The Chutneyfication of History
Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Bharati Mukherjee and the Postcolonial Debate
by Mita Banerjee
Hardback (Published)
(January 2002)
ISBN: 9783825314040
5.31 x 8.31 inches
Price: $60.00
On back order
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
Violence and Open Spaces
The Subversion of Boundaries and the Transformation of the Western Genre
Volume 277
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
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
Through the Bars of My Memory
Prison Life Writing and the Prison Movement of the 1970s and 1980s
Volume 319
Similar Books
Dis/United States of Vulnerability
Literary and Cultural Transgressions in U.S. Poetry Since the 1960s
Volume 330
![Book cover: Transitive Media [Philosophy]](https://isd.stisonbooks.com/images/books/native/9781804132326.jpg?asset_id=66970)
Writing of Women as Cultural Resistance
Deconstructing Memory Legacies in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic
Becoming German American
Eine generationenübergreifende deutsche Migrationsgeschichte in Amerika nach 1945
Dark Like You
Zur medienreflexiven Modernität der Kinder- und Jugendzeitschrift ‚The Brownies’ Book‘ (1920–1921)
Volume 191
Kann man Filterblasen platzen lassen?
101 Fragen und Antworten rund um Verschwörungstheorien, Fake News und ideologische Überzeugungen
New Sacred Writing and Charisma
The Transformation of Religious Authority in Nineteenth-Century America
Tools of Control or Seeds of Liberation?
Reformed Evangelism and Slavery in the Ante-Bellum American South
Bedeutungskonstitution und Multimodalität
Blinden-Sehenden-Interaktion am Beispiel von Teamübersetzen in der Audiodeskription
Volume 25
Anlegerschutz beim regulären Delisting
Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung empirischer, rechtsvergleichender und rechtsökonomischer Untersuchungen
Volume 260
Argumentation, Persuasion und Manipulation in Medientexten und -diskursen
Beiträge zur kontrastiven Medienlinguistik
