Salman Rushdie: Reading the Postcolonial Texts in the Era of Empire

Abstract

Using the first three novels of Salman Rushdie, this essay articulates a different conceptual framework for reading the postcolonial texts. It is a known fact that in most metropolitan readings of the global periphery, the text is made to stand in for an entire culture. Inundation, a technique introduced in this essay, ensures a more complex reading by inserting silenced knowledge and histories in our reading to challenge any reductive representations of the global periphery.

An inundated text, I suggest, becomes a better tool in teaching the complexities of the postcolony to the metropolitan audiences, while also taking the reader beyond the politics of representation. It is hoped that this essay will invite other scholars to expand on this concept (inundation), for a new mode of reading is absolutely necessary in the politically charged world of today's empire.