The Value of Post-Colonial Literature for Education Processes: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Abstract

The author Salman Rushdie's post-colonial essay, Midnight's Children, highlights a different perspective on the problems created by the colonial power where place and displacement are central themes and migration is a painful but emancipating process; both are expressed through the life of the writer, Salman Rushdie. The primary aim of this discourse is to show that post-colonial narratives have a huge impact on educational settings and conceptions, and, thus, on identity formation processes. This study concentrates on the spaces where formerly colonized people have regained power, or where they have attributed value to their own discourse by displacing the standpoint of normative social behaviour, and thus recovering their own voices. One of the major purposes of this piece of writing is to look at the ways in which the discourse of Otherness privileges direct and indirect (structural and cultural) violence towards the Other, concentrating especially on processes of exclusion from educational settings.