Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy is the first book to draw extensively from material in the Salman Rushdie archive at Emory University to uncover the makings of the British-Indian writer's modernist poetics. Simultaneously connecting Rushdie with radical non-Western humanism and an essentially English-European sensibility, and therefore questions about world literature, this book argues that a true understanding of the writer lies in uncovering his 'genesis of secrecy' through a close reading of his archive. Topics and materials explored include unpublished novels, plays and screenplays; the earlier versions and drafts of Midnight's Children and its adaptations; understanding Islam and The Satanic Verses; the influence of cinema; and Rushdie's turn to earlier archives as the secret codes of modernism.

Through careful examination of Rushdie's archive, Vijay Mishra demonstrates how Rushdie combines a radically new form of English with a familiarity with the generic registers of Indian, Arabic and Persian literary forms. Together, these present a contradictory orientalism that defines Rushdie's own humanism within the parameters of world literature.

Vijay Mishra is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Murdoch University, Australia. He has two doctorates, the first from the Australian National University in Medieval Indian Poetry and Aesthetics, the second from the University of Oxford in 18th-Century English Literature. He has written widely on literary and cultural studies, including Annotating Salman Rushdie: Reading the Postcolonial (2018), What Was Multiculturalism?: A Critical Retrospective (2012), The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007), Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (2002), Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime (1998), The Gothic Sublime (1994) and Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (with Bob Hodge, 1991).