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Combination, Divination

Stephen Clingman

in The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary

Salman Rushdie is the most ebullient of transnational writers, and central to this are formal features, embedded as the inner DNA of his fiction. Among them is the key figure of chiasmus which, with ... More

Salman Rushdie is the most ebullient of transnational writers, and central to this are formal features, embedded as the inner DNA of his fiction. Among them is the key figure of chiasmus which, with its ‘X-like’ crossings, invokes metonymy, reversal, inversion. In Midnight's Children it is the key to identity itself, running through every level of the text. What this means, among other things, is that in a world of incessant contiguities, metonymy trumps biology when it comes to definitions of the self. If this makes Midnight's Children a novel which encodes the transnational within the national, then The Satanic Verses takes those patterns even further, with its chiastic metonymies of place, time, waking life, and dream, as well as religion and doubt. The result in Rushdie's work is a philosophy of excess in which identity and place cannot be contained.Less

Freedom of Speech

Anne Norton

in On the Muslim Question

This chapter examines how the Muslim question has been linked to the question of freedom of speech. A clash of civilizations that saw the West as the realm of enlightenment, and Muslims in the realm ... More

This chapter examines how the Muslim question has been linked to the question of freedom of speech. A clash of civilizations that saw the West as the realm of enlightenment, and Muslims in the realm of religion, custom, and tradition, has long been part of spectacles in the Western public sphere. Ayatollah Khomeini gave new life to these civilizational theatrics when he issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, whose The Satanic Verses became the center of a controversy that cast freedom of speech as a Muslim question. However, the martyr to free speech was not Rushdie but Theo van Gogh, the murdered producer of the film Submission. The chapter shows how the dramas surrounding Rushdie, van Gogh, the Danish cartoons and the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo's copycat cartoon provocations mark Muslims as the enemies of free speech.Less

Contexts of Literary Production and Consumption

Ruvani Ranasinha

in South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation

This book traces a genealogy of the literary publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing in 20th-century Britain, through a comparison of the changing contexts of literary production ... More

This book traces a genealogy of the literary publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing in 20th-century Britain, through a comparison of the changing contexts of literary production and consumption for succeeding generations of selected writers of South Asian origin, who emigrated to, or were born in, Britain. Comparing two or more writers of a similar ‘generation’ in each chapter, this book begins just before World War II, a decade before the independence of the subcontinent. This moment was the prelude to the mass emigration that would configure constructions of South Asian identity in Britain. The writers discussed here include the early nationalist Indian writers, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, alongside R. K. Narayan whose impact is compared to the contrasting receptions of Sri Lankan poet and publisher M. J. Tambimuttu, and of Bengali author Nirad Chaudhuri. Other writers discussed in the book include Kamala Markandaya and Ambalavener Sivanandan, Salman Rushdie and Farrukh Dhondy, and Hanif Kureishi and Meera Syal.Less

Writing Back, Re-writing Britain: Farrukh Dhondy and Salman Rushdie

Ruvani Ranasinha

in South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation

The mass immigration of the 1950s and 1960s changed the dynamics of British culture and created new audiences. Later writers from South Asia were more confident in self-consciously writing against ... More

The mass immigration of the 1950s and 1960s changed the dynamics of British culture and created new audiences. Later writers from South Asia were more confident in self-consciously writing against the terms of dominant culture. Most prominent amongst these was Salman Rushdie, who contested stereotypical representations of India and of ethnic minorities in Britain in his fiction and criticism. This chapter considers Rushdie alongside the figure of Farrukh Dhondy, who began his career in Britain as a political activist. Their work is examined primarily in terms of the way they straddle the concerns of both first and second-generation writers. Rushdie's first three novels embody the movement from colonialism and anti-colonialism towards a project of re-writing multicultural Britain. Dhondy's early stories and plays form a transformative bridge between writing back and re-writing Britain in another way. They map out themes of generational conflict and class tensions within British Asian communities as well as the topical, vexed debates on the appropriate response to racism, particularly the role of violence in the anti-racist struggle.Less

Islam and Blasphemy on the International Stage, 1989–2011

Paul Marshall and Nina Shea

in Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide

Some of the larger and more famous recent attempts to export blasphemy restrictions from the Muslim world to the West have had such a complex and long lasting effect that they require particular ... More

Some of the larger and more famous recent attempts to export blasphemy restrictions from the Muslim world to the West have had such a complex and long lasting effect that they require particular examination. These are detailed in Chapter Ten and include the continuing affair of The Satanic Verses, renewed when author Salman Rushdie's was given a knighthood by the British government. The so-called “Danish Cartoons” crisis of 2005–2006 continues to reverberate when the images are republished or forbidden to be printed, as in 2009 when Yale University Press censored them and other images from a book detailing the cartoons crisis itself. Other examples include Newsweek's account of a Qur’an flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo, a report which was later disproved; Pope Benedict XVI's controversial speech at Regensburg; and Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders's provocative film, Fitna. These upheavals frequently involved political manipulation. For example, the Danish cartoons were first published in September 2005 and republished, even in Egypt, Morocco, and Indonesia, without any outcry. Only in January 2006, following a decision by the OIC in its Mecca meeting to make an issue of the caricatures, did riots, violence and boycotts erupt and some 200 people die.Less

Literary Worlds

Eric Hayot

in On Literary Worlds

This chapter discusses the common use of the term “world” in literary studies that speaks to the relation between literature and worlds, and has nothing to do with world-systems or world literature. ... More

This chapter discusses the common use of the term “world” in literary studies that speaks to the relation between literature and worlds, and has nothing to do with world-systems or world literature. We speak of “Balzac's world,” or “Hawthorne's world,” or “Rushdie's world” in ways that rely on two fairly conventional understandings of the word, neither of which is captured by the current world literature debates. In one use the word names the general social and historical space within which an author lived and worked. In its other use the phrase means something like the unity of form, diegesis, and feeling composed by the rough totality of a work: the world of the work of art.Less

Introduction: Beginnings and Endings

Peter Marks

in Literature of the 1990s: Endings and Beginnings

Assassination is a hyperbolic way of describing the toppling of political leaders in a parliamentary democracy. Perversely, through the 1990s, the person in Britain most vulnerable to actual ... More

Assassination is a hyperbolic way of describing the toppling of political leaders in a parliamentary democracy. Perversely, through the 1990s, the person in Britain most vulnerable to actual assassination was a writer: Salman Rushdie. His novel The Satanic Verses had been published in 1988 to critical acclaim (winning the Whitbread Best Novel prize) and almost instant attack from sections of the Muslim community in Britain and beyond. The Satanic Verses was banned in India and South Africa, and burned publicly in Bradford in the late 1980s. Some Muslims regarded the book as a slur on Mohammed specifically and on their religion more generally. Because Islam is a global religion, the fury unleashed spread around the Muslim world, culminating in Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwah, or formal opinion, in February 1989, calling on devout Muslims to kill Rushdie.Less

Anti-racism, liberalism and class in The Satanic Verses and the Rushdie affair

Ahmed Rehana

in Writing British Muslims: Religion, class and multiculturalism

This chapter provides a crucial context to the Britain-based controversy surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, establishing the importance of a dialectical ... More

This chapter provides a crucial context to the Britain-based controversy surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, establishing the importance of a dialectical understanding of race, class and religious affiliation and grounding the protests in their material conditions. It reads the novel alongside and against the dispute that it generated: an engagement with the social context illuminates the presence of ideological contradictions within the novel which in turn shed light on the complexities and contradictions of multicultural politics in 1980s Britain. Focusing primarily on Rushdie’s representations of the fictional area ‘Brickhall’ in London, the chapter argues that the oppositional anti-racism that underpins the representation of the largely Muslim community’s struggle against the racism of Thatcher’s Britain is in tension with the endorsement of secular individualism against religious communalism that pervades the novel. The chapter reveals the strategies by which the novel attempts to manage and resolve this tension which is embedded within it and which emerged in the form of protests and book-burnings soon after its publication.Less

Black Futures Past

Rob Waters

in Thinking Black: Britain, 1964-1985

This epilogue looks to the decline of the formation of thinking black that this book has traced. It proposes that this formation declined in the face of the failure of revolutionary Black Power in ... More

This epilogue looks to the decline of the formation of thinking black that this book has traced. It proposes that this formation declined in the face of the failure of revolutionary Black Power in the Caribbean, new divisions around ethnicity and religion in the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the Rushdie Affair, the incorporation of black activists into new structures of state multiculturalism, and the reinventions of blackness that Stuart Hall analyzed as the rise of “new ethnicities.” In these contexts, the epilogue proposes, the meanings and constituencies of blackness shifted in the late 1980s, and its promise of a radical or revolutionary transformation of British politics and society appeared less certain.Less

What Are We Allowed to Say?: Rushdie, Mill, Savio

David Bromwich

in How Words Make Things Happen

Liberty of thought and discussion, as it came to be understood in Europe and North America, arose from the schismatic energies of the Protestant reformation and the political idealisms of the ... More

Liberty of thought and discussion, as it came to be understood in Europe and North America, arose from the schismatic energies of the Protestant reformation and the political idealisms of the Enlightenment. The uncertain future of the principle can be estimated by the spread of demands for codified speech and the widening context of recent proposals for censorship—proposals that are often advanced in the cause of cultural identity and sensitivity. Libertarian writings by Milton and Mill are pertinent for their emphasis on the connection between free speech and “moral courage,” and for their warning against the supposition that the future course of moral progress is already known to some people. The distinction between words and actions is worth preserving, as much as the distinction between persuasion and force. Censorship presumes an innocence in the censor that can never be humanly tenable.Less

Postscript: Remapping the Nation: The Map was in My Head.

in Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

This postscript is devoted to subcontinental portraits of national memory, mourning, and movement in Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) and Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1989). It considers the ... More

This postscript is devoted to subcontinental portraits of national memory, mourning, and movement in Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) and Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1989). It considers the possibilities of thinking the nation through the practice of fantasmatic cartography—the mapping of national and global territories of belonging through an analysis of the psychic work of longing.Less

East-West Descent Narratives

Rachel Falconer

in Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945

This chapter discusses several East–West descent narratives. The first is Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which represents the descent of a Western, imperial hero into a demonic ... More

This chapter discusses several East–West descent narratives. The first is Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which represents the descent of a Western, imperial hero into a demonic Eastern/Southern underworld. The chapter then studies Salman Rushdie's The Jaguar Smile and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the latter as a revision of the myth of Orpheus, and examines rich and positive representations of East–West relations and descent journeys from one region to another. It also contrasts the Bush administration's polarised worldview, where certain Eastern states have all been characterised as an ‘axis of evil’.Less

Introduction: Constructs by Which We Live

Elizabeth S. Anker

in Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature

This book explores various failures of human rights and the prevailing theoretical orientations within postcolonial studies through what it calls an “embodied politics of reading.” In particular, it ... More

This book explores various failures of human rights and the prevailing theoretical orientations within postcolonial studies through what it calls an “embodied politics of reading.” In particular, it considers two paradoxes that trouble “liberal” articulations of human rights by reading four postcolonial novels, each of which variously censures liberalism's practiced vocabularies for eclipsing key facets of selfhood: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero (1973), J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). It shows that liberal human rights discourses and norms exhibit a profound ambivalence toward embodiment, underwritten by the dual fictions of human dignity and bodily integrity and negating core dimensions of embodied experience.Less