Hybridity and Postcoloniality: Formal, Social, and Historical Innovations in Salman Rushdie’ s Midnight’s Children 10. Manzoor, Sarfraz. The South Asian Britain of My Beautiful Laundrette 11. Merila, Isabela. Changing Textual Identities in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children 12.
National consciousness and national cultures are inseparable from each other and anti-colonial resistance cannot succeed without them. Writers, artists and intellectuals play a vital role in imagining the nation and in this way they participate centrally in resisting colonialism. A detailed analysis of the novel Midnight 's Children shows that in many respects it is concerned with the issues and purposes which are central to diasporic literature.It can be said that Midnight 's Children recreates Rushdie’s sense of an ‘India of the mind’ through the novelistic conventions established by Rushdie for postcolonial novels written by immigrant writers. Rushdie’s Midnight 's Children is a novel about the enabling power of hybridity which is an important issue of diasporic
The distinct nature of post modernity is analyzed through the various forms of fragmentation employed in the novel. The ideology of postmodernism seems very much like modernism. But in the case fragmentation, the dividing line occurs. In modernism fragmentation is mourned and is lamented over. Postmodernism, in contrast,
It is usually easy to identify the discrepancies which subsist in one period of political thought from another but explaining the divergence of postmodernism from its predecessor, modernism, may be a lot more complicated than usual. This is because first, etymologically, postmodernism does not necessarily mean “the period right after modernism” but rather an “effective reappropriation of memory” (Brann, 1992). More than that, it is a reaction to modernism (ibid). According to Lyotard, postmodernism should be understood in the context of the paradox of the future coming after the just now in a sense that the work is not “composed in accordance with any previous universal rules, or, as he calls it, any metanarrative” (ibid). Simplified, postmodernism
The Indonesian cuisine had been influenced by Indian, Chinese, and Western cultures. The American cuisine has also been influenced by a variety of cultures. Indonesians may prepare dim sum, a Chinese dish, while Americans enjoy tacos. In this way Indoensian and American cultures both enjoy food from a variety of different cultures. A second similarity between my culture and Indonesian cultures is that, in both places, a variety of different religions are practiced.
It has always remained a problem of countless questions that either postmodernism is applicable to IWE or not! Even Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is seen as a cautious imitation of the western literary model by few critics. But on the other hand with the emergence of the nineties, the nature of Indian reality and society transformed due to drastic changes in cultural, political, social, and familial patterns. Post- Rushdie generation has
Postmodern attempts to develop a new conceptual language to represent world politics beyond the terms of state-centrism in order to rethink the concept of the political. Postmodernism’s ethical critique of state sovereignty needs to be understood in relation to the deconstructive critique of totalization and the deterritorializing effect of transversal struggles. To rethink questions of political identity and community without submitting to binary oppositions is to contemplate a political life beyond the paradigm of sovereign states. There are two strands of ethics which develop out of postmodernism’s reflections on international relations. One strand challenges the ontological description on which traditional ethical arguments are grounded.
Post-modernist literary styles and ideas serve to dispute, reverse and reject the principles of modernist literature (Postmodernism in Literature) This plays in the fact that artists of the postmodern period tend to abstain from bringing out the possibility of meaning whereas this is opposite case in modernist fiction. The postmodern product is presented across as a parody of the modernist literary quest for meaning (Postmodernism in Literature). Some of the characteristics which run commonly in postmodernists texts include: magic realism, intertextuality, maximalism, metafiction, temporal distortion, pastiche, etc. I have analyzed two of the major ones: intertextuality and magic realism. Post-modernist fiction entails within it the element
of the most eminent postcolonial writers, he is also generally known as one of the most momentous representatives of magic realism outside Latin America. Salman Rushdie, one of the most renowned writers of Indian Diaspora, settled in England, shot into fame through his magnum opus, Midnight’s Children. He was born to an affluent Muslim family in Bombay on 19 June 1947. He grew up in Mumbai and graduated with honours from King’s College, Cambridge. Settled in England, Rushdie’s literary career started with his first novel, Grimus (1975), which was a meagre seller.
Much ink has been wasted by various critics on Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Various facets of his art have been critically scrutinized. Ashutosh Banerjee, for example, studies the narrative technique; Ron Shepherd and M.L Pandit see fantasy; R.S Pathak describes Rushdie’s portrayal of the bond between history and the individual; Neil Ten Kortenaar observes it as an allegory of history; and Goonetileke finds the use of myth in the novel. Rushdie’s intertextual strategies have been the centre of critical inquiry for many critics. Nancy E. Batty, for instance, sees its affinities with the Tales of Arabian Nights, while Robert Alter brings a comparison between Midnight’s Children and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.The aspect that has not as yet been