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(Im)Proper Name of Salman Rushdie: Hybridity, Migrancy

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(Im)Proper Name of Salman Rushdie: Hybridity, Migrancy THE (IM)PROPER NAME OF SALMAN RUSHDIE: HYBRIDITY, MIGRANCY, AND THE RUSHDIE PERSONA by Jannik Haruo Eikenaar A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) September 2015 © Jannik Haruo Eikenaar, 2015 Abstract Salman Rushdie’s fiction is often celebrated for challenging colonial and postcolonial systems of power and representation, in part through inscriptions of marginalized subject positions that subvert normative assumptions about identity. Our understandings of those subject positions are influenced by the Rushdie persona, a cultural presence that is part author function, part literary celebrity, part writer / thinker in the contemporary marketplace, and part living body under threat. An idea in excess of Rushdie’s lived experience and not entirely within his control, this persona occupies a position of social and material privilege and is regularly attributed qualities that position it as an exemplary authority on how to survive and succeed as a hybrid subject and migrant citizen. As a result, the persona exerts a limiting influence on the reading of Rushdie’s hybrid and migrant protagonists by often rendering them as consistent with, rather than subversive of, the values of the dominant West. This project clarifies the effects of the Rushdie persona by theorizing its dominant qualities and conditions of production, and by analyzing the interplay between the persona and the protagonists of Rushdie’s recent novels, memoir, and film: Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, and the screen version of Midnight’s Children. I argue the persona increasingly reduces the subversive potential of Rushdie’s work, particularly with regard to the themes of hybridity and migrancy. However, there is still room to read against the persona’s influence by occupying a critical position modelled by the filmic adaptation of Midnight’s Children and within this dissertation – a position that requires an open-minded, skeptical encounter with the Rushdie persona. ii Table of Contents Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. v Dedication ............................................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1: Introduction ......................................................................................................... 1 The Storyteller’s Return and Joseph Anton ...................................................................... 5 Thinking Identity in Rushdie’s Fiction ........................................................................... 11 Rushdie’s Public Identity.................................................................................................. 17 Rushdie’s Literary Standing ............................................................................................ 20 Consequences of the Affair ............................................................................................... 25 Reading Joseph Anton: A Memoir .................................................................................... 30 Reading against the Rushdie Persona ............................................................................. 34 Reinforcing the Exceptional: Gender Norms, Secularism, and Social Elitism............ 39 Chapter Outlines ............................................................................................................... 45 Chapter 2: Theorizing the Rushdie Persona ...................................................................... 53 An Argument of Rushdies ................................................................................................ 53 An End of The Affair: Rushdie’s Discursive and Material Identities .......................... 56 Rushdie’s “literary-political goals” ................................................................................. 58 The Limits of Rushdie’s Literary Celebrity ................................................................... 63 Points of Confluence: Navigating the Rushdie Archive ................................................. 70 Biographical Approaches to Rushdie’s Work ................................................................ 73 The Persona as an Alternative to Biographical Dipping ............................................... 84 Chapter 3: Recuperating Rushdie ....................................................................................... 95 Authorial Intrusions: Metafictional and Post-narrative ............................................... 95 Metafictional Intrusions ................................................................................................... 97 Post-narrative Intrusions ................................................................................................ 105 Metafictional Intrusions and the Moral Authority of the Rushdie Persona .............. 110 Post-narrative Intrusions and the Political Persona .................................................... 114 Public Interventions: the Persona as Expert Commentator ....................................... 122 From The Affair to the affairs: Rushdie’s Pop-cultural Persona and Tabloid Morality ........................................................................................................................................... 126 iii Chapter 4: Hybridity, the Rushdie Persona, and The Enchantress of Florence ........... 131 Hybridity as a Category of Identity ............................................................................... 133 Rushdie the Hybrid ......................................................................................................... 135 Histories of Hybridity ..................................................................................................... 138 Critical and Fictive Theorizations of Hybridity: Bhabha and Rushdie ..................... 140 Two Hybridities in The Enchantress of Florence ......................................................... 143 Akbar’s Synthesis vs. Mogor’s Disruption ................................................................... 153 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 158 Chapter 5: Migrancy, the Rushdie Persona, and Shalimar the Clown ........................... 162 Migrant Qualities of the Rushdie Persona .................................................................... 163 Shalimar the Clown .......................................................................................................... 167 Shifting from the Political to the Personal .................................................................... 169 Exception as the Norm: Migrant Subjects in Shalimar the Clown ............................. 171 Secularism and Migrancy ............................................................................................... 176 Violence and Migrancy ................................................................................................... 180 Differing Paths of Migrancy: from The Satanic Verses to Shalimar the Clown ......... 183 Overlooking Kashmira: the Influence of the Rushdie Persona .................................. 187 Chapter 6: Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 194 A Caution against Reductive Narration: Max Ophuls in Shalimar the Clown .......... 195 A Caution against Authority: the Unreliable Narrator-historian in The Enchantress of Florence ........................................................................................................................ 197 The Rushdie Persona Speaks: Voice-over Narration in Midnight’s Children ........... 200 Return, and Constant Imagining ................................................................................... 206 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 210 iv Acknowledgements I am grateful for the guidance from my dissertation committee members, Drs. Lisa Grekul and David Jefferess, and especially from my doctoral supervisor, Dr. Jennifer Gustar. I am also grateful to my family, particularly Deena McDell and Elena Kiyomi, without whose exceptional support this work would not have been possible. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. v Dedication To my father, Robert Jan Hendrik Eikenaar. vi Chapter 1: Introduction Salman Rushdie’s writing career and life in the public eye now span the better part of four decades; however, much of the subversive and transformative power of Rushdie’s fiction and social interventions has waned. This is, I think, largely an effect of what I call the persona of Rushdie, a complex, specific and increasingly well-defined idea of Rushdie that circulates around the author and his fiction, but that is necessarily distinct from the actual, living individual, and is produced by a variety of discursive responses to Rushdie’s writing and lived experience. While Rushdie, as a public figure, may have once been the placard- bearing, bombastic writer of editorials
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