Domesticity in Magical-Realist Postcolonial Fiction Reversals of Representation in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Abstract

Anne McClintock's assertion that imperialism cannot be understood without theory of domestic illustrates contemporary critical awareness that colonialism cannot be considered only in terms of structures, such as the nation or city, but must also be debated in terms of its construction through the private lives of both colonizer and colonized.1 Against the anthropological tradition's repetition of the patriarchal division of public and private spheres treating the house as self-contained world, the globe split between an inside of emotional dialogues and an outside of political negotiations, intimacy and exposure, of private life and public colonial discourse analysis focuses frequently on the as site of power contestation.2 [C]onnected to, and perhaps stemming from, the principles of spatiality, as Bill Ashcroft has noted, . . the idea of enclosure, or property, has dominated colonizers' views of place.3 Postcolonial critics connect the to political struggle: a site of resistance with a radical political dimension.4 Not only does such distance itself from representations in geography, spatial theory, and conventional anthropology, it is at the same time distinguished from colonial representations of the home. In this paper, my focus is on the postcolonial novel and how this novel's representation of domestic space, reflecting the concerns outlined above, addresses the preexisting relationship between domesticity and colonialism. I use Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children as fiction indicative of postcolonial authors' engagement with issues of domestic space and its colonial implications.5 Combining close reading of Rushdie's text and more overarching theoretical discussion, I want to suggest that at the center of the postcolonial novel's focus on the is the desire to unravel and undermine processes central to the colonial home, asking for the idea of home to be examined not metaphorically, as I will suggest is key to the colonial home, but, instead, literally. In such distinction are two opposing representations of domestic space: