The Production of Alternative Global Spaces: Walking in the City in Salman Rushdie’s Novels

Abstract

de Certeau explicitly posits walking as a mode of resistance, which has been updated in theories of affect and posthumanism that advocate a return to the concept of the body and the human, respectively. These new theories propose a modified walker who blurs the subject–object/human–nonhuman distinction, reinforcing both a contested embodiment and an inclusive approach to the “other” in self-fashioning. Salman Rushdie, too, uses the trope of walking in the city as an altered act of resistance. Walking, an exercise in Rushdie’s novels that deconstructs the autonomous bodies of walkers at the moment of their encounter with material cities, aligns itself to postanthropocentric discourses of walking. This fracturing of the autonomous bodies of walkers, however, is a result of the modified body politic and relevant to migrant figures from the Global South rather than to the provincial walkers of the Global North.

德赛图明确地断定步行作为反抗的形式，此一主张并由情绪与后人文主义的理论进行更新——两者分别倡议回到身体与人文的概念。这些新理论提出一个修改过的步行者，模糊了主体—客体／人类—非人类的区别，同时强化了争夺的身体化，以及自我形塑中的“他者”的包容性方法。萨尔曼．鲁西迪同样运用步行于城市的比喻，作为改变后的反抗行动。步行——这个在鲁西迪的小说中，解构步行者与物质城市相遇时的自主身体之实践，并与后人类中心主义的步行论述一致。此般步行者的自主身体之断裂，却是修改过后的身体政治之结果，并且关乎来自全球南方的移民者，而非全球北方的在地步行者

De manera explícita, de Certeau postula el caminar como un modo de resistencia, que ha sido actualizado en las teorías sobre el afecto y el poshumanismo, que propugnan, respectivamente, por el retorno al concepto del cuerpo y de lo humano. Estas nuevas teorías proponen un caminante modificado, quien desdibuja la distinción sujeto–objeto/humano–no humano, reforzando por igual una personificación disputada y un enfoque inclusivo hacia el “otro” en autopromoción. También Salman Rushdie usa el tropo de caminar en la ciudad como un acto ajustado de resistencia. Caminar, un ejercicio en las novelas de Rushdie que deconstruye los cuerpos autónomos de los caminantes en el momento de su encuentro con las ciudades materiales, se adapta por cuenta propia a los discursos posantropocéntricos de la caminata. Sin embargo, esta fractura de los cuerpos autónomos de los caminantes es un resultado de la política del cuerpo modificado, relevante más para figuras migratorias del Sur Global que para los caminantes provincianos del Norte Global.

Key Words:

• affect
• city
• postanthropocentric
• posthumanism
• Salman Rushdie
• walking

• 情绪
• 城市
• 后人类中心主的
• 后人文主义
• 萨尔曼
• 鲁西迪
• 步行

• afecto
• ciudad
• posantropocéntrico
• poshumanismo
• Salman Rushdie
• caminar

Notes

1. The extinct figure of the flaneur was revived as cyber flaneur with the Internet boom in the mid-1990s. With the Internet becoming increasingly regimented and disciplined through both government and corporate control, however, and with the upgrading of surveillance techniques in terms of data storage of consumer behavior, the traffic to e-commerce Web sites became increasingly regulated, discouraging once again the strolling of the leisured flaneur even in the virtual space (Morozov 2012).

2. Rushdie explores the multicultural aesthetic productions of gardens varying across time and space but, as stated before, he subverts them. For example, in Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Rushdie is inspired by both Hieronymous Bosch’s triptych painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Voltaire’s ([1759] 1991) Candide. The latter ironically advocates “cultivate your own garden,” symbolically expressing the birth of autonomous subjectivity through the process of achieving autonomy as gardeners. The figure of the gardener Geronimo recovers a fractured self (as a hybrid of peri and human), rather than a nascent complete self, through his acts as the gardener of the emerging civilization. In contrast to these Western concepts, Rushdie simultaneously engages and parodies the idea of symmetry and perfection expressed in the Islamic concept of chaharbag garden. According to Islamic myth, the magnificent gardens on earth reflect the perfection of paradise in heaven, exemplified in the inscription on the Black Pavilion of the Mughal garden of Shalimar Bagh in Kashmir, which was constructed by the Mughal emperor Jahangir for his wife Nur Jahan in 1619. The very popular Persian inscription of Shalimar Bagh written by the poet Amir Khusrau, when translated into English, says, “If there is a paradise on earth, it is here.” The concept of Islamic paradise now circulates in the popular imagination of the non-Islamic world as the incentive of martyrdom for terrorists sacrificing themselves for the perverse holy war of jihad. Rushdie, in foregrounding syncretism in gardening, subverts the idea of the Islamic paradise as a nefarious space serving as a reward for murderous terrorists and militants. Instead, Rushdie depicts how terrorism destroys the manmade, harmonious, and multicultural paradise of Shalimar Bagh in Kashmir.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Madhumita Roy

MADHUMITA ROY is an Assistant Professor of English at Vivekananda Mission Mahavidyalaya, Haldia, 700094, West Bengal, India. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include interdisciplinary spatial studies, postcolonial and postmodern literature, and literary theory.

Anjali Gera Roy

ANJALI GERA ROY is a Professor in the Department of Humanities of Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, 721302, India. E-mail: [email protected]. She works on fiction, film and performance traditions of India, diasporas, and Punjab.