Kureishi's main objection to the identity politics that he sees taking over from class orientation is that it freezes identity in false shapes for political convenience. Against this, The Black Album, like its predecessor, records a young man in the process of wrestling with the challenges to identity that youth and new experience raise. True identity is seen as fluid, and the search for an authentic self is more fruitful than the possibility of finding it.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 172