The colonial subject and colonial discourse: Salman Rushdie's critique of Englishness in The Satanic Verses

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have applied the principle of deconstruction to argue against the uniqueness of Western culture and its claim to be the centre of the world. Colonial discourse, with the aid of Orientalism, in attempting to assimilate into its ‘totality’ the cultures of the colonized, had made a similar claim for English culture and for Englishness. This paper argues that in The Satanic Verses the experiences of Rushdie's protagonists show that the ‘Same’ ‐ represented as Englishness ‐ is unsuccessful in absorbing its ‘Other’ into a ‘totality’ of European history, which on these grounds is therefore neither unique nor ‘sovereign’.

Key words:

• Englishness
• fetish
• Manicheanism
• totality
• ambivalence
• ontological