Thrillers inviting identification with injustice can avoid engaging culturally different subjects

Evidence

Without suggesting any facile equivalence between the worldly and the textual, it must be asked: Is it too much to see the liberal thriller as raising the question of when life can be said to be “readable”? What types of experience, culture, and mindset can be foregrounded and valorized in a form that claims depth and breadth but that often resorts to the comforts of the known and familiar? In The Unknown Terrorist, readerly identification is invited with an experience of injustice, not with a culturally different subject. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 378

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens what ‘contesting’ vs ‘reinforcing’ Islamophobia can mean: a novel can aim at injustice yet still refuse cultural specificity — a useful analytic threshold.
• XREF: This is a hinge concept for the reader applying Morey: does Hamid or Naqvi invite identification with an injustice or with a culturally specific subject? Tentative, but plausible given reading purpose.