These novels replace multicultural communal assertion with liberal individualist autonomy

Evidence

In both cases, political multiculturalism is shown to lead to the dead ends of censorship and personal oppression—especially of women. It can certainly be objected that Kureishi’s celebration of the dissolute energies of the liberal lifestyle—embodied in the caricatural figure of Deedee—is insufficiently attentive to the fact that sexual emancipation has historically tended often to favor men and has resulted in women being forced into objectified pliancy by the male gaze. (There’s certainly an element of this objectification in Kureishi’s depiction of this character.) However, this lifestyle is still seen as preferable to a life of devout austerity in which all individuality must be surrendered. … For Nazneen in Ali’s novel, the celebration of autonomy and feminist agency comes at the expense of the rejection of community politics and an endorsement of the entrepreneurial spirit: a path that has come to be increasingly valorized as social modes of support have been deliberately attenuated by successive governments. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 199

Categorization

• XREF: Directly useful for reading Naqvi’s Home Boy and Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist: does the comparable ‘escape into liberal individualism’ show up there, and is it framed as more or less dystopian?
• ADDENDUM: Nazneen’s choosing entrepreneurial autonomy and rejecting communal politics is a concrete instance of ‘individualism over community assertion’ that parallels how lone protagonists in the two novels grapple with belonging.