Culture and Ethics in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

Abstract

Salman Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence (2008) tells the story of a princess of the Mughal dynasty and how her name is effaced from history. The narrative, mixing historical facts with fiction, depicts the princess’s perilous journey across continents in her search to find a home. Following Steven Shankman’s reading of Emmanuel Levinas, in whose work the primacy of ethics over ontology requires that we take responsibility for the Other, (Shankman, 2010: 15–16), this paper traces the trajectory of Rushdie’s text that represents, through the character of Akbar, the primacy of ethics as both before and beyond culture.