New Directions in Rushdie Studies (Editorial) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Postmodernism, Postcolonialism and 'the Rushdie Affair'
Cogito, 1995
Analysis of the 'Rushdie affair' from political, ethical, aesthetic and inter-cultural perspectives. Explains Khomeini's fatwa against the author and publishers of The Satanic Verses and addresses the question: is there a contradiction between Rushdie's 'deconstructive' or anti-representational practices as a postmodernist writer and his claims to represent- and be represented by - governments, nations and cultures in his campaign to overcome the fatwa and rehabilitate himself in civil society.
Salman Rushdie: The Accidental Intellectual in the Mediascape
Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe: Academics, Artists, Activists and their Publics, 2018
After Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued an edict against the author of The Satanic Verses in 1989, calling for the execution of the Indianborn British citizen Salman Rushdie, the novel soon became politicized and its reception polarized. Rushdie’s text admits no supernatural quality to revelation and refers to Muhammad as “a false prophet,” and was thus considered a blasphemy. Eighteen years after the fatwa, the announcement of Rushdie’s knighthood in 2007 for his contribution to literature in the Queen’s birthday honours revived the earlier explosions of indignation. The acrimony that emerged primarily from British and South Asian Muslims, both in the late 1980s and 2000s, was perhaps intensified by the fact that Rushdie was born into a Muslim family in Bombay, then British India, a mere couple of months before the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947. While the question of freedom of speech has been central to Rushdie’s engagement with the media and his role as a public intellectual, he has been openly (and ambivalently) downplaying the relevance of politics to his literary writings. It is probably in Joseph Anton that Rushdie provides the most straightforward answer to the apparent paradox of the conflicted relationship between his literary writing and politics. In fact, a reflection on the apparent inner dialectic between Rushdie’s creative and political sensibilities has persisted throughout his texts, including those that will be mentioned in this chapter besides The Satanic Verses and Joseph Anton, such as the novels Midnight’s Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, as well as the essays and critical pieces included in the collection Imaginary Homelands.
Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace
Ashgate, 2013
Taking up the roles that Salman Rushdie himself has assumed as a cultural broker, gatekeeper, and mediator in various spheres of public production, Ana Cristina Mendes situates his work in terms of the contemporary production, circulation, and consumption of postcolonial texts within the workings of the cultural industries. Mendes pays particular attention to Rushdie as a public performer across various creative platforms, not only as a novelist and short story writer, but also as a public intellectual, reviewer, and film critic. Mendes argues that how a postcolonial author becomes personally and professionally enmeshed in the dealings of the cultural industries is of particular relevance at a time when the market is strictly regulated by a few multinational corporations. She contends that marginality should not be construed exclusively as a basis for understanding Rushdie’s work, since a critical grounding in marginality will predictably involve a reproduction of the traditional postcolonial binaries of oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized that the writer subverts. Rather, she seeks to expand existing interpretations of Rushdie’s work, itineraries, and frameworks in order to take into account the actual conditions of postcolonial cultural production and circulation within a marketplace that is global in both orientation and effects.
"Salman Rushdie's Authorial Self-Fashioning in Joseph Anton"
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2017
This article examines some of the highlights, limitations, and contradictions of Rushdie's authorial personas that have been perpetuated and challenged by his critics and the mass media. I argue that Joseph Anton, published in 2012, exhibits evidence of Rushdie's attempt at authorial self-fashioning, and therefore the memoir represents an important part of his effort to shape the public narrative about him. Joseph Anton highlights Rushdie's exilic persona through direct comparisons to figures like Voltaire and Galileo, and attempts to privilege this position above his other authorial selves. This authorial self has deep roots in a narrative fashioned by Rushdie that has been abetted by some of his critics and the media since the fatwa. My essay critiques this emphasis, suggesting that Rushdie's self-fashioning is out of step with his twenty-first-century political ideals and affiliations. Ultimately, the third-person " distancing " of the memoir helps to highlight what it seeks to mitigate: a plurality of Rushdie's competing for public attention.
The present paper tries to trace out some of the postmodern traits in this immensely allegorical, funny and technically innovative novel of Salman Rushdie entitled Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). Rushdie wrote this novel with the intention of contributing to the oeuvre of children's literature. But as children enjoy this novel for its amazing and baffling story telling style, adult and mature readers find it attacking upon the omnipresent 'Ocean of Notions' which he presents as a character, besides other interesting names like the Shah of Blah, moon of Kahani, Controller Walrus, cult leader Khattamshud, General Kitab, Prince Bolo, Land of Gup and Land of Chup and many others. All the names themselves hide and reveal so many ideas and perceptions. The present novel is usually read as a criticism of Enlightenment theory but at the same time, Rushdie is cautions of erecting simplified dichotomies. Because, for the most part, humankind as a race and as individuals finds itself immersed in the ambiguous grey zone of judgement in which right and wrong, good and bad, civilization and barbarism cease to exist in a tidy binary opposition. Distinctions among them are rather blurred and confused, as God Himself is Bezabaan (tongueless), according to Rushdie. Rushdie lets Haroun adopt a postmodern spirit of skepticism and critique but with a political motive. He is accompanied by Iff and Butt, with additional power of seeing beyond the restrictions of perceived reality. He literally shifts the world on its axis by clashing the past, the present and the future. He acknowledges that we exist simultaneously in all three temporal modes and must therefore, acknowledge the authority, claims and limitations of each. Thus, as no rules can claim to be holy in the present 'postmodern' times, we can always move towards a new beginning and a deeper, more progressive understanding of our reality.
Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and the Post-truth Condition
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2020
The emergence of ‘post-truth’ has dramatically affected the contemporary socio-political discourses. The blurring of the distinctions between fact and fiction has become ostensible owing to the proliferation of social media and the pivotal role played by cyberspaces in creating volatile identities. The erosion of objectivity and the creation of a Baudrillardian ‘hyperreality’ have destabilized the position of truth irrevocably. The meteoric rise of far-right populist governments across the world with their jingoistic, xenophobic and parochial brand of politics, the erasure of subjective autonomy and invasion of privacy have pushed the world to the brink of moral anarchy, devoid of ethical values and veracity. Salman Rushdie’s latest work Quichotte (2019) is a postmodern rendering of Miguel De Cervantes’ picaresque novel Don Quixote. This paper attempts to critically analyse the novel vis-à-vis the ‘post-truth condition’. The evolution of the concept of truth is traced through the id...
Playing Hide and Seek with Names and Selves in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, A Memoir
2013
The British government’s protection of Rushdie after Khomeini’s fatwa came at a cost: Rushdie was forced to change his name. Years later he tells the story of the secret life he led by revealing the names of his near and dear as if this restitution of reality would remake and reposition his self tossed between fantasy and fanaticism in a globalized world. Like Jhumpa Lahiri’s, Rushdie’s American experience has helped him find a creative way out of the drama of naming and identity he undergoes as a migrant writer.