Salman Rushdie's Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation, Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalization

Sanga, Jaina C. Salman Rushdie's Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation, Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalization. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. 173 pp.

In little more than twenty years or since the publication of Midnight's Children in 1981, Salman Rushdie has become one of the most notable authors to write in English. This fact is even more remarkable when we consider that he is neither ethnically British nor American but Indian. The attention paid to such "migrant" writers like Rushdie has given rise to new ways to think about literature written by the inhabitants of former colonies of the British Empire. This area of studies, currently known as postcolonialism, has led to a number of newer approaches to how we might think more productively about literature that is written "cross-culturally." Sanga's book is a wonderful investigation of how to think across the work of one of the finest writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the intellectual trends associated with postcolonial literature.

Her book focuses primarily on six of Rushdie's novels, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (she does offer minor treatments of some "lesser" works as well). Her readings of these various novels prove to be interesting as interrogations of Western and Eastern literary history. Moreover, Sanga sheds significant light on a combination of metaphors that are not only relevant to Rushdie's works, but are essential Io anyone who wishes to understand better what is at stake in the symbolic representations in postcolonial literature/studies. For her, the metaphor or metonym, which arguably could be the foundation of all literary and nonliterary writings, is clearly positioned differently when written through and within the contentious history of empire.

In the " Introduction," Sanga points out that the book "attempts to show how postcolonial literature is reworking and re-imagining the colonial metaphors" (p. 2). And while she posits this as having to do with realities, I would add to this and state that her work in the area of metaphor, an area too often taken for granted, calls into question issues that emerge from realities, like identity and geographical place, and raises important and engaging questions about how we know or think we know about cultural others. Admittedly, she is much influenced by the work of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978).

Sanga's depth of the insight and research on metaphor is remarkable. Her writing is well executed. While her prose does not avoid the theoretical discourse needed to discuss her subject, the writing still remains clear enough for both the professional and nonprofessional. Moreover, her first three chapters build nicely upon each other. The work on "Migration" addresses more individual matters, like identity, while "Translation," not surprisingly deals with language. And "Hybridity," which has become almost a mantra for those in postcolonial studies, engages questions of identity through a kind of translatability.

The final two chapters of Sanga's book, not including the "Conclusion," merely two pages in length, appear to serve a different purpose. The fourth chapter entitled "Blasphemy" is situated as a kind of extended example of how migration, translation, and migration function within a specific novelistic context in Rushdie. And certainly the controversy surrounding the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988 makes this a rather easy choice for the author. While I find the work in this chapter adequate, it fails to bring anything really "new" to the plethora of information on religious freedoms and literary persecutions.

I have similar concerns about the "fit" of the fifth chapter. On the one hand, I very much like the idea of globalization as the "next step" as we think about the quadrate of migration, translation, hybridity, and blasphemy. On the other, it seems that Sanga spends excessive space summarizing the plot of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Granted, this book's newness could have much to do with this particular strategy. However, I would have welcomed more of an in-depth examination of globalization as an extended metaphor rather than just "inscribed within notions of uncertainly and duality," (p. 158) as identified in her conclusion. Finally, let me conclude by applauding this book for its treatment of one of the most important, even when overlooked, aspects of literature, that being metaphor. I believe that Jaina Sanga's investigation, especially within the first three chapters of her book, raises the standard for how and why we might more effectively think about metaphor not only in and through the works of Salman Rushdie but moreover within the context of postcolonial studies.

James M. Ivory Appalachian State University

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