Space versus Place in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses

Conference Paper

Sadiq, Ebtisam Ali . 2012

• نوع عمل المنشور: Literary Criticism
• الوسوم: Contemporary Novel
• اسم المؤتمر: International Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences Research
• عنوان المؤتمر: Paris, France
• تاريخ المؤتمر: الثلاثاء, تموز (يوليو) 24, 2012
• المنظمة الراعية: Analytrics, Strasburg, France

مستخلص المنشور

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. The study suggests that Rushdie re-writes the history of Islam through a spatial perspective, a legitimate way of writing back to imperial forces and challenging essentialist world views. However, the author's utilization of spatial history discourse ironically exposes a hegemonic attitude and an imperialist stance on his part. His spatial sense of historic documentation simultaneously employs the metaphor of history as a theatre. Historical events as a theatre performance and the historian as an objective spectator are imperialist stances contested by postcolonial critics. The theatre metaphor is condemned as a colonialist practice that aims at subversion and control. Rushdie’s indulgence of the theatre metaphor negates his use of the traveler metaphor.  Such negation leads to questioning the efficiency and the legitimacy of his subversive attitude towards Islam.