Salman Rushdie Research Articles

This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form by Debjani Ganguly

Reviewed by: This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form by Debjani Ganguly Claire Chambers Debjani Ganguly. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. xii + 300 pp. I write this review in November 2016, soon after Donald Trump was elected US president twenty-seven years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of This Thing Called the World's most valuable contributions is the attention it accords to "the historically significant threshold of 1989" in shaping our current Manichean political climate (1). Notwithstanding recent scholarly emphasis on the World Trade Center attacks and their aftermath, I agree with Debjani Ganguly's thesis that 1989—a year significant for, but not reducible to, the collapse of communism—marked the most profound shift in geopolitics and literary aesthetics since the revolutionary movements of 1968. However, from my perspective as a researcher of British Muslim writing and given that Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown is one of the key texts discussed in this monograph, it is surprising that Ganguly devotes little space to exploring the Rushdie affair in her nuanced analysis of 1989 as a new "temporal horizon for the emergence of a new kind of novel" (6). Ganguly, who is Director of the University of Virginia's Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, argues that post-Cold War world novels are notable for their engagement with modern kinds of unending war and insurgency, the digital environment, and human rights discourse. She launches this ambitious and perceptive line of enquiry by bringing contemporary world novels into dialogue with the late-eighteenth-century protonovel. The eighteenth-century comparative framework is illuminating, but it seldom filters into the individual case studies about contemporary novels. For instance, especially since the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the infamous fatwa against him in 1989, Rushdie has been eager to position himself as heir apparent to Enlightenment philosophes such as Voltaire. This promising research avenue is not pursued in Ganguly's chapter on Rushdie's 2005 novel. Ganguly's disentangling of the terms "postcolonial," "global," and "world" in the introduction is much needed and persuasive. She hints at the recent emergence of global literature as a category, linked as it is with the ongoing issues of colonialism and globalization. But it is puzzling to see that this well-read study does not interact with work on global fiction by such scholars as Sanjay Krishnan, Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley, Diana Brydon, and Richard J. Lane. With her eighteenth-century expertise, Ganguly is more immersed [End Page 177] in longstanding debates about world literature from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Edward Said and Immanuel Wallerstein. Drawing on Romantic sources, she expounds on the lovely, instructive phrase "the melancholic realism of the world novel" (19). She also reflects on the increasingly pervasive sense in academia that there are problems with the term "postcoloniality," particularly in light of transnational brands of terror and war without end. Ganguly paints a grisly picture of what she terms, with a nod to Achille Mbembe, "deathworlds" around the globe (9), as well as to resistance movements that deflagrate in response. The chapter entitled "Forensic Witnessing," for example, is an elegy for the Sri Lanka killed during its protracted civil war as portrayed in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. Strangely, though, the 2003 Iraq War is first encountered via Ian McEwan's Saturday. In this novel, a rather objectionable middle-class man, Henry Perowne, expresses views of the war and Muslim migrants in Britain that are hardly offset by even the echo of a contestatory subaltern voice. Similarly, Martin Amis's "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta" provides readers' first window on 9/11 in this volume. Ganguly praises "Amis's deft strokes" (49) in the short story and absorbs his phrase "the thing which is called the World" (43) into her title. It is a missed opportunity that she does not challenge Amis's preoccupation with the figure of the terrorist, his simplistic view of Atta as a man with a death wish, and the hateful nature of some of his public pronouncements on Muslims and Islam. Ganguly makes...

Davis Press: Should You Publish Meccan Madness?

You are the owner/editor of your own publishing firm, Davis Press. You encounter a dilemma when, in 2010, you are given the opportunity to publish a novel set in the Islamic holy city of Mecca. Given the angry fallout after the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, the Iraq War, and the controversy of Qur'an desecration at the US naval base prison at Guantanamo Bay, publishing the novel presents a host of ethical dilemmas. This case discusses the ethics of a free press and challenges the profit motive in the face of jeopardizing political and religious world affairs. Excerpt UVA-E-0421 Rev. Jan. 8, 2021 Davis Press: Should You Publish Meccan Madness? After 25 years of career success in a leading US publishing firm, you harnessed the monetary and human resources to launch your own publishing firm, Davis Press. Your company has created a niche for itself in high-adventure, factually based fiction, and, as a risk-taker, you have profited from the national resurgence in adventure novel sales. It is late 2010, and you are currently celebrating Davis Press's sixth year since inception and its first year in the black. Earlier in the year, author Jonathan Taajwar had submitted a manuscript to Davis Press called Meccan Madness. The editorial staff reviewed the book, and it has been and found it to be a fascinating and riveting novel about a Muslim woman who attempts to lead an underground movement to take control of the Kaaba, the holy sanctuary at Mecca. You are sure the book would be a bestseller, which would give a large and welcome boost to your bottom line. Your confidence in the success of Meccan Madness is also, however, the very reason for your serious concern about publishing it under the Davis Press name. You are well aware that the novel's basic premise makes it controversial, as does the fact that Taajwar is a self-professed lapsed Muslim. Needless to say, any publication critical of Islam would be badly received, primarily by people of the Islamic faith. Although the tragedy of September 11, almost four years earlier, had created interest in learning about the Islamic faith and consequently would probably boost sales, it had also created a far more volatile climate that could mean a potentially hostile reception to Taajwar's novel. In addition, the Iraq War, waged by America in the spring of 2003, had created a lot of anti-American sentiment not only in Iraq but also in many other Muslim countries. . . .

This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form by Debjani Ganguly

Reviewed by: This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form by Debjani Ganguly Beth Miller Debjani Ganguly, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, 300 pp. Debjani Ganguly's new book This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form beautifully connects the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century to their contemporary equivalent, the humanitarianism of the post-1989 global novel. In her analysis, these texts have a unique desire and responsibility to bring together global networks of world, war, and witness. Ganguly demonstrates how the sentimental works from the Romantic period, unconvincing in the following centuries, reenter the world stage with the change in zeitgeist following the end of the Cold War through a specific focus on ekphrasis. Her argument details how the hypervisual and multimedia culture rising to prominence alongside a new era of global warfare has intensified an iteration of the Romantic imagination (137). Ganguly's primary argument uses ekphrasis to explore the role of witness and witnessing in the contemporary novel, especially with the outbreak of global war and terror networks. Ganguly divides her text into three sections: World, War, and Witness. In "World," through the image of the collage, she critically reimagines the global novel as "a formal and semantic construct through which the human imagination as well as the humanitarian imagination seeks to make sense of and sensitize our reading publics to the worlds of wars and violence that have become pervasive in our era" (85). Ganguly's analysis commences with David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, a novel spanning the globe and demonstrating the intricate ripples felt personally, corporately or communally, and nationally from individual's decisions in our increasingly interconnected present. The power of witnessing on a global scale, specifically the inescapability of graphic violence, comes into sharper clarity in Ganguly's analysis of Salman Rushdie after 1989. Her close reading of Shalimar the Clown individualizes as well as worlds Rushdie's transition from a postcolonial to a global author in his shift to a "world perspective" of history's relationship to the present, "reckon[ing] with planetary convergence" as opposed to the postcolonial focus on "disjunctive temporalities," in other words, "a contemporality that is global" (122). Her second section, "War," builds on the scholarly foundation of the quotidian [End Page 385] experience of war to focus on humanitarian responses to the concentration of images in our global culture intensified by the Web. Adding to her existing literary timeline, Ganguly details the transformation in humanitarian thought between the end of WWII and human rights movements of the 1960s to the "age of witnessing" and "hypermediated humanitarianism" in the early twenty-first century especially (140). Romantic-era photography, specifically of the Napoleonic wars, brought war into the home for the first time. This intimacy transformed the relational perception between war and the nation, making future literary movements dependent on reactions to warfare; in the same vein, "the global wars since the end of the cold war and the iconic mediatization of 9/11 overwhelmingly constitute the horizon of literary theorizations in our global era" (152). Her analysis of this image-saturated environment focalizes around Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers and Don DeLillo's Falling Man, both of which strive to make sense of the iconography of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Ganguly's third section, "Witness," flips conceptions of the "cultural chasm" between postcolonial and Western worlds; she argues instead that "the saturations and reinflections of witnessing violence across multiple media … need to be read explicitly as products of both postcolonial planetary reconfigurations and the concomitant effects of hypermediation in our information era" (178). Analyses of Anil's Ghost and Orpheus Lost form the argument of her final section. Anil's Ghost "makes legible" the witnessing process, complicated by connecting the personal feeling of loss to the historical fact of atrocity by following Anil as she discovers "the necessity and impossibility of finding the truth about extreme human violence" in the extra-judicial killings in Sri Lanka between 1988–90 (193). Ganguly engages in global mapping in her analysis as well, connecting Ondaatje and Sri Lanka to Spiegel...

What’s in a Term: Can Feminism Look beyond the Global North/Global South Geopolitical Paradigm?

What’s in a Term: Can Feminism Look beyond the Global North/Global South Geopolitical Paradigm?

Red-Headed Physiognomy in Salman Rushdie's MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN

Salman Rushdie often links physical attributes with personality traits in Midnight's Children. He explores the relationship between colonizer and colonized, paying particular attention to the ways ...

From Elephant God to Man Dog: Hybridity, Mimicry, and the Homo Sacer in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”

From Elephant God to Man Dog: Hybridity, Mimicry, and the Homo Sacer in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

Saudi Clerics and Shiʿa Islam

Saudi Clerics and Shiʿa Islam

Capital Offenses:

Satire, with its objectifying, disparaging gaze and deliberate misrepresentations, is a form of othering—of representational violence. Sometimes its mocking and critical ways make satire so explosive that the symbolic violence of its distortions motivates actual violence on the part of those who feel targeted (or offended) by its referential finger-pointing and nose thumbing, as with the murders on January 7, 2015, of twelve people at the satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Drawing on satire theories from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this essay asks what literary and cultural scholars can learn from the Charlie Hebdo murders, from comparison with the Salman Rushdie affair of 1989–98 (since both were prompted by perceived disrespect to Islam in satiric works), and from the vigorous discussions the murders prompted among media commentators and bloggers concerning satire’s offenses and dangers. Familiar positions on and debates about satire’s intentions, differentiating strategies, targets, effects, and moral positions—and related debates about free speech and censorship—received new airings in the context of the murders and the renewed attention to satire they prompted. By examining key positions and recurring assumptions in the public discourse on satire after the shootings, the essay shows how a relatively dormant field of scholarly theory and classification was reinvigorated by real-world events that test its assumptions and demonstrate, in compelling new ways, the risks and perils of satire’s unstable power in our heterogeneous societies.

The Production of Alternative Global Spaces: Walking in the City in Salman Rushdie’s Novels

de Certeau explicitly posits walking as a mode of resistance, which has been updated in theories of affect and posthumanism that advocate a return to the concept of the body and the human, respectively. These new theories propose a modified walker who blurs the subject–object/human–nonhuman distinction, reinforcing both a contested embodiment and an inclusive approach to the “other” in self-fashioning. Salman Rushdie, too, uses the trope of walking in the city as an altered act of resistance. Walking, an exercise in Rushdie’s novels that deconstructs the autonomous bodies of walkers at the moment of their encounter with material cities, aligns itself to postanthropocentric discourses of walking. This fracturing of the autonomous bodies of walkers, however, is a result of the modified body politic and relevant to migrant figures from the Global South rather than to the provincial walkers of the Global North.

Salman Rushdie in conversation

This interview with Salman Rushdie took place in May 2017 in Lyon, France, when he answered the questions of students from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and from high schools and universities in Lyon, Paris and Nantes. The novels discussed include Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children and Shalimar the Clown. Rushdie reflects on the flexibility of the word “story” for him, on his attraction for cities and on his relation to magic realism and Latin American writers like García Márquez. He talks about the children’s books that have inspired him (The Arabian Nights and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books) as well as the great books he has learned from (Don Quijote, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses). He also refers to the comic dimension of some of his books, the joys and difficulties of translation, and his experience as a screenplay writer.

The Voice of the Silenced in Salman Rushdie’s Shame, Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners: Three English Lives, and Colum McCann’s

This article examines the implications of history in Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007), and Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (2013). History plays an important role in discriminating and distinguishing the proper characteristics of certain nations and people of a specific historical era. The purpose of the current paper is to scrutinize the historical components in the selected novels. These novels incarnate the authors’ visions of the silenced minorities depicted in the fictional plots. They embody the sense of individual sufferings at the time of human devastation and retardation caused by historical events. In essence, my study focuses on the authors’ abstract voices which are uttered through the fictional characters’ dialogic voices. That is, the authors portray the neglected and suppressed voices which need alleviation and freedom. Thus, the authors do not tend to express their authorial voices directly in the novels. Instead, they convey their literary meanings through the characters’ voices. Thus, my analysis will focus on both the authors’ implied voices and their manifestation in the characters’ direct fictional voices. The methodological analysis of the study will concentrate on the way by which the authors present the peculiarities of their fictional characters and discourses.

Betrayed Sentiments:Joseph Antonand the Phraseology of Emotional Representation

This article addresses the issue of the emotional construction of Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton in terms of the conceptualization and the linguistic representation of emotions. To this end the essay explores the relationships between feelings and their linguistic expression as well as examining how emotions are represented in the memoir on the figurative level. In particular, the article looks at how idiomatic expressions, as part of the emotion lexis deployed in Joseph Anton, contribute to the emotional representation of its principal characters. The article claims that the memoir has an emotional structure imposed by a few central metaphors and sustained by idioms to figuratively frame its content. The study proves that Joseph Anton is not only heavily charged with emotions but it also utilizes a plethora of idiomatic expressions and figurative language, which is a distinctive feature of Rushdie’s novelistic works.

A Tale of Ambivalence: Salman Rushdie’s “Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights”

Salman Rushdie’s memoirs, essays and novels contribute to the appreciation of the contradictions in his outlook on life. His experiences in his family enable Rushdie to make efforts for objective and tolerant judgement of British lifestyle and culture. However, his isolation from the society in Britain despite his struggle for adaptation to British cultural values cause contradictions in his cultural identity. While Rushdie expresses his allegiance to India and its culture in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), he reflects his alienation from his homeland in this novel as well. Similarly, in his Imaginary Homelands (1981-1991) whereas Rushdie questions the injustice and inequality caused by imperialism in The New Empire within Britain (1982), he justifies the colonialist discourse in Kipling (1990). He elaborates on the contradictions in his outlook on life in terms of his cultural ambivalence in his fictions such as Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983). However, in his latest novel, Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), Rushdie reflects his cultural identity conflict in terms of rationalism-mysticism dichotomy. With the use of allegory as well as the lack of linearity in time and space, Rushdie justifies his cultural ambivalence in relation to the dynamism of contemporary world. Thus, Rushdie’s latest novel invites reading for its representation of the oppositions in his approach to life.

Emergence of Young Adult Fiction in Indian English

The novel is the major literary forms appropriated in Indian Writing in English from the Western canon. Most Indian fiction writers are true to the English tradition of novel writing both in theme and treatment. They deal with a wide ranging of thematic concerns and techniques and they adopt the narrative techniques already experimented in the West. Of course, there are some novelists like Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh who stand out from the rest for their bold experiment. Interestingly, some writers during the first decade of the twenty first century have employed young adults and their points of view to deal with Indian social realities for the first time in the history of Indian fiction in English. Indian Fiction in English has branched out into a new sub-genre — young adult/adolescence novel — in the hands of Arvind Adiga, Vikas Swarup, and Chetan Bhagat. This paper critically examines the forms and themes of young adult fiction in Indian English.

Rushdie's Everest: Secular Transcendence in The Satanic Verses

Alleluia Cone, a female character from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, has a visionary experience when she reaches the summit of Mount Everest. This transcendent experience is not ironized in the novel by the author's characteristic discourse of religious doubt. In fact, it exists in the text as a counterweight to the career of the prophet Mahound, who also ascends a mountain with aspirations of transcendence. Allie explains her experience in terms of her deceased father's rejection of ‘the idea of the continuum’. Otto Cone's universe of irreconcilable elements admits the possibility of the sublime without reconciling it with a consistent metaphysical system. In fact, this approach to the sublime may allow a perceiver to regard it in that other (Rudolf) Otto's words as a ‘mysterium tremendum’, discontinuous with the path of normal life. The sublime mountain presents not just an obstacle in Allie's life journey but an incoherence; a break in the track. Allie is one of only a few Rushdie characters untroubled by a religious upbringing and yet she is the one who, in her encounter with Everest, experiences transcendence in its naked perfection. This paper explores the paradox of secular transcendence in this novel, noting that Allie's reflections on the topic echo some of the author's own in ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’

Between Salman Rushdie and Ayatollah Khomeini: Kalim Siddiqui and Political Islam in Britain in the Last Quarter of the 20th Century

Between Salman Rushdie and Ayatollah Khomeini: Kalim Siddiqui and Political Islam in Britain in the Last Quarter of the 20th Century

Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett by Nels Pearson

<i>Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett</i> by Nels Pearson

Idiomatic Confluences: Xenisms in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Kamila Shamsie's

L’auteur et journaliste britannique d’origine pakistanaise Kamila Shamsie a reconnu l’influence de Salman Rushdie sur son œuvre. Il n’est donc pas surprenant que Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) de Rushdie et le premier roman de Shamsie In the City by the Sea (1998) aient de nombreux points communs, meme si leur genre est different. Je me propose d’etudier les differentes manieres dont les auteurs incorporent des mots et des expressions etrangers, ou xenismes, dans leur texte en anglais. Apres une breve analyse des points communs entre les deux romans, j’etudierai plus en details les techniques utilisees par les deux auteurs, a travers leur utilisation des xenismes, pour eduquer et divertir leurs lecteurs occidentaux et pour les familiariser avec certains aspects de la culture et du mode de vie en Asie du Sud, et plus particulierement dans le cas de Shamsie, sa vision de l’Islam. J’estime egalement que Rushdie et Shamsie utilisent tous deux les elements interculturels propres a la langue comme une strategie pour non seulement promouvoir l’Hindustani vernaculaire aupres de leurs lecteurs occidentaux, mais aussi pour renouveler et enrichir la langue anglaise en y incorporant ces xenismes, et ce faisant inventent une confluence originale des langues. Et avec la langue c’est le roman anglais qui est ainsi rajeuni par des ecrivains venus des marges de l’ex-empire britannique et qui devient encore plus multi-culturel.

Inhabiting the Classic, Constructing the Self: Translated and Translating Voices in Josephine Balmer’s Poetry

Creative translation and versioning of classical material is arguably a significant aspect of 20 th -century poetry and continues to represent a driving force in 21 st -century poetic production. A field reclaimed by classical scholars, translators and poets, this phenomenon has often provided the artists themselves with a rich ground for reflecting on their own poetical voice. The recontextualization of the classic in new poetry by means of creative translation will be explored through examples from the British poet Jospehine Balmer (b. 1959); like one of her Modernist models, Ezra Pound, Balmer has consistently absorbed classical translation into her own works, often blurring the boundaries between creative translation and original. Her trans-creative poetry raises the question about the use of the classical voice as a space to be both inscribed with personal experiences and employed as a distancing filter from the self. In her collection Chasing Catullus (2004) Balmer moves in and out of her autobiography by self-consciously “overwriting” her own memories through classical versioning. The Word for Sorrow (2009) approaches the themes of displacement and loss through the prism of Ovid’s exilic persona , combining the ancient poet’s voice with that of a British soldier who fought at Gallipoli and the self-conscious voice of the poet-translator. By borrowing Salman Rushdie’s metaphor of the migrant as a “translated man”, my contribution will also address translation as a trope of the writing self in Balmer’s hybrid works.