Annotating Salman Rushdie ― Reading the Postcolonial

How does one read a foundational postcolonial writer in English with declared Indian subcontinent roots?

This book looks at ways of reading, uncovering and recovering meanings in postcolonial writing in English through the works of Salman Rushdie. It uses textual criticism and applied literary theory to resurrect the underlying literary architecture of one of the world's most controversial, celebrated and enigmatic authors. It sheds light upon key aspects of Rushdie's craft and the literary influences that contribute to his celebrated hybridity. It analyses how Rushdie uses his exceptional mastery of European, Anglo-American, Indian, Arabic and Persian literary and cultural forms to cultivate a fresh register of English that expands Western literary traditions. It also investigates an archival modernism that characterizes the writings of Rushdie.

Drawing on the hitherto unexplored Rushdie Emory Archive, this book will be essential reading for students of literature, especially South Asian writing, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, linguistics, and history.

Vijay Mishra is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. He has two doctorates, the first in Medieval Indian Poetry and Aesthetics from the Australian National University, and the second in Eighteenth-Century English Literature from Oxford University. Between 2010 and 2015 he was an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow. In 2017 he was awarded another Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to write a book on V. S. Naipaul based on the University of Tulsa Naipaul Archive. At various times he has been Professor of English Literature, University of Alberta, Canada; Senior Fellow, University of Wales; Professorial Fellow, University of California Santa Cruz; Robert Evans Fellow, University of Otago; Visiting Professor of English, Universitat des Saarlandes; Professorial Fellow, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University; Christensen Professorial Fellow, St Catherine’s College, Oxford; and Erich Auerbach Professor of Global Literary Studies, University of Tubingen. Fluent in English, Hindi, Fijian and Fiji Hindi, he reads Sanskrit, Old and Middle English, French and German. He has been the Chair of the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards and of the S. E. Asian and Australasian Section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Among his major book publications are Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (1991, with Bob Hodge); The Gothic Sublime (1994); Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime (1998); Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (2002); The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007); and What Was Multiculturalism? A Critical Retrospective (2012). He is a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy (FAHA).