The values enshrined in the great novels of the Western canon are claimed to operate irrespective of social, geographical, or any other context, and their meanings are claimed to be singular and unequivocal. Nafisi articulates a deeply conservative view of literature and criticism in keeping with those other near-contemporary volleys in the so-called curriculum wars of the 1980s and 1990s. As a response to the new, vigorous assertion of black rights as well as broader patterns of postimperial population movement, questions were raised from the 1970s on about the representativeness of the established canon of great literary works as an educational tool in the multicultural societies of the West. … In this moment of multiculturalism, cultural pluralism was placed against melting-pot assimilationism. In response, a conservative backlash accused multiculturalists of introducing the taint of politics into the sacred and supposedly neutral space of Great Art.

XREF: Connects to the 'curriculum wars' and culture wars debates of the 1980s-90s; parallels Allan Bloom's 'Closing of the American Mind' and Hirsch's cultural literacy controversy.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 230