Andrew Teverson

Salman Rushdie and Aijaz Ahmad: Satire, Ideology and Shame

Aijaz Ahmad’s polemical critique of Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983) in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992) remains one of the most provocative denunciations of Rushdie as a political thinker yet to be published. Despite a thriving industry of Rushdie-orientated criticism, however, literary critics have yet to assess the full significance of Ahmad’s arguments, or to offer a persuasive defence of Rushdie’s position. This is not for lack of commentary, affirmative or negative, on the various positions developed by Ahmad in In Theory. Critics have responded fulsomely to his condemnation of Rushdie’s representation of women in Shame and to his interrogation of the privileging of Rushdie’s works in metropolitan intellectual orthodoxies. Both these arguments, however, are, for Ahmad, rooted in more fundamental political objections to Shame that, whilst they are often rehearsed, have yet to receive a sustained response. In Jaina Sanga’s recent book on Rushdie, for instance – excellent as it is in many ways – Ahmad’s arguments are summarized, but no detailed reply is made to them; an omission that is surprising, given that Sanga’s own broadly poststructuralist view of Rushdie’s political significance as a writer would seem to demand a defence of Rushdie against Ahmad. For Sanga, Rushdie’s re-utilization of old colonial metaphors can be politically effective because it is a means of ‘‘problematizing entrenched versions of reality’’. For Ahmad, however, such an argument is flawed. Change is effected by transformations in economic relations and the only thing that can be helpful, in the context of ongoing neo-colonialism in the third world, is not a challenge to conceptions of ‘‘reality’’, but a global transformation in the ownership

The Number of Magic Alternatives: Salman Rushdie’s 1001 Gothic Nights

In the first essay in his edited collection of meditations on nationhood, Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha includes the transcript of a lecture delivered by Ernest Renan to the Sorbonne in 1882. In this lecture, written, in part, in response to the rising threat of German nationalism in the late-nineteenth century, Renan rejects the idea that nation should be based upon racial origin (and that ‘[t]he Germanic family … has the right to reassemble the scattered limbs of the Germanic order, even when these limbs are not asking to be joined together again’) and suggests instead, that secure and stable nations are more likely to be those that have forgotten their origins.2 ‘The essence of a nation’, argues Renan, is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth … every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of St Bartholomew … there are not ten families in France that can supply proof of their Frankish origin, and any such proof would anyway be essentially flawed, as a consequence of countless unknown alliances which are liable to disrupt any genealogical system.3