The liberal offer of culture to the excluded aims to pacify, not empower.
Evidence
By implication, Baxter and the other outsiders and untouchables of this world are excluded from these benefits but can be “brought in” through education and exposure to their power. Like a boy with his nose pressed against a sweet-store window at Christmas, Baxter can only look on in spellbound wonder at the goodies being tantalizingly dangled before him. The therapeutic qualities of Arnold’s work suggest that the excluded may be transformed by exposure to art and literature, although—as with Arnold and his fellow nineteenth-century liberals—there is always some doubt as to whether the aim is to empower or to pacify them. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 117
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- QUESTION: Worth testing against the novels under study: does any inclusive gesture in Hamid or Naqvi similarly turn out to be pacifying rather than empowering?