Salman Rushdie : Reading the Postcolonial Texts in the Era of Empire
Abstract
In the post-9/11 era many assertions of cultural difference are now being appropriated in the name of the neoliberal empire and a perpetual War on Terror. Most works of recent postcolonial scholarship, as Gayatri Spivak aptly points out, have been reframed in the service of easy postnationalism that is supposed to have come into being with globalization (1). There is, therefore, a danger that in this process of theoretical overgeneralization, the particularities of postcolonial nation- states are overwritten by the universalizing and inescapable dictates of the current regime of high capital and its attendant cultural imperialism. Based on these assumptions about the current phase of high capital, Spivak suggests that the main role of the humanities is the empowerment of an informed imagination (2). This training of an informed imagination, Spivak further asserts, must continue persistently and forever (3). Focusing on writing by Salman Rushdie, this article attempts to articulate a nuanced model of reading the postcolonial texts in this new era of empire.
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