ABSTRACT
Referring to postcolonial cultural production, Graham Huggan concludes that ‘the language of resistance is entangled, like it or not, in the language of commerce’ (2001: 264). This chapter contends that Salman Rushdie’s work, being inextricably enmeshed in capitalist modes of cultural production, distribution and exchange stands at the nexuses of representation and reconstruction, as well as of complicity and autonomy. This chapter draws connections between The Aliens Show, a situation comedy in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses about a group of creatures from outer space, and The Kumars at No. 42, a BBC minority-based sitcom. Both Saladin, the co-star of the grotesque TV programme in Rushdie’s novel who plays the role of Maxim Alien, and Sanjeev Kumar, the protagonist of The Kumars at No. 42, are relentless in their shared ambition of becoming media personalities in Britain. In their pursuit of fame, Saladin, an Indian immigrant to London, constantly changes his hairstyle and clothes, while Sanjeev, a Br-Asian1 living in Wembley, has his family bulldoze the back garden to erect a state-of-the-art TV studio so that he can host his very own chat show. The key issue in these characters’ attempted assimilation to mainstream discourse is that they are equally aware of the provisionality of their cultural self-construction. Both texts highlight continuities and disruptions: from The Aliens Show’s focus on
the misrepresentation of Otherness on the part of the media, mirroring the blatant ethnic stereotyping of the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, to the interstitiality of The Kumars at No. 42 which came to characterize Br-Asian TV comedy from the late 1990s and early 2000s. What is interesting to note here are the dilemmas that result from the negotiation of Orientalist representations. Such representational dilemmas are framed in the context of a globalized world where transnational cultural industries simultaneously foster an expanded space for minority-based authorship and self-fashioning, and betray the unfeasibility of unmediated and unframed literary, cinematic or other type of cultural self-representation. In 1989, Timothy Brennan noted how difficult it was ‘to tell in Rushdie’s
parodies where complicity begins and ends’ (Brennan 1989: 92). In a more recent inquiry, Deepika Bahri recognizes that Rushdie’s cosmopolitan writings, along with Arundhati Roy’s and Rohinton Mistry’s, form part of a body of work that ‘is often mediated by the very process of flattening that ushers it into the mainstream of acceptable radicalism’; in addition, she argues, ‘its expansively geocultural inflections are apt to be muted, and its aesthetic dimension lost to its parochially functional purpose’ (Bahri 2003: 3). Still, in Bahri’s perspective, criticism of those postcolonial texts should be attentive to a ‘native intelligence’ that is not ‘minority and Third World informancy’ (Bahri 2003: 7), but rather emphasizes ‘the existence of the subject of postcoloniality in relational terms with its First World sponsor’ (Bahri 2003: 18). ‘This hermeneutic stance,’ Bahri suggests, ‘permits a conception of literature as simultaneously embedded in a real, reified world of commodities and in potential tension with it by virtue of its native regime of aesthetic and formal organization’ (Bahri 2003: 7). Such a nuanced position runs counter to the perception of Rushdie as representing the quintessential native informant, a class of individuals that Gayatri Spivak defined, in her influential essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, as belonging to the Indian cultural elite and acting as ‘native informants for first-world intellectuals interested in the voice of the Other’ (Spivak 1988: 284). Indeed, Rushdie seems for many to be the perfect representative of the category of Indian writers suggested by Meenakshi Mukherjee ‘who are globally visible, who are taught in postcolonial classrooms the world over, and who are hailed in the review pages of Western journals as interpreters and authentic voices of the non-Western world’ (Mukherjee 2000: 574). In effect, Mukherjee charges these writers with fundamentally catering to the expectations of a western readership and of purveying selected, restrictive and often western-based representations of India. According to Homi Bhabha, culture is a transnational and translational
strategy of survival (Bhabha 1994: 172).2 Not unrelatedly, Huggan sees postcolonial cultural producers as ‘both aware of and resistant to their interpellation as marginal spokespersons, institutionalized cultural commentators and representative (iconic) figures’; furthermore, ‘they make their readers aware of the constructedness of such cultural categories; their texts are
metacommentaries on the politics of translation, on the power relations that inform cross-cultural perception and representation’ (Huggan 2001: 26). Rushdie’s role as cultural broker – more than that of a ‘cultural mulatto’ who is able to ‘navigate easily in the white world’ (Ellis 1989: 189) – lies thus within those fault-lines which, paradoxically, provide the context and condition of possibility for the writer’s actions in what Arjun Appadurai terms a ‘diasporic public sphere’ (Appadurai 1996: 22). As Rushdie puts it in a 2008 interview, alluding to his at times controversial actions in that public sphere inhabited by the artist, ‘[n]othing of great interest for [him] is done sitting safely in the middle of the room. You want to push the boundaries as much as possible’ (Preston 2008). This can well be read as an all-encompassing commentary on the circumstances of his own life and creative project thus far. Huggan questions whether the representativeness of postcolonial writers is ‘a function of their inscription in the margins, of the mainstream demand for an “authentic”, but readily translatable, marginal voice’, but admits that this question ‘yield[s] no immediate or obvious answers’ (Huggan 2001: 26). The process this critic describes hints at the charges of self-exoticization or gimmickification of South Asianness faced by artists who are seen as pandering to western reception. In this respect, he draws attention to the double coding involved in postcolonial self-fashioning ‘wherein space claimed for cultural expression becomes a constricted and restrained space within a wider system’ (Huggan 2001: 31). Re-Orientalist cultural practices can be regarded as potentially strategic
and affirmative, and/or otherwise complicit with the rules of the western market and aiming mainly at metropolitan audiences. As my inquiry into current re-Orientalisms was initially motivated by Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, with its self-conscious juggling with re-Orientalist elements and its selfreflexive implication of the postcolonial writer’s status as exotic commodity in the global literary market, it might be relevant to consider how this novel, through its self-deployment as cultural commodity, stages Rushdie’s challenge to its anticipated commercial appeal and accommodation within a metropolitan publishing industry. Midnight’s Children subverts re-Orientalist representations of India as the exotic Other by repoliticizing Orientalist imagery. In effect, Rushdie’s novels and miscellaneous writings exhibit a self-ironic acceptance and questioning of an instantaneous cut-and-paste contemporary culture, in particular regarding the changes that have taken place in the cultural industries since the 1980s, and, on the other hand, the fact that these characteristics of self-irony and self-reflexivity are conversely clear sources of the marketability of his works, finding as they do particular purchase with a metropolitan readership. Admittedly, Rushdie’s works have not renounced consumption in the global literary field. The author does not actively downplay nor disclaim his involvement in the inevitable commodification of postcolonial cultural production; in effect, his primary cultural products – his novels – are consumer items themselves and their simple financial viability relies on their mainstream success.
