The focus of this article is “The Ballad of the Dark Ladie,” a short fragment by the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Critics often overlook the poem in their reading of Coleridge although it has an interesting story between the lines. The story carries significant revelations about Coleridge’s literary relationship with foreign cultures and elements, the Dark Lady in this particular case.

This paper reads Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses through a postcolonial critical perspective. It argues that the author rewrites the history of Islam by utilizing postcolonial strategies of historiographic modality and spatiality in order to challenge Islam as a colonizing force and deconstruct what he considers its essentialist creeds. Ironically, Rushdie abuses postcolonial discourse by essentializing Islam and evaluating it from an imperial perspective and a Eurocentric point of view.

Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses is a much contested piece of work. Its politics dichotomized responses into either condemnatory or supportive categories. In some forms of defense of its content, critics employed the principle of artistic necessity to explain the book’s transgression against Islamic ideology. This paper intends to neither defend nor condemn but rather to read the work through a postcolonial critical perspective and expose its limitations and inherent contradictions.