The receptivity to being called ‘representative’ colors how novels get judged as multicultural

Evidence

The novels I am concerned with in chapter 2—The Black Album and Brick Lane—are about the lived experience of individuals negotiating their way through the modern minefield of community relations. Both are by writers deemed to be in some way “representative” of multicultural Britain—despite their protestations to the contrary—and this expectation has had particular effects on these novels’ reception. … Nazneen’s transformation from dutiful wife to adulterous lover to independent economic entity—forming a business with like-minded female friends—marks the completion of a process whereby the British multicultural novel comes to embrace the neoliberal ethos of individual economic self-assertion. This is the preferred route to emancipation for Nazneen, who at the end becomes the model multicultural liberal subject, using her design skills to produce “traditional” (and therefore exotic) garments for the wider market. Thus, taken together, these two novels register a shift of emphasis from collectivist political assertion to commodification and consumption. By the end, the industrious but still devout Nazneen embodies an Islam “we” need not be phobic about. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 66

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallel to how Hamid and Naqvi are read as ‘representative’ of Muslim experience post-9/11; and the readership burden mapped in The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
• QUESTION: Does Changez or Changez’s author face the same ‘representative’ expectation that Nazneen’s author does?
• SEED: Angle: reading Hamid and Naqvi as the endpoint versus the complication of this ‘multicultural novel embraces neoliberal ethos’ trajectory — is Changez the model subject whose Islam ‘we’ need not fear, and if he is not, why not?