Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 23:37:48 -0300
Subject: jussawalla and postcolonialisms



Has anyone read Feroza Jussawalla's article "Rushdie's Dastan-e-Dilruba: The 
Satanic Verses as Rushdie's Love Letter to Islam", diacritics/spring 1996, 
50-73?

As a kind of reasoned inversion of Julian Samuel's peculiar rant, seen earlier 
on this list, it makes for a refreshing revaluation of Rushdie's positionality.

The general issues it raises, however, may be more interesting for listers. I 
have reservations about the use of an author's claims and intentions to 
substantiate or promote an argumentQJ. generates most of the argument from 
Rushdie's post-publication journalism and interviews but also from characters 
like Saleem Sinai (in Midnight's Children) who are readily conflated with the 
author. I like the breach of literary PC though. J. also appears to have a 
radically absolutist view of context.

I'm more responsive to the call for a re-theorization of postcolonialism. J. 
wants (us) to heed postcolonial voices constructing counterhegemonies ouside 
the perhaps overcircumscribed European colonialisms. Rushdie, for example, is 
construed as working within a tradition/history of post-Muslim colonization or 
of post-Mughal Islamic culture (hence, ultimately, the reading of SV as a 
"dustan" or love letter). J. detects eurocentricity in mainstream (Spivak's and 
Bhabha's) readings and calls for "nation-centred and context-based criticism" 
as a way of re-centring postcolonial literatures and, coextensively, 
postcolonialism. 

Anyone any thoughts?

pms


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