From forked tongue to forked tongue: Rushdie and Milton in the postcolonial conversation

Abstract

In The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie draws heavily on Milton's Paradise Lost. However, unlike other postcolonial writers and theorists such as David Dabydeen and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rushdie does not primarily polemicize against Milton as an embodiment of Europe's alleged cultural supremacy. Instead, his scattered references and allusions to Paradise Lost - especially to the figures of Satan, Adam and Eve - encourage a rereading of Milton as an unexpected precursor of postcolonial subjectivities. While the article offers close readings of some particularly rich instances of rewritings of Paradise Lost in The Satanic Verses, it also discusses aspects of other Milton texts in order to delineate that writer's ambiguous position towards questions of Empire, the "civilizing mission" and the centrality of the modern European subject. Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications.