The Chutneyfication of History
Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee and the Postcolonial Debate
by Mita Banerjee
Hardback (Published)
(January 2002)
ISBN: 9783825314040
5.28 x 8.27 inches
Price: $60.00
Out of stock
Colonizers are driven into a state of panic by the circulation of a ‘humble’ chapati; a young girl’s setting her family’s shoes on fire seems comparable to a nuclear attack; a sleepwalker kills two hundred and eighteen turkeys just to be rid of them. Are these events of historical significancei The works of Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, and Bharati Mukherjee seem to suggest that this question might be answered in the affirmative. The anecdote fleshes out what historical facts must elide in their abstraction. This study proposes that the fiction of all three authors can be read through Rushdie’s metaphor of the chutneyfication of history. In line with the lighting of shoes and the murder of turkeys, the chutney’s presence is a playful, unhistorical one; a presence, however, which Rushdie, Ondaatje, and Mukherjee proceed to turn into an historical agent in its own right, in a fusion of postmodernist and postcolonialist politics. Contrary to the claim that revolutions can be made by bread alone, this study suggests that this postmodernist agency of postcolonial aporia may in fact be self-defeating, and that the rejection of communal resistance which emerges in its wake must be considered in a much more critical light.
- By (author) Mita Banerjee
Other Titles in this Series
Walking in the Wilderness
The Peripatetic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Painting
Volume 134
Deliberately Out of Bounds
Women's Work on Classical Myth in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Volume 282
Transnational Mediations
Negotiating Popular Culture between Europe and the United States
Volume 261
American Studies/Shifting Gears
A Publication of the DFG Research Network 'The Futures of (European) American Studies'
Volume 185
Performing America Abroad
Transnational Cultural Politics in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism
Volume 297
Medical Humanities in American Studies
Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography
Volume 292
Faith Matters
Religion, Ethnicity, and Survival in Louise Erdrich's and Toni Morrison's Fiction
Volume 149
Schauspiele des Sehens
Die Figur der Flaneurin, Voyeurin und Stalkerin im U.S.-amerikanischen Essay
Volume 239
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