Global Migrancy and Diasporic Memory in the work of Salman Rushdie

Global Migrancy and Diasporic Memory in the Work of Salman Rushdie examines Salman Rushdie’s major works for the ways that they consistently affirm the power of memory to construct a concrete, rooted identity for characters and nation-states despite the prerogative of migrants to translate themselves into new creations through a dismissal of the weight of the past. Stephen J. Bell conducts an in-depth, comprehensive postcolonial and postmodern of Rushdie’s ideas as expressed through his work. If “exile is a dream of glorious return,” as one of his characters reflects in The Satanic Verses, few diasporic writers living today rival Rushdie for the singular inspiration he draws from memories of home and the past. So vital is the idea of home and belonging to Rushdie that, notwithstanding the frequent charges of his critics that he represents no more than a disconnected cosmopolitan, Bell would categorize Rushdie's position as one of “centripetal migrancy" (with centrum--“center”--and petere--“to seek”--forming the idea of a constant quest for the center). Rushdie thus qualifies as the quintessential “centripetal migrant,” whose slippery critical location is balanced Janus-faced between the future and the past. Cover Global Migrancy and Diasporic Memory in the Work of Salman Rushdie Global Migrancy and Diasporic Memory in the Work of Salman Rushdie Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Chapter 1 Introduction Notes Chapter 2 Remembering the Past, Writing/Righting History The Operations of Memory Orientalism and Memory Writing in English The Political Value of Redescription Secular Blasphemy A Re-“orientation” of Perspective: History from the Margins The Wisdom of the East Whiteness as Otherness Language and Violence A Nation of Forgetters Propaganda and Misinformation Memory’s Resistance to Political Oppression Notes Chapter 3 The Politics of the Palimpsest Postcoloniality and the Palimpsest Postmodernism and the Palimpsest Spatial Layering and Hybridity Influence Magic Realism and the Transgression of Generic Boundaries Surrealism and Alternate Realities Palimpsest and Trauma Danpierre and Robeston The Broken Promise of India Over World and under World Palimpstine Migrancy and the Politics of the Palimpsest Notes Chapter 4 Pitting Levity against Gravity Lightness and Weight Cosmopolitan Migrancy and Non-attachment Translating for the Metropolitan Reading Public Commodified Exoticism National Unbelonging “Rowdyism” versus Quietism Carnivalesque Levity and Subversion Flight and Guilt America and Erasure Centripetal Migrancy and the Longing for Home Notes Chapter 5 Of Untranslated and Translated Men Translation Untranslation and Continuity with the Past Lost in Translation Stop All the Clocks False Translation and Mimicry Empire’s Children Scandal’s Embrace Globalization and Deracination Deconstruction in the City, Desert, and Ocean The Hybrid “Third Space” The Liminal Space of the Comma Notes Chapter 6 Conclusion The Enchantress of Florence Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights The Golden House Notes Bibliography Index About the Author