Writers from minority communities face censorship pressure and are presumed to represent their communities

Evidence

However, there are some useful insights in Malik’s trenchant book. Notably, in making his case for the importance of not closing down freedom of expression at the supposed behest of minorities, Malik conscripts as interviewees Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali. The novelists recount their experiences of the pressures of would-be censorship over their subject matter and the connected phenomenon whereby as authors they were considered in some sense representative of the communities they were writing about. Kureishi laments the climate of fear that has followed the Satanic Verses affair and made writers wary of tackling tough cultural topics. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 159

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the ‘burden of representation’ phenomenon through the concrete cases of Kureishi and Ali.
• XREF: Directly illuminates how Naqvi’s and Hamid’s novels function as representations of Pakistanis/Muslims in the West — the exact representativeness problem the reader’s novels are read against.