The city novel tradition frames space as contested between segregation and self-remaking

Evidence

Michel De Certeau remarks of the production of the city space that it depends on “rational organization” that must “repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it.” This is a battle we see played out at close quarters in Waldman’s and Naqvi’s novels, where Muslim characters have their freedom curtailed and their movements and motives questioned. Space is demarcated in particular ways, in keeping with a longer American literary tradition—from The Great Gatsby to a raft of novels by African Americans, such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ann Petry’s The Street, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain—where social and racial prejudice and segregation vie with the promised opportunity to remake the self offered by the city. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 265

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s existing novel: Naqvi’s Home Boy the city as contested space; also resonates with Ellison/Baldwin segregation tradition they may know.
• SHARE: The Gatsby-to-CoLE-Cole lineage placing Naqvi within the African American city-fiction tradition is a sharp claim worth verifying against the rest of the chapter.