Taken together, The Black Album and Brick Lane offer a strong rejection of what they depict as the misguided channels of minority-group community assertion. In both cases, political multiculturalism is shown to lead to the dead ends of censorship and personal oppression—especially of women. … For Nazneen in Ali's novel, the celebration of autonomy and feminist agency comes at the expense of the rejection of community politics and an endorsement of the entrepreneurial spirit: a path that has come to be increasingly valorized as social modes of support have been deliberately attenuated by successive governments. This movement from identity to individualism also seems characteristic of a broader social shift in ways of looking at empowerment. … However, in an era when Islamophobic policies are increasingly being adopted by governments in the United States and Europe, there must come a point where the targeted disciplining of those who are not deemed acceptable (and accepting) free-market subjects produces direct conflict. It is not the job of novelists to produce programmatic blueprints for the coming struggle. Nevertheless, in novels such as The Black Album and Brick Lane we may see a roadmap that at least marks out part of the route by which we arrived here.

QUESTION: The claim that political multiculturalism inevitably leads to censorship and female oppression is debatable; worth interrogating against counterexamples where multicultural policies expanded rather than restricted agency. XREF: Connects to broader debates about identity politics versus liberal individualism, Susan Okin's 'Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?', and critiques of neoliberal co-optation of feminist empowerment.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 199