Migrancy, the Cosmopolitan Intellectual, and the Global City in The Satanic Verses (original) (raw)
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One of the possible ways to conceptualize transnationalism is to analyze the special kind of consciousness it has given birth to, marked by dual or multiple identifications. A post-colonial writer concerned with what it means to be a migrant or diasporic subject, Salman Rushdie starts from what Said has called a ‘contrapuntal’ reading of history, the setting against one another of home and host country in The Satanic Verses, where the fall from the sky of both Gibreel and Saleem embody “the unhealable rift . . . between the self and its true home” (Said). However, in his subsequent novels, the contrapuntal reading makes way for a plural and metamorphic reading of history. The initial awareness of the split self changes into an awareness of the irreducible plurality of the self’s identifications with the multiple histories of the spaces and times it inhabits. Thus in his following novels Rushdie gravitates towards a new understanding of the migrant’s identity as metamorphic, constant...
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This article proposes a reading of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) as a series of cultural performances negotiating between postcolonial cultures, histories of migration, urban landscapes and translingual repertories. It seeks to linguistically interpret insights by postcolonialists like Bill Ashcroft et al. (2002) and Homi Bhabha (2010), who have argued that postcolonial writers have deconstructed “discourses” of empire by ap- propriating and hybridizing the monolingualism of the English novel. Though qualitative analysis – informed by the theoretical frame and methodology of the third wave of socio- linguistics – this essay examines the relationships between identity and language use on the basis of characters’ linguistic utterances and interactions, focusing on the role of linguistic varieties, contact phenomena and code-switching in the construction of postcolonial identity. It also pays particular attention to the way in which translingual creativity contributes to the emergence of hybrid, immigrant or diasporic identity formations. Drawing on Kandiah (1998) and Pennycook (2003), it interprets performative utterances as ‘semiotic reconstructions’, which recontextualize and reaccentuate characters’ linguistic, cultural and semiotic resources. By foregrounding the concept of ‘semiotic reconstruction’, it aims to reveal the so-called metasocial/ metacultural potential of performance events as well as the socio-semiotic and socio-semantic reconstruction these events are able to achieve.
Language and the Postcolonial City: The case of Salman Rushdie
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2011
This article examines the ways in which the fact of writing about the postcolonial city of Bombay inflects the language of Rushdie's novels. With specific reference to Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the article proposes that a productive analysis of language in Rushdie can be made by replacing the unwieldy and diffuse category of Indian English with the more meaningful contextualization provided by the category of Bombay English. It goes on to argue that while Rushdie's "chutnified" language offers an enabling point of entry into the complex, multilayered and heterogeneous socioeconomic fabric of the Third World postcolonial city, it fails to tease out the relations of power and privilege that are intimately tied to the ways in which language, even a "chutnified" one, is deployed.
Bombay, the city where Salman Rushdie spent his childhood, features prominently in four of his novels, namely Midnight's Children (1981), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). However, in traditional literary approaches, the built environment and the materiality of Bombay evident in Rushdie's fiction are largely lost disallowing Rushdie's portrayal of the city to be explained as the real-imaged lived space, which Henri Lefebvre (1991) defines as "representational space" and Edward Soja (1996) as "third space". In the globalized world of ubiquitous placelessness, the strategies and the tactics of recovering the lived space, sometimes involving the micro level of the body and sometimes larger scales such as the communities, are matters of great significance for the prominent spatial thinkers of our times. Therefore, by considering that Rushdie's depiction of Bombay provides an access to its lived space, and particularly concentrating on the issues related to the land-reclamation in Bombay, this paper finally aims to explore how Rushdie's sense of place is a progressive, global sense of place, which neither collapses in to a reactionary nostalgia; nativist bigotry, nor does it surrender to a spectral, deterritorialized globality.