Salman Rushdie's Cities: Reconfigurational Politics and the Contemporary Urban Imagination

ISBN-13: 9781441148506 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 256 str.

Vassilena Parashkevova

Opis

Employing Salman Rushdie as a guide to a historicized contemporary, this study offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the plurality of cities along his transnational trajectory. It engages with the geographically identifiable Bombay, Karachi, Islamabad, London or New York; the phantasmal, politically coded, Jahilia or Mildendo, the inspirational yet flawed urban precedents of Fatehpur Sikri or Renaissance Florence and the ways these cities generate, interact with and transform each other. The book situates Rushdie's cities in relation to developments in Bombay, Karachi, Islamabad and London writing and focuses on novels which shuttle between cities. Parashkevova attends to cities' cultural and historical contexts, to many of Rushdie's numerous literary, cinematic and artistic influences and to diverse events, processes and paradigms - earthquakes, translations, seductions - that politically re-position cities and citizens on the contemporary urban map.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements \ Abbreviations \ An Alphabet of Rushdie's Cities \ 1. Introduction: Salman Rushdie's Cities and Reconfigurational Politics \ 2. Partition and after: Bombay Re/beginnings and Subcontinental Twin Cities in Midnight's Children and Shame \ 3. Bombay, London, Jahilia: Di/versifications and Di/versions in The Satanic Verses \ 4. War of the Worlds: Bombay Diptychs and Triptychs in The Moor's Last Sigh \ 5. Quaking Solid Ground: Trojan Falls and Roman Rises in The Ground beneath Her Feet \ 6. Metropolitan Desires: Glocalist Seductions in Fury and Shalimar the Clown \ 7. Mirrors-for-cities: Florence and Fatehpur Sikri, or Machiavelli and ‘the Prince' in The Enchantress of Florence \ Afterword: Urban Thresholds: the Respectorate of I and the Insultana of the Otter Way \ Notes \  Bibliography \ Index