ABSTRACT
In the present chapter, I argue that Salman Rushdie’s engagement of contemporary American experience transgresses national borders and concepts of identity, the likes of which Faulkner and Ellison were deeply invested in maintaining. Writing in the post-World War II era, in which the United States exerts a commanding influence abroad, particularly in Third World countries, Rushdie offers a critical rendering of the transnational inequalities of contemporary economic and cultural production. Rushdie’s aim, however, surpasses a simple critique of American global might; in fact, he seeks to imagine America as embodying a set of practices. This is an extraterritorial gesture that playfully dismisses organic connections between identity, place, and history. Provocatively, Rushdie suggests that the consequent uprooting is both the product of contemporary globalization-media and migration together dismantling intact, homogeneous local places-and a longstanding feature of American life itself. As we shall see, with Ground Rushdie ultimately seeks to reveal how modern globalization and traditional forms of American mobility combine to render American identity a phantasmagoric masquerade that makes the careful measurements of authenticity which so occupied Faulkner and Ellison exercises in futility.
