The Forsterian stance fails to balance personal and political trauma in Islamophobia fiction

Evidence

So although The Submission is an impressive, morally responsible engagement with contemporary Islamophobia in some of its rawest manifestations, perhaps it has not successfully balanced personal and political trauma, as others have claimed it has. Rather, it seems to have a Forsterian quality to it: advancing the claims of liberal humanism while acknowledging a context in which personal relations are doomed by ideological forces. Even so, it manages to raise some of the key questions facing Muslims in the West today: Can the American multicultural dream survive? Should Muslim Americans’ claims to the First Amendment be respected? What are Muslims allowed to say about 9/11, and can they stake a claim to it as fellow victims? These questions are also at the heart of H. M. Naqvi’s novel Home Boy. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 297

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the Forsterian quality — liberal humanism conceding doom of personal relations under ideology — as a distinct mode of anti-Islamophobia fiction.
• XREF: The reader’s hinge: this is the very tool for reading Home Boy, which Morey explicitly bridges to here.