Modern Languages and Comparative Literature Research Seminar: Postcolonialism and Literature

More than any postcolonial author, Salman Rushdie’s life has constituted his texts. Conversely, we might say that his texts have embodied his life. This talk begins with a report on a brief conversation Rushdie had with me on his textual style and on why his autoethnographic fictions seem to provoke such extreme reactions. From the fatwa issued against him in 1998 to the brutal knife-attack on him in the sylvan surroundings of the Chautauqua Institute in 2022, it appears that it is not just his fictions that are sought to be censored but his very being. Why is this so? In this presentation, I consider just one aspect of Rushdie’s ‘magic realist’ style and its aggravations: namely, his use of the dream narrative. If the narrative within a dream is a favorite stratagem of divine revelation, my argument is the dream within a narrative seems an equally entrenched method of human rebellion. Prophets are the sanctioned users of the former voice, poets and storytellers of the latter. Any crossovers between the two can, however, signal unbearable tension. This is because, psychologically, dream states are simulations of ‘reality’ in which heightened intuitions coexist with diminished responsibility. Gods or their emissaries appear to the chosen in dreams and direct them to act in unforeseeable ways. Inspirations, demonic or otherwise, take the form of dreams in a text when an author uses them to mount an attack on accepted verities. In their use of the dream as a proto-deconstructionist tool, the traditional greats of many cultures (Virgil, Sei Shonagon, Mira Bai, Chaucer) recognized that such departures from the deeply familiar could signal grave danger; several postmodern writers (Los Vargas, Kundera, Havel, Marquez) return to this major non-realist mode of representation in their own reliance on dreams to imply political menace. Rushdie's novels take this technique of disrupting historical, literary, religious and emotional presuppositions via the textual dream to an extreme precipitous edge. Finally, the talk ends with a laying out of the features of a brand of postcolonial writing that I call ‘Sensuous Theory’. Rushdie has, I suggest, helped in large part create this body of ‘sensuously’ provocative literary texts. Although written in English, by reason of their ambidextrous command over not only the former colonizers’ language but also their dreams, such narratives seem strongly to resist ‘ownership’ by western academia. Their persistent emphasis on subversive linguistic play means that these texts cleverly dispense with the need to be theorized at all by critics by self-reflexively theorizing themselves. They thus mark a break from the subservient ‘victim mentality’ associated with postcolonialism and offer a possible heuristic for global participation in current processes of language decolonization and democratization.

 

In this presentation, I’ll discuss my current book project Longevity Fictions (contracted with Bloomsbury Academic).  Reading medical and scientific writing alongside literary texts, the book shows how developments in the biomedical sciences have created new iterations of colonialism, which are problematically presented as desirable because their stated aim is to produce human health and longevity. I argue, however, that such developments ultimately generate new ways of laying claim to and disciplining the bodies of Black, Brown and Indigenous people.