“Artworks, unlike terrorists, change nothing": Salman Rushdie and September 11

• Autor(a) principal: Mendes, Ana Cristina
• Data de Publicação: 2009
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/30207
• topic: Rushdie, Salman, 1947- - Crítica e interpretação; Intellectuals; Postcolonial studies; Postcolonial literature; September 11; USA; Said, Edward W., 1935-2003 - Crítica e interpretação; Worldliness

This essay sets out to demonstrate that rather than being an instance of fission, Rushdie’s most recent literary journalism as well as his latest novels, in particular Shalimar the Clown (2005), are the ultimate product of fusion, in the way that they result from the synthetic encounter – not disintegration – of contradictory states of affiliation. Any critical engagement with the global brand “Rushdie” must explore its manifold reverberations. In this sense, my concern is with teasing out a interrelated set of elements that have contributed to shape the discursive predicament in which the writer has been trapped for a couple of decades, and not with attaching a one-dimensional label for his post-fatwa and post-9/11 politics. The purpose of addressing the writer’s shifting positions as a public intellectual is not to appraise what might be called Rushdie’s “American turn,” nor to ascertain the inconsistencies of his ideological standing with reference to the cultural authority and military power of the US in general, and to the aftermath of September 11, 2001 in particular. Rather, a focal intention is to undermine the idea that the writer manifests, or did indeed manifest, a clear-cut pro-US government position in support of the “war on terror.”