New Directions in Rushdie Studies

Released five years ago, Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton (2012) serves as an important review of his life and oeuvre up to that point, (re)written from the author’s changing ideological positions and reflective of his attitudes one decade into the twenty-first century. Three years later, Rushdie published his most recent novel to date, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015).

This special issue dedicated to exploring “New Directions in Rushdie Studies” sets out to survey the meaning and impact of this prolific author’s body of work up to the present moment, while highlighting some of the most innovative approaches in the field. Our aim is to offer new insights to the decades-long discussion over how Rushdie, as a writer, critic, and cultural icon, circumvents any categorization. In the pursuit of this aim, we acknowledge and seek to challenge the critical emphasis often placed on “po-fa” Rushdie. This term, coined by Rushdie and theorized by Robert Eaglestone (2013), denotes a popular reading of Rushdie’s work through the lens of the fatwa as a critical turning point. Such an interpretation is understandable, especially given the centrality of the fatwa to Rushdie’s memoir (its title is the alias he adopted while in hiding during the “Rushdie affair”). As he writes of himself in Joseph Anton:

He had always been post-something according to that mandarin literary discourse in which all contemporary writing was mere aftermath — post-colonial, post-modern, post-secular, post-intellectual, post-literate. Now he would add his own category, post-fatwa, to that dusty post-office, and would end up not just po-co and po-mo but po-fa as well. (2012: 442)

While 1989 remains the central hinge point in Rushdie studies, 2000 was the year he moved to New York City and started experimenting with an “American” identity. The attack on the World Trade Center of September 2001 was a pivotal moment for the author, one that contributed to what many critics saw as Rushdie’s “American” turn.

While we do not dispute that the fatwa and the events of September 11 had a significant influence on Rushdie’s writing, ¹ constituting a new “imaginative geography” (Mondal, 2007: 169) inhabited by celebrity culture, global flows, and consumer capitalism, the broader aim of this special issue of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature is not to focus on a single “event” or moment as a kind of line in the sand or “turn” in Rushdie’s work, nor to demarcate his life and writings as “po-co”, “po-mo”, and/or “po-fa”. Instead we seek to draw out new themes, topics, issues, and questions beyond the labels to uncover what possibilities emerge from working outside of these parameters. In other words, we argue that authorial identity and creative output are not only automatic responses to trauma. Change occurs (if it occurs at all) in a more gradual and complex way, weaving in and out, reversing itself, staking out new territory, and retreating again to familiar positions.

Post-2000 monographs and volumes of essays on Rushdie’s work have largely focused on his fiction and adopted a postcolonial and/or postmodern reading of the Rushdie corpus, with the result that the critical methods employed have often remained narrowly inscribed in a particular disciplinary field. The lion’s share of this research has focused on themes of globalization, migrancy, and cultural hybridity. The title of Jaina Sanga’s book, Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation, Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalization (2001), perfectly captures some of the motifs that continue to be utilized by Rushdie’s critics more than a decade after its publication. Without intending to lessen the importance of these themes, which are indeed central to Rushdie’s work, this issue aims to add new critical itineraries and frameworks for interpreting the writer’s fiction and nonfiction. In this sense, the issue is intent on examining not only Rushdie’s writings, but also his self-fashioning as well as subsumption into image-making machinery as star literary author, global brand, and celebrity intellectual.

Purposefully juxtaposing Rushdie’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century output, we ask how critical receptions of his work can be renewed. As such, we implicitly question how the past 10 years of output from Rushdie, as well as trends in Rushdie scholarship, can be read in relationship with his earlier work. How do we assess the shifting of various themes across a wide swathe of Rushdie’s work? Is it problematic, for example, that some of Rushdie’s critics have read his work as essentially continuous since he arrived on the literary scene in 1975? Because of this trend, this collection seeks to explore how different ways of reading or thinking about Rushdie’s fiction and nonfiction have been avoided, suppressed, ignored, or abandoned. How might his twenty-first-century writings, in other words, demand that we rethink our approaches or our previous assumptions about his four-decades-long literary career? Similarly, new directions for Rushdie studies involve distancing oneself from the anxiety of influences that sees all contemporary Indian fiction in English as emerging from Rushdie’s legacy or, in its extreme form, as suffering from “Rushdieitis”, a “condition that has claimed Rushdie himself in his later works” (Rushdie and West, 1997: xiii). In this regard, Amit Chaudhuri has critiqued the metonymical subsumption of Indian literature into a small body of work by “a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England or America and whom one might have met at a party, most of whom have published no more than two novels, some of them only one” (2001: xvii).

A significant development for Rushdie scholarship was the opening of the Salman Rushdie archive at Emory University in 2010. Numerous contributors to this collection have had the opportunity to visit and conduct research in the archive, and the sheer breadth of material available to scholars — in drafts, notes, journals, media collections, unpublished manuscripts, and emulated environments where users have the opportunity to “navigate” within Rushdie’s personal computer files — will certainly reshape Rushdie scholarship for years to come. Thinking theoretically about the purpose and function of the archive, Vijay Mishra’s essay examines Rushdie’s unpublished, pre-Grimus works of fiction that were central to honing his craft. Mishra contends that his “unpublished work” offers a narrative about an author’s search for both the right content and style.

Metamorphosis, a consistent metaphor in Rushdie’s oeuvre, is a key framework through which we can read Rushdie’s career. Rushdie’s twenty-first-century work is comprised of a familiar authorial voice situated alongside new, sometimes startling emergent voices. These changes take the form of new perspectives, beliefs, and styles that have altered the trajectory of his career and authorial persona. As Rushdie writes in the opening pages of Joseph Anton, “he knew that his old self’s habits were of no use anymore. He was a new self now” (2012: 5).

A diversity of transformations characterizing Rushdie’s career are examined throughout this issue. Rushdie is now identified as the icon of postcolonial secularism. While Rushdie has been likened by some critics — like Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, the authors of The New Atheist Novel — as utilizing the novelistic form to promote “secular freedom” (2010: 82), Daniel O’Gorman and Rachel Trousdale argue that Rushdie’s attitudes and approaches to religion (and Islam in particular) reflect a split self. O’Gorman discusses “fictionality” and the secular–fundamentalist binary in Joseph Anton. Trousdale charts a major shift in Rushdie’s thinking about Islam from The Satanic Verses to Joseph Anton. She argues that Rushdie’s engagement in the arguments following the Charlie Hebdo attack demonstrate a more rigidly binary set of absolutes that have come to encapsulate his current thinking about Islam. Additionally, essays by Minoli Salgado and Treasa De Loughry examine how Rushdie’s newer fiction reflects the image of the terrorist in the “age of terror” as well as the crisis of American identity and cultural production during a fraught period of the early twenty-first century. Within this context, Salgado’s article attempts a critical intervention in current theories of testimony, evaluating a range of texts including Shame and Shalimar the Clown in relation to Rushdie’s rhetorical question, “Can only the dead speak?”, a question that highlights the politics of bearing witness from an exilic perspective. Ana Cristina Mendes and Joel Kuortti examine metamorphosis in another sense — that of adaptation — as Rushdie’s Booker-winning novel Midnight’s Children was translated to stage and screen.

The question of identity as an offshoot of transformation is a major focus of this collection. Charlie Wesley and Grzegorz Szpila examine the topic of self-fashioning as it pertains to the uses of language in Joseph Anton as well as throughout Rushdie’s career. One new development that may someday be considered to be central to the construction of authorial identity of the twenty-first century, and that related to issues of literary celebrity, has been the proliferation of Twitter and other forms of social media. This phenomenon is examined by Tawnya Ravy in her close reading of Rushdie’s Twitter account. Like the movement from the typewriter to the computer — a significant change reflected in Rushdie’s writing career and Emory’s Rushdie archive — social media has yet again changed the relationship of authors to their audiences and allowed audiences to feel they have an immediate, even intimate connection with their favourite authors. In this respect, both Ravy and Szpila demonstrate how studies in linguistics and the digital humanities have the potential to expand our understanding of output.

This special issue offers a much-needed reassessment of Rushdie’s work — and in particular the texts produced in the first decade of the twenty-first century — in the wake of his move to New York City in 2000 and the emphasis often placed on the relationship between 9/11 and his fiction/nonfiction. We accomplish this reassessment by working through the various authorial selves, commitments, and significant changes marking his 40-year career, as well as focusing on the aspects of his work that have not been sufficiently discussed from the beginning of his career to the present day. It is our hope that these contributions can challenge too easily — held positions on the Rushdie corpus by staking out new territory and asking questions that can be pursued by future Rushdie scholars.