“A Punishment of Dreams”: Reading Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses after Orientalism

Abstract

This article focuses on Edward Said’s still undigested influence on world literary studies by using Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) as a test case of what Said’s thinking, beginning with Orientalism (1978), allows in terms of reading quintessential works of world literature. The article links Said’s elaboration of “contrapuntal reading” in Culture and Imperialism (1993) with his claim in the “Imaginative Geography and its Representations” chapter of Orientalism that the confrontation with Islam, dating as far back as the eighth and ninth centuries, constituted a “lasting trauma” for Europe and the West (59). With Said’s remarkable diagnosis of what Islam represented—and perhaps continues to represent—for the West’s Eurocentric, orientalist imaginary firmly in mind, this article provides an opportunity for scholars and students of world literature alike to move forward in the debate over how world literature is to be read, translated, and disseminated across historically uneven networks of violent, traumatic cultural encounters.