The passionate cosmopolitan in Salman Rushdie's Fury

Abstract

Relating Rushdie's work to theories of cosmopolitanism and to Rushdie's own comments on the intersection of globalization and American hegemony, this essay argues that Fury treats cosmopolitanism in an American guise with ambivalence. It foregrounds American immigrant experiences as ones with limited recourse to the consolations of nostalgia and authenticity, and it links justice‐seeking anger to the transnational allegiances and cultural and geographical mobility that define cosmopolitanism. Rage emanating from childhood vulnerability and from loss of ideals fuels cosmopolitanism in this novel, and thus it intriguingly alters a received idea of the cosmopolitan character as cool, distanced, and ironic.

Keywords:

• Rushdie
• America
• cosmopolitanism
• globalization
• immigrant
• anger

Notes

1. For the relationship between cosmopolitanism and detachment, see Anderson.

2. Recent works include, in addition to Appiah and Walkowitz, Anderson, Benhabib, Berman, Breckenridge, Brennan, Cheah and Robbins, Dhardwadker, and Israel.

3. Alternative views of The Satanic Verses can be found in Gane's favorable assessment of it as cosmopolitan in spite of its nostalgic ending, and Kalliney's critical view of it as escapist in its cosmopolitanism.

4. Dohra Ahmad argues that Rushdie's work expresses ambivalence towards the hybridity, or Appiah's “ideal of contamination”, that undergirds a cosmopolitan ethics.

5. Fury's flânerie is self‐consciously literary: by dressing Malik in a “straw Panama hat” (42), Rushdie alludes to Blazes Boylan of Ulysses, like Malik, an adulterer. And, in naming Malik's friend, the African‐American poet and war correspondent, Jack Rhinehart, Rushdie alludes to another significant work of modernist, urban wandering: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

6. The oppositional consciousness in modernist flânerie is well‐articulated in Duffy's reading of Joyce and Yeats, 53ff.

7. Critical views of Rushdie's politics sharpened after his pro‐American statements post‐9/11. Sawhney and Sawhney provide a description of Rushdie's post‐9/11 views and reception. Insightful glosses on Rushdie's allusions to the western literary tradition include Hawes', Greenberg's, Falconer's, and Karamcheti's. These critics are what Dohra Ahmad refers to as Rushdie's “cosmopolitan readership” (1).

8. I thank the anonymous readers for Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Joel Sweek, Alan Cole, Michael Mirabile, and Margaret Bruzelius for their helpful comments.