Now domiciled in the United States, Azar Nafisi and Khaled Hosseini can be read as the kind of "native informer" Hamid Dabashi identifies as crucial to the self-justification of neoimperialism. Dabashi says of such writers: "Faced with the Islamophobic conditions of their new homes, they have learnt the art of simultaneously acknowledging and denying their Muslim origins. They speak English with an accent that confirms their authenticity to their white interlocutors." Dabashi's polemic captures the way in which books such as Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Kite Runner peddle images that find a ready audience in the contemporary West. However, I wish to go further and consider how the texts' formal ambiguities undercut their otherwise selective and simplistic worldviews.

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial criticism of self-Orientalizing and the 'native informer' concept, echoing debates around writers like Salman Rushdie and Lila Abu-Lughod. QUESTION: Worth probing: can authenticity be performed for white audiences while the text's formal complexities resist containment? The author hints at going 'further' here.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 215