New cities out of old ones: Catoptric echoes and reversals in Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Abstract

A close examination of the relationships between cities in Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet reveals their bi‐vocal nature through which the text problematizes notions of originality and autonomy. Here, Bombay and New York accommodate relics/prophecies of each other, thus engaging in ongoing conversations. The after often precedes the before, unsettling the linear flow of speech and song and, respectively, the groundwork of origins. This article addresses the ways in which cities reconfigure each other through an inter‐urban exchange of auditory and visual echoes. These effects, which I have termed “catoptric”, create a space for subversion as cities hold up to each other partial, broken or inverted mirrors. Traces of songs, images and histories vibrate across auditory membranes and prime meridians, but acquire new, subversive resonances.

Keywords:

• Salman Rushdie
• urban configurations
• catoptrics
• postcolonial travel
• identity

Notes

1. The Satanic Verses offers two ideas of metamorphosis to inform the notion of migrant identity. In the Ovidian one, identity is an immutable essence – we are “still the same forever, but [we] adopt in [our] migrations ever‐varying forms”. The Lucretian one is of constant mutability: the old self must die for the new one to be born. Saladin embraces this, since a “being going through life can become so other to himself as to be another” (288, emphasis in the original).