Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading of His Major Works

This is a close textual analysis of Rushdie’s five major novels: Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and The Moor’s Last Sigh. Rushdie recognizes that practicing identity politics leads to nativism and nationalism, categories he rejects because they merely invert the colonizer/colonized binary, leaving violent hierarchies intact. His impulse is to deconstruct the colonizer/colonized binary and in doing so to clear a “new’ postmodern space. This text employs post-structuralist/ postmodern theory not only to address the issues of representation that Rushdie raises in his major political novels, but also to facilitate a discussion of the manner in which he pushes the boundaries of the modern novel.