R. D. Grillo
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780198294269
- eISBN:
- 9780191599378
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0198294263.003.0009
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
In Britain and other countries with similar patterns of ethnic and cultural diversity, policy in the 1980s and 1990s stood within the messy middle of the spectrum from assimilation to separatism. ...
More
In Britain and other countries with similar patterns of ethnic and cultural diversity, policy in the 1980s and 1990s stood within the messy middle of the spectrum from assimilation to separatism. British policy may have favoured what was called ‘integration’, but how much diversity, of what kind, and on what basis were still open questions. In Britain and elsewhere there were three emergent modes of cultural pluralism: ‘multiculturalism’, ‘institutional pluralism’ (or more simply ‘separatism’), and ‘hybridity’. In the 1990s, multicultural policies, which had supporters and critics from all parts of the political spectrum, were severely tested by demands by some Muslims for greater recognition of their claims for space in the public arena, and by events such as the ‘Rushdie Affair’, which posed the question of what room should contemporary societies allow for being French or British or American ‘differently’?Less
In Britain and other countries with similar patterns of ethnic and cultural diversity, policy in the 1980s and 1990s stood within the messy middle of the spectrum from assimilation to separatism. British policy may have favoured what was called ‘integration’, but how much diversity, of what kind, and on what basis were still open questions. In Britain and elsewhere there were three emergent modes of cultural pluralism: ‘multiculturalism’, ‘institutional pluralism’ (or more simply ‘separatism’), and ‘hybridity’. In the 1990s, multicultural policies, which had supporters and critics from all parts of the political spectrum, were severely tested by demands by some Muslims for greater recognition of their claims for space in the public arena, and by events such as the ‘Rushdie Affair’, which posed the question of what room should contemporary societies allow for being French or British or American ‘differently’?
Stephen Clingman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199278497
- eISBN:
- 9780191706981
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278497.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The book proceeds from a central contemporary paradox. Never before have we been confronted by such dizzying forms of multiplicity, while at the same time facing still powerful appeals to singularity ...
More
The book proceeds from a central contemporary paradox. Never before have we been confronted by such dizzying forms of multiplicity, while at the same time facing still powerful appeals to singularity in matters of location and identity. The question arises as to how we negotiate the relation between the two — whether we can fashion new understandings of self and place in a disparate and uneven world. Here the relevant problem is not whether boundaries exist, but the nature of the boundaries we construct. In this light the book takes up the idea of a ‘grammar of identity’, considering notions of the generative, the metonymic, the transitive and navigational as ways of fashioning a sense of both self and place. In doing so, it explores the fiction of some of the major writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Joseph Conrad, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. Beyond the binaries of the colonial and postcolonial, the modern and postmodern, these are writers for whom questions of self and boundary have been central. If they present no form of utopia, they have described the space and time of our history, redefining what we mean by the transnational, and by transnational fiction.Less
The book proceeds from a central contemporary paradox. Never before have we been confronted by such dizzying forms of multiplicity, while at the same time facing still powerful appeals to singularity in matters of location and identity. The question arises as to how we negotiate the relation between the two — whether we can fashion new understandings of self and place in a disparate and uneven world. Here the relevant problem is not whether boundaries exist, but the nature of the boundaries we construct. In this light the book takes up the idea of a ‘grammar of identity’, considering notions of the generative, the metonymic, the transitive and navigational as ways of fashioning a sense of both self and place. In doing so, it explores the fiction of some of the major writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Joseph Conrad, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. Beyond the binaries of the colonial and postcolonial, the modern and postmodern, these are writers for whom questions of self and boundary have been central. If they present no form of utopia, they have described the space and time of our history, redefining what we mean by the transnational, and by transnational fiction.
Stephen Clingman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199278497
- eISBN:
- 9780191706981
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278497.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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
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.
Anne Norton
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691157047
- eISBN:
- 9781400846351
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691157047.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
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
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.
Andrew Teverson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719070501
- eISBN:
- 9781781701225
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719070501.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Salman Rushdie is one of the world's most important writers of politicised fiction. He is a self-proclaimed controversialist, capable of exciting radically divergent viewpoints; a novelist of ...
More
Salman Rushdie is one of the world's most important writers of politicised fiction. He is a self-proclaimed controversialist, capable of exciting radically divergent viewpoints; a novelist of extraordinary imaginative range and power; and an erudite, and often fearless, commentator upon the state of global politics today. This critical study examines the intellectual, biographical, literary and cultural contexts from which Rushdie's fiction springs, in order to help the reader make sense of the often complex debates that surround the life and work of this major contemporary figure. It also offers detailed critical readings of all Rushdie's novels, from Grimus through to Shalimar the Clown.Less
Salman Rushdie is one of the world's most important writers of politicised fiction. He is a self-proclaimed controversialist, capable of exciting radically divergent viewpoints; a novelist of extraordinary imaginative range and power; and an erudite, and often fearless, commentator upon the state of global politics today. This critical study examines the intellectual, biographical, literary and cultural contexts from which Rushdie's fiction springs, in order to help the reader make sense of the often complex debates that surround the life and work of this major contemporary figure. It also offers detailed critical readings of all Rushdie's novels, from Grimus through to Shalimar the Clown.
Elizabeth S. Anker
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451362
- eISBN:
- 9780801465635
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451362.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Over the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the ...
More
Over the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the novel to explore both the possibilities and challenges of enacting and protecting human rights, particularly in the Global South. This book shows how human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. The book suggests how an embodied politics of reading might restore a vital fleshiness to the overly abstract, decorporealized subject of liberal rights. Each novel examined approaches human rights in terms of limits and paradoxes. Rushdie's Midnight's Children addresses the obstacles to incorporating rights into a formerly colonized nation's legal culture. El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero takes up controversies over women's freedoms in Islamic society. In Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee considers the disappointments of post-apartheid reconciliation in South Africa. And in The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy confronts an array of human rights abuses widespread in contemporary India. Each of these literary case studies further demonstrates the relevance of embodiment to both comprehending and redressing the failures of human rights, even while those narratives refuse simplistic ideals or solutions.Less
Over the past fifty years, debates about human rights have assumed an increasingly prominent place in postcolonial literature and theory. Writers from Salman Rushdie to Nawal El Saadawi have used the novel to explore both the possibilities and challenges of enacting and protecting human rights, particularly in the Global South. This book shows how human dignity and bodily integrity contribute to an anxiety about the body that helps to explain many of the contemporary and historical failures of human rights, revealing why and how lives are excluded from human rights protections along the lines of race, gender, class, disability, and species membership. The book suggests how an embodied politics of reading might restore a vital fleshiness to the overly abstract, decorporealized subject of liberal rights. Each novel examined approaches human rights in terms of limits and paradoxes. Rushdie's Midnight's Children addresses the obstacles to incorporating rights into a formerly colonized nation's legal culture. El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero takes up controversies over women's freedoms in Islamic society. In Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee considers the disappointments of post-apartheid reconciliation in South Africa. And in The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy confronts an array of human rights abuses widespread in contemporary India. Each of these literary case studies further demonstrates the relevance of embodiment to both comprehending and redressing the failures of human rights, even while those narratives refuse simplistic ideals or solutions.
Paul Marshall and Nina Shea
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199812264
- eISBN:
- 9780199919383
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812264.003.0010
- Subject:
- Religion, Islam
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
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.
Ruvani Ranasinha
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199207770
- eISBN:
- 9780191695681
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199207770.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book provides an historical account of the publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing from the 1930s to the present, based on original archival research drawn from a range of ...
More
This book provides an historical account of the publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing from the 1930s to the present, based on original archival research drawn from a range of publishing houses. This comparison of succeeding generations of writers who emigrated to, or were born in, Britain examines how the experience of migrancy, the attitudes towards migrant writers in the literary marketplace, and the critical reception of them, changed significantly throughout the 20th century. The book shows how the aesthetic, cultural, and political context changed significantly for each generation, producing radically different kinds of writing and transforming the role of the post-colonial writer of South Asian origin. The extensive use of original materials from publishers' archives shows how shifting political, academic, and commercial agendas in Britain and North America influenced the selection, content, presentation, and consumption of many of these texts. The differences between writers of different generations can thus in part be understood in terms of the different demands of their publishers and expectations of readers in each decade. Writers from different generations are paired accordingly in each chapter: Nirad Chaudhuri (1897–1999) with Tambimuttu (1915–83); Ambalavener Sivanandan (born 1923) with Kamala Markandaya (born 1924); Salman Rushdie (born 1947) with Farrukh Dhondy (born 1944); and Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) with Meera Syal (born 1963). Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hosain, V. S. Naipaul, and Aubrey Menen are also discussed.Less
This book provides an historical account of the publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing from the 1930s to the present, based on original archival research drawn from a range of publishing houses. This comparison of succeeding generations of writers who emigrated to, or were born in, Britain examines how the experience of migrancy, the attitudes towards migrant writers in the literary marketplace, and the critical reception of them, changed significantly throughout the 20th century. The book shows how the aesthetic, cultural, and political context changed significantly for each generation, producing radically different kinds of writing and transforming the role of the post-colonial writer of South Asian origin. The extensive use of original materials from publishers' archives shows how shifting political, academic, and commercial agendas in Britain and North America influenced the selection, content, presentation, and consumption of many of these texts. The differences between writers of different generations can thus in part be understood in terms of the different demands of their publishers and expectations of readers in each decade. Writers from different generations are paired accordingly in each chapter: Nirad Chaudhuri (1897–1999) with Tambimuttu (1915–83); Ambalavener Sivanandan (born 1923) with Kamala Markandaya (born 1924); Salman Rushdie (born 1947) with Farrukh Dhondy (born 1944); and Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) with Meera Syal (born 1963). Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hosain, V. S. Naipaul, and Aubrey Menen are also discussed.
Ruvani Ranasinha
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199207770
- eISBN:
- 9780191695681
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199207770.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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
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.
Ruvani Ranasinha
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199207770
- eISBN:
- 9780191695681
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199207770.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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
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.
Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226138336
- eISBN:
- 9780226138503
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226138503.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Theory and Practice
The book presents a highly original reflection on the status of an “anthropology of the contemporary”. Following on the same authors’ Demands of the Day, this new and convincing manuscript gives a ...
More
The book presents a highly original reflection on the status of an “anthropology of the contemporary”. Following on the same authors’ Demands of the Day, this new and convincing manuscript gives a coherent elaboration of the central arguments, movements and shifts from research rooted in the experience of the present to a contemporary one understood as an ethos. The book contains two highly original case studies which illustrate the relevance and richness of this approach. In Part 1, the authors undertake an erudite discussion of philosophical grounds and concepts necessary for an anthropology of the contemporary by way of an ongoing engagement with arguments established by Max Weber, John Dewey and Michel Foucault (e.g. his notion of ‘foyers d’expérience’), as well as with other authors (e.g. Kant, Blumenberg, Warburg, Geertz). Central to this engagement is the guiding idea of anthropological inquiry as ‘practice of form-giving’ linked to an ongoing attention to questions of ethics. The book considers inquiry--and its aftermath—where a near future is at stake, one, however, which is not (or only in part) determined by the past and the present. Part II consists of two case studies: one on the Rushdie Affair, the second one on ‘Gerhard Richter’s Pathos’. Based on different kinds of texts (interviews, letters, printed articles, anthropological research, etc.), they demonstrate the basic ideas of an exploration of the contemporary and its key challenge (for anthropology and contemporaries): how to conceptualize and give form to breakdowns of truth and conduct.Less
The book presents a highly original reflection on the status of an “anthropology of the contemporary”. Following on the same authors’ Demands of the Day, this new and convincing manuscript gives a coherent elaboration of the central arguments, movements and shifts from research rooted in the experience of the present to a contemporary one understood as an ethos. The book contains two highly original case studies which illustrate the relevance and richness of this approach. In Part 1, the authors undertake an erudite discussion of philosophical grounds and concepts necessary for an anthropology of the contemporary by way of an ongoing engagement with arguments established by Max Weber, John Dewey and Michel Foucault (e.g. his notion of ‘foyers d’expérience’), as well as with other authors (e.g. Kant, Blumenberg, Warburg, Geertz). Central to this engagement is the guiding idea of anthropological inquiry as ‘practice of form-giving’ linked to an ongoing attention to questions of ethics. The book considers inquiry--and its aftermath—where a near future is at stake, one, however, which is not (or only in part) determined by the past and the present. Part II consists of two case studies: one on the Rushdie Affair, the second one on ‘Gerhard Richter’s Pathos’. Based on different kinds of texts (interviews, letters, printed articles, anthropological research, etc.), they demonstrate the basic ideas of an exploration of the contemporary and its key challenge (for anthropology and contemporaries): how to conceptualize and give form to breakdowns of truth and conduct.
Eric Hayot
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199926695
- eISBN:
- 9780199980499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199926695.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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
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.
Lawrence Rosen
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226726137
- eISBN:
- 9780226726144
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226726144.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
This book illuminates key aspects of Muslim life and how central tenets of that life are being challenged and culturally refashioned. Through a series of poignant tales—from the struggle by a group ...
More
This book illuminates key aspects of Muslim life and how central tenets of that life are being challenged and culturally refashioned. Through a series of poignant tales—from the struggle by a group of friends against daily corruption to the contest over a saint's identity, from nostalgia for the departed Jews to Salman Rushdie's vision of doubt in a world of religious certainty—the book shows how a dazzling array of potential changes are occurring alongside deeply embedded continuity, a process it compares to a game of chess in which infinite variations of moves can be achieved while fundamental aspects of “the game” have had a remarkably enduring quality. Whether it is the potential fabrication of new forms of Islam by migrants to Europe (creating a new “Euro-Islam”), the emphasis put on individuals rather than institutions, or the heartrending problems Muslims may face when their marriages cross national boundaries, each story and each interpretation offers a window into a world of contending concepts and challenged coherence. The book is both an antidote to simplified versions of Islam circulating today and a consistent story of the continuities that account for much of ordinary Muslim life. It offers, in its human stories and its insights, its own contribution, as the book states, “to the mutual understanding and forgiveness that alone will make true peace possible.”Less
This book illuminates key aspects of Muslim life and how central tenets of that life are being challenged and culturally refashioned. Through a series of poignant tales—from the struggle by a group of friends against daily corruption to the contest over a saint's identity, from nostalgia for the departed Jews to Salman Rushdie's vision of doubt in a world of religious certainty—the book shows how a dazzling array of potential changes are occurring alongside deeply embedded continuity, a process it compares to a game of chess in which infinite variations of moves can be achieved while fundamental aspects of “the game” have had a remarkably enduring quality. Whether it is the potential fabrication of new forms of Islam by migrants to Europe (creating a new “Euro-Islam”), the emphasis put on individuals rather than institutions, or the heartrending problems Muslims may face when their marriages cross national boundaries, each story and each interpretation offers a window into a world of contending concepts and challenged coherence. The book is both an antidote to simplified versions of Islam circulating today and a consistent story of the continuities that account for much of ordinary Muslim life. It offers, in its human stories and its insights, its own contribution, as the book states, “to the mutual understanding and forgiveness that alone will make true peace possible.”
Ahmed Rehana
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719087400
- eISBN:
- 9781781708972
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719087400.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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
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.
Rob Waters
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520293847
- eISBN:
- 9780520967205
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520293847.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
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
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.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804754903
- eISBN:
- 9780804772501
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804754903.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
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
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.
Rachel Falconer
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748617630
- eISBN:
- 9780748651733
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748617630.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
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
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’.
Paul Giles
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199301560
- eISBN:
- 9780199369218
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199301560.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature, World Literature
This focus of this chapter is on fiction produced in the United States since 1945 that has been shaped in one way or another by Australasia. The contexts addressed range from engagement with ...
More
This focus of this chapter is on fiction produced in the United States since 1945 that has been shaped in one way or another by Australasia. The contexts addressed range from engagement with Irish-American cultural politics (Raymond Chandler, Thomas Keneally) to the paradoxes of exile (Shirley Hazzard, Peter Carey) and the structural inversions of postmodernism (Salman Rushdie). This chapter also considers how the “posthumanist” idiom of US cultural theorist Donna Haraway has been influenced by Australian visual artist Patricia Piccinini, and it concludes by discussing how J.M. Coetzee, whose first novel was written in New York but who is now resident in Adelaide, internalizes transnational forms of disorientation and displacement within the body of his writing.Less
This focus of this chapter is on fiction produced in the United States since 1945 that has been shaped in one way or another by Australasia. The contexts addressed range from engagement with Irish-American cultural politics (Raymond Chandler, Thomas Keneally) to the paradoxes of exile (Shirley Hazzard, Peter Carey) and the structural inversions of postmodernism (Salman Rushdie). This chapter also considers how the “posthumanist” idiom of US cultural theorist Donna Haraway has been influenced by Australian visual artist Patricia Piccinini, and it concludes by discussing how J.M. Coetzee, whose first novel was written in New York but who is now resident in Adelaide, internalizes transnational forms of disorientation and displacement within the body of his writing.
Andrew Teverson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719070501
- eISBN:
- 9781781701225
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719070501.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter discusses the novels The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury, which take globalisation as a central theme. These tend to reflect more ambivalently upon the subject, since they focus upon ...
More
This chapter discusses the novels The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury, which take globalisation as a central theme. These tend to reflect more ambivalently upon the subject, since they focus upon global mass culture – a phenomenon in which Rushdie is able to discover egalitarian and utopian impulses flourishing alongside the darker machinations of international capital flows. On the one hand, in these novels Rushdie is clearly aware that mass popular culture is driven by, even complicit with, what Shaul Bassi calls ‘consumeristic ideology’. On the other hand, he is simultaneously concerned to argue that, despite this implication in capitalist economics, global mass culture has sufficient ideological autonomy and cultural complexity to offer a critique of the very same economic processes which have brought it into being.Less
This chapter discusses the novels The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury, which take globalisation as a central theme. These tend to reflect more ambivalently upon the subject, since they focus upon global mass culture – a phenomenon in which Rushdie is able to discover egalitarian and utopian impulses flourishing alongside the darker machinations of international capital flows. On the one hand, in these novels Rushdie is clearly aware that mass popular culture is driven by, even complicit with, what Shaul Bassi calls ‘consumeristic ideology’. On the other hand, he is simultaneously concerned to argue that, despite this implication in capitalist economics, global mass culture has sufficient ideological autonomy and cultural complexity to offer a critique of the very same economic processes which have brought it into being.
Andrew Teverson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719070501
- eISBN:
- 9781781701225
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719070501.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Timothy Brennan, in his critical study Salman Rushdie and the Third World, identifies Rushdie as being a member of a distinctive and historically original group of writers that has come to prominence ...
More
Timothy Brennan, in his critical study Salman Rushdie and the Third World, identifies Rushdie as being a member of a distinctive and historically original group of writers that has come to prominence in the period following the formal dissolution of the British Empire. These writers are described by Brennan as Third World cosmopolitans: migrant intellectuals who are identified with a Western metropolitan elite in terms of class, literary preferences and educational background, but who, by virtue of ethnicity, are also presented by the media and publishing industries as being ‘the interpreters and authentic public voices of the Third World’. Brennan's central thesis is that Rushdie's socio-cutural location compromises his viability as a political writer, a thesis which has provoked some of the most important critical responses to Rushdie's work. Few if any of these critical responses disagree with Brennan's broad location of Rushdie as a migrant, cosmopolitan intellectual. The source of disagreement, rather, concerns the degree to which Rushdie's political arguments are undermined by this location, and by the structures of thinking that his location tends to implicate him in.Less
Timothy Brennan, in his critical study Salman Rushdie and the Third World, identifies Rushdie as being a member of a distinctive and historically original group of writers that has come to prominence in the period following the formal dissolution of the British Empire. These writers are described by Brennan as Third World cosmopolitans: migrant intellectuals who are identified with a Western metropolitan elite in terms of class, literary preferences and educational background, but who, by virtue of ethnicity, are also presented by the media and publishing industries as being ‘the interpreters and authentic public voices of the Third World’. Brennan's central thesis is that Rushdie's socio-cutural location compromises his viability as a political writer, a thesis which has provoked some of the most important critical responses to Rushdie's work. Few if any of these critical responses disagree with Brennan's broad location of Rushdie as a migrant, cosmopolitan intellectual. The source of disagreement, rather, concerns the degree to which Rushdie's political arguments are undermined by this location, and by the structures of thinking that his location tends to implicate him in.
