Alternative geohistories of global cities in Salman Rushdie’s novels

Abstract

Abstract Saskia Sassen posits the ‘global city’ as the centre of the late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century global agglomeration economy. This article considers that the cities depicted in Salman Rushdie’s novels offer an alternative geohistory of global cities. Rushdie traces the impulse of urban agglomeration to the earliest moments of city formation. He also emphasizes the cities of the global south and the alternate linkages they forged with the world. Edward Soja’s concept of ‘synekism’ is effective in explaining the different trajectory of the formation of the global cities in Rushdie’s novels. Particularly, taking a cue from Soja, this article aims to explore how the different moments of urban agglomeration in Rushdie’s novels reflect a contestation of the matriarchal, nomadic energies and paternalistic, statist, institutionalizing impulses, also evident in a renewed form in the formation of the postmodern global cities.