Jamal Awil

← Islamophobia and the Novel

Minority writers perform staged marginality for majority audiences. [definitional]

Yet I would suggest that Hamid’s articles, like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, can be read as part of what Graham Huggan has called “staged marginality”—not staged in the sense of being fake but performatively “simulating the conditions in which the dominant (in this case white Anglo-Saxon) culture perceives … marginalised people.” The reception of Hamid’s work, as much as anything intrinsic to it, gives it something of the quality of those minor literatures identified in the postcolonial context by David Lloyd and Abdul JanMohamed, drawing on original definitions by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Among the salient features of this form of writing, produced by a minority in the language of the majority culture of which he or she is also a part, are “the questioning or destruction of the concepts of identity and identification, the rejection of representations of developing autonomy and authenticity[,] … and accordingly a profound suspicion of narratives of reconciliation and unification.”

DEFINE: Defines 'staged marginality' and 'minor literatures' from Deleuze/Guattari via Lloyd and JanMohamed.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 453