Post-Structuralism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Postcolonial era was a period of transition, degeneration, regeneration, fragmentation, unification, uncertainty, stability, nationalism, globalization, enforced mass migration, rootlessness and metamorphosis with a special seal of three phases tagged to it namely, ‘adopt’, ‘adapt’ and ‘adept’ which led to identity crisis, double consciousness and finally, the duet and duel of binary oppositions. The postcolonial era experienced many poles-apart forces working simultaneously to shape the destiny of the decolonized nations, particularly India. Hope built its castle where despair dwelt, too; private affairs and public affairs embraced each other; women seemed submissive, but, they emboldened themselves during crisis; harsh realities of the era were fantastically unbelievable; records of unbelievable historical facts and realities seemed fictitious; East and West cultures mated to give birth to the so called ‘Indian Modern’; peace seemed to dawn after the Britishers vacated the nation, but it was followed by Indo-Pak and Indo-China wars; waves of unconditional love and humanism seemed to be in progress to build the nation, but hatred and revenge tumbled forth due to Indo-Pak partition and further slicing of the nation into small states. To sum up, it can be said that it was an era of interplay of dualism where opposite forces co-existed, complementing each other and this notion has been greatly explained and approved by the poststructuralists, especially Derrida and J. Hillis Miller, who are centrally concerned with the aim to show the fluid and unstable nature of personal and gender identity, the shifting, polyvalent, contradictory currents of signification within texts and the play of binary opposites. Salman Rushdie’s works, which fall under postcolonial literature, exhibit in candid profusion the duet and the duel of binary oppositions, acquiring a unique stance to become the theme, form and method in various hues by means of their fusion, fission and parallel propagations. This paper aims to identify these binary opposites in operation and their roles played in different milieus in the select novels of Rushdie.
Keywords: Binary opposites; ‘domestic enclosure’; ‘enclosed exchange’; ‘osmotic mixing’; Deferment; and supplement.