Rushdie's Midnight Research Articles

Trans(inter?)textual Migrations (Relations?) in the Traditional (Postmodernist?) Narrative of Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie's narrative style reflects a blend of traditional oral storytelling and postmodern literary techniques. This duality makes it challenging to categorize him strictly as either a traditional or postmodernist writer. His works, such as Midnight’s Children, exhibit fragmented storytelling akin to oral narratives, where the narrator frequently digresses, influenced by their environment and memories. These digressions create intertextual relationships, not just between texts but also between the text and the non-textual world, a technique which is called the "grasshopper narrative” in this paper. Rushdie's Midnight’s Children is heavily influenced by both Eastern oral traditions and Western literary techniques. The narrative is interspersed with references and borrowings from other texts and traditions, creating a tapestry of intertextual and trans-textual relations. For instance, characters and motifs from Forster’s A Passage to India and Kipling’s Kim find their way into Rushdie’s narrative, creating a dialogue between these works and Rushdie’s own. Moreover, the novel’s fragmented structure and the presence of a listener, Padma, enhance its oral storytelling feel, reinforcing its connection to traditional Eastern narratives. The influence of Western authors like Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez is also evident. These influences blend with Rushdie’s use of magic realism and his unique narrative style. Furthermore, Rushdie’s cinematic influences and his use of film vocabulary add another layer to his complex narrative structure. Rushdie’s narrative technique is a hybrid of traditional oral storytelling and postmodernist intertextuality, creating rich, multi-layered texts that traverse cultural and textual boundaries.

Spring Board of Subversion: The Grotesque and Polyphonic Voices in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Spring Board of Subversion: The Grotesque and Polyphonic Voices in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Abhilash Pillai's Midnight's Children: Performing Politics through Optics

Abhilash Pillai's stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (2005–6) introduced a new visual language to Indian theatre, conceiving performance between theatre and cinema. Pillai's work presents history as memory, amnesia and re-remembering within the framework of a multisensorial scenography that largely uses the vocabularies of the Bollywood film industry. The politics of the performance lies less in the thematic than in its optical dynamics, different as they are from both scene painting and the aestheticization of the public sphere. The production shows how theatre experience in a media society may primarily build on the perceptual, but without dismissing text or suspending the cognitive altogether. The visual media are used more as an intervention in politico-aesthetic discourse than as mere technology. As I explain the reasons for the long absence of any scholarly study of the production, I also consider its relevance to the current political scene in India.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the subaltern: Representations of the subaltern in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

This article examines the marginalised characters in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children with reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's concept of the subaltern. The subaltern, as defined by Antonio Gramsci, is the person who is oppressed and denied fundamental rights by the governing class. Spivak broadens this term to encompass individuals who are marginalised from prevailing discourse and representation. The article focuses on the fact that Spivak's viewpoint sheds important light on the problems faced by the subordinate Indian characters in Midnight's Children. Through Saleem's experiences and those of the other characters he meets, the novel fictionalises the turbulent history of India in the second half of the twentieth century and portrays the feelings and viewpoints of oppressed and marginalised groups, particularly in the context of colonialism and postcolonialism. The article discusses how the subaltern characters resist and assert their agency while also underlining the difficulties they encounter through a thorough analysis of major characters in the novel. The article's ultimate goal is to help the reader comprehend the subaltern characters in Midnight's Children and the difficult problems they face as they continue to deal with colonialism's lingering effects.

Re-Vision of History: Historiographic Metafiction in Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Rather than simply accept the "official" historical record, historiographic metafiction reexamines these records and events in showing different perspectives. This creates a dialogue between the text of the novel and the original texts of history, forcing the reader to examine more closely the texts being presented in both the "official" record and the novel. Two novels that operate along these lines are Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night (1962), the supposed memoirs of an American who becomes a Nazi officer in Germany during World War II; and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), a novel examining the interwoven histories of the narrator's family and events in the history of India, including independence from Great Britain and the Emergency period under Indira Gandhi. These texts experiment with history by examining how those histories are constructed as memoirs by their character authors as well as what they mean and communicate to their contemporary audiences. By examining the methods by which histories are created and what they communicate to their audiences, Mother Night and Midnight's Children speak directly to the levels of meaning and construction in the histories chosen for re-vision.

Salman Rushdie's Midnight’s Children: Cultural Cosmopolitan Reflection

This article aims to prove Salman Rushdie's Midnight’s Children as a cultural cosmopolitan novel through the lance of cosmopolitanism. Out of various types, cultural cosmopolitanism is my focus in this paper. Culturally, cosmopolitanism means openness to different cultures. Cosmopolitanism is a kind of cultural outlook involving an intellectual and aesthetic attitude of openness towards peoples, places and experiences from different cultures, especially from different nations. This type of cosmopolitanism refers to an ideal about culture or identity. Cultural cosmopolitans view that membership in a particular community is not essential for one’s social identity. It stresses that such cultural membership is irrelevant. It refers to partiality for cultures besides one’s own culture of origin as with a traveler or globally conscious person. The parochial feeling of nation and nationalism is, sometimes, an obstacle to the unity and humanitarian feeling. After the outbreak of pandemic Covid 19, people living in any corner of the world have realized- to a great extent- that the feeling of cosmopolitanism and humanism should be at the center of every human. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children evokes people, in this cosmos, cannot be confined within the boundary of limited nationalism.

Midnight's Children as a Superhero Novel: Contesting the Politics of Superheroes and Supervillains

Abstract: This article reads Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children through the lens of superhero comics in which the protagonist would appear to be the supervillain while the antagonist would emerge to be the real superhero. By foregrounding this inversion, Rushdie is defying as well as critiquing the underlying ideological underpinnings and the political assumptions that inform the genre. The superhero comics and its relation with the United States provides the theoretical framework, and the state of emergency imposed in India by Indira Gandhi from 1975 to 1977 provides the conceptual framework, within which this article has been situated.

Finding the Self in the Otherness of Nature: The Sundarbans and Postcolonial Identity in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Doğa ve kültür arasında süregelen bir ikilik olmasına rağmen edebiyat eserlerinde insanlık durumunun belli bazı yönlerini betimlemek ve bilinçaltında nelerin olduğunu göstermek için doğadan yararlanıldığını görürüz. Bu kaçınılmazdır çünkü insan da doğanın bir parçasıdır. Bu insan durumlarından bir tanesi de savaş ve onun sebep olduğu travmadır. Savaşın yol açtığı travma ve tutarsızlık insanın kimliğini sorgulamasına ve hatta kaybetmesine kadar gidebilir ki bu noktada insan bu travmayı atlatma ve kimliğini bulma çabası içinde tekrar doğanın sağladığı sakinliğe dönebilir. Bu fiziki çevre bir orman ya da çöl olabilir. Bu makale Salman Rushdie'nin Geceyarısı Çocukları adlı romanının Sundarbans bölümünü eko eleştirel açıdan bir okumasını yaparak romanın baş karakteri Saleem Sınai'nin kimliğini dünyanın en güzel ve aynı zamanda en tehlikeli ormanlarından bir tanesinde bulmasını tartışmayı amaçlamaktadır. Saleem'in 1965 Hindistan-Pakistan savaşında bir asker olarak kimlik arayışı onu politik olarak sınırları en çok tartışılan Bangladeş ve Hindistan arasındaki devasa yağmur ormanına götürür. Bu bağlamda, Sundarbans'ın muğlaklığı mecazi olarak sömürgecilik sonrası kimliğin muğlaklığına karşılık gelmektedir. Eko eleştiri teorisi temelde ziksel mekan ile ilgilendiğinden bireysel kimliği odak noktası yapan sömürgecilik sonrası eleştirmenler tarafından şüpheyle karşılanır. Bu makale, aynı zamanda Saleem'in Sundarbans'ta yaşadıklarından yola çıkarak eko eleştirel ve sömürgecilik sonrası teorilerin farklı araştırma odaklarından kaynaklanan tartışmaları da uzlaşılabilecek ortak bir paydada birleştirmeyi amaçlamaktadır.

Introduction: Beyond the Anglophone—Comparative South Asian Literatures

Introduction: Beyond the Anglophone—Comparative South Asian Literatures

From ‘Magic’ to ‘Tragic Realism’

The year 2013 was the 94th anniversary of the Amritsar massacre in the Jallianwala Bagh, and it was also the year that the film of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children went on general release. The Amritsar atrocity is the first historical event portrayed in the original novel, demonstrating its relevance to the emergence of an independent India, yet – despite its director being born in Amritsar – the movie chooses not to represent the massacre at all. This essay argues that such a symbolic omission hints at a major shift in the politics of Rushdie's newer work: The Enchantress of Florence and Shalimar the Clown are marked by a capitulation in the face of state power that Rushdie fought so hard against in Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. Rushdie has never been only a celebrant of ‘hybridity, impurity, intermingling,’ preferring instead to dramatize the conflict between the magic of hybridity and the awful realities of state power, in a technique I dub ‘tragic realism’. In his latest novels, however, Rushdie portrays less and less magic in his worlds, replacing it with more and more sadness about what he sees as the failure of hybridity as a political project in the face of sovereign power and the state of exception.

The Limitations of Dignity: The Novel and Human Rights

The Limitations of Dignity: The Novel and Human Rights

Temporal Spaces in García Márquez's, Salih's, and Rushdie's Novels

In her article "Temporal Spaces in García Márquez's, Salih's, and Rushdie's Novels" Adrienne D. Vivian discusses the significance of time in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. While culturally distinct to one another, in each novel temporal space is narrated as a means to express and explore postcolonial identity. Vivian examines the connections between time and memory, history, and nation in each of the novels and the ways postcolonial authors use time as a device to mark the crossroads of precolonial past and colonization. The three novelists' treatments of temporal spaces resist Western culture while they reveal disruption and fragmentation.

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and its Incarnations

(2014). Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and its Incarnations. South Asian Review: Vol. 35, Salman Rushdie, pp. 157-168.

Imagining Otherwise: Comparative South Asian Literatures and the MLA

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said’s Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/ postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani’s work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha’s legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie.

The Carnivalesque in Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Research Article| October 01 2012 The Carnivalesque in Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Rushdie's Midnight's Children ANUSHA UTHAMAN RAMANI ANUSHA UTHAMAN RAMANI Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Steinbeck Review (2012) 9 (2): 89–93. https://doi.org/10.2307/41693924 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation ANUSHA UTHAMAN RAMANI; The Carnivalesque in Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Steinbeck Review 1 October 2012; 9 (2): 89–93. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41693924 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressSteinbeck Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2012 The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies/Wiley Periodicals, Inc.2012The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies/Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Changing Textual Identities in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie's novel, Midnight's Children, connects the destiny of one family, and of one character-narrator in particular, with the destiny of India, by symbolically associating Saleem Sinai's birth with that of the new nation. The textual journey that follows plays with concepts such as: margin and centre, identity and otherness, unity and division etc. While witnessing Saleem's changing sense of self, India is also revealed as a stage for the inter-change of multiple perspectives on the idea of nation. Thus, ‘the myth of the nation’ becomes the pretext for the display of postcolonial attitudes and fallacies, due, in part, to its focus on establishing a compact and well-defined sense of identity.

The Carnivalesque in Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Rushdie's Midnight's Children

The Carnivalesque in Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Rushdie's Midnight's Children

The Nation and Its Fictions: History and Allegory in Tagore's Gora

In Rabindranath Tagore's novel Gora (1910) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), literary works which employ the fiction of nativity to examine a paradoxical moment of historical origin, the idea of the nation is subjected to intolerable strain. Fables of identity are constructed in both novels, yet instead of a ‘hardening’ of the metaphysical idea that sustains the allegorical parallel, what we witness is a radical dissolution or disintegration of the categories of nation and narrative at the very site of their inscription. I will argue that in both works, the symbolic equation of novel and nation opens up fissures in historical experience.

Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth Teresa Heffernan . Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel. University of Toronto Press. 2008. 224. $50.00 Reading through an opposition between 'modernism' and 'postmodernism' Teresa Heffernan considers the role of what she calls 'post-apocalyptic' thinking in the twentieth-century novel in English. Her introduction explains her focus on the end of Endings in narrative and the implications of that shift for four very large topics: 'The End,' 'History,' 'Nation,' and 'Man.' Each is subdivided into two chapters to address the topic in terms of modernism and postmodernism respectively. 'The End' focuses on 'Characters in Search of an End' (Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury) and 'Viral Endings' (DeLillo's White Noise). 'History' focuses on 'Modernism and the End of the End of History' (Ford's The Good Soldier) and 'Futures That Have Not Been: Postmodernism and the Limits of History' (Morrison's Beloved). 'Nation' focuses on 'Apocalyptic Communities: The European Nation, Islam, and Hinduism' (Forster's Passage to India) and 'Unveiling Nations' (Rushdie's Midnight's Children). 'Man' focuses on 'Anti-Apocalypse and the New Man' (D.H. Lawrence's Apocalypse) and 'The 'Fag End' Again and the New Woman' (Carter's Nights at the Circus). The conclusion briefly discusses 'The Return of End Times' (Derrida's suggestion contra Michel Houellebecq's Elementary Particles that announcements of the End of Man may be premature). Despite these large, even heady topics, the discussion in each section consists mainly of literary readings of the eight texts just mentioned, and these readings are the best thing about this book. They are intelligent and sometimes venturesome as, for example, in the challenge to conventional readings of Beloved. The ingenious organizational strategy allows the author to exfoliate (or in some cases to wander far) from the literary text into a range of issues as wide as the author wants to make it, sometimes to world political news, sometimes to a background theory. This kind of organizational strategy is valuable in an era when methodological change is so urgently required. And in her literary interpretations [End Page 365] Heffernan shows signs of the important ability to write in a personal voice. I particularly appreciate the genuinely interdisciplinary qualities of the book. The title claims incorrectly that she covers 'the Twentieth-Century Novel.' She uses novels originally written in English, a tradition that has not been a hotbed of interest with regard to postmodern experiment and adventure. Very occasional references outside English-language novels do not make up the deficit. Confinement to English may explain the lack of definition concerning the key terms, modern and postmodern, which Heffernan uses as if their meaning were settled and were not highly contested and divergent, depending on where 'modern' begins (1400? 1750? 1900?). To pose this question of definition compromises the value of those terms in making a case, and the terms do seem to function mainly as a way of providing a divide in each part, leaving undefined what is at stake in the general shift it implies. In conducting her argument, Heffernan cites her authorities (e.g., Kermode, Kant, Connor Cruise O'Brien, Derrida, Fukuyama, Spivak) as if citing them carries the point and nothing is required of her. Once we get a brief reference to a theorist or interpreter, the discussion leaves the relatively clear discussion of a literary text and rambles in ways that are sometimes pleasing but rely far too heavily on passing allusions to theories whose relevance is not explained or shown. Her choice of sources is sometimes perplexing; for example, she claims to discuss 'Postmodernism and the Limits of History,' yet does not cite a single discussion by any of those who currently write on that topic (Ankersmit, Berkhofer, Jenkins, Munslow, White, and even - full disclosure - the present writer); instead she opts for the highly compromised Fukuyama. Or she touches on the question concerning Christianity as a source of history but without appearing to be aware of the Ur-source on this topic is Karl Löwith's Meaning in History. Nobody can read everything, but everybody has an obligation to cover...

In Search of Identity: Inner Diaspora and Psychic Healing in Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

(2010). In Search of Identity: Inner Diaspora and Psychic Healing in Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. South Asian Review: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 9-26.