imaginary homelands essay summary

Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Looking for Imaginary Homelands summary? This paper contains a synopsis, critical review, and analysis of Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie.

Introduction

The essay Imaginary Homelands describes the plight of the writers in the Diaspora as they attempt to reconnect with their homelands. However, the reconnection fails miserably due to incomplete memory. They are completely out of touch with their homelands and hence grossly alienated.

This essay will focus on the features of semantic and lexical structures employed in order to highlight the question of memory fragmentation. These are metaphors, semantic fields, intertextuality and text types, and register.

Imaginary Homelands Summary

Imaginary Homelands is a collection of essays by Salman Rushdie. The book written between 1981 and 1992 focuses on the author’s experiences in the time when Indira Gandhi was ruling India. The book is divided into six parts: Midnight’s children, The politics of India and Pakistan, Literature, Arts & media, Experience of migrants, and The question of Palestine.

Imaginary Homelands Analysis

Metaphor in imaginary homelands.

There is extensive use of metaphor in the essay Imaginary Homelands by Rushdie. This is driven by the need to convey the theme of alienation that people in the Diaspora are invariably plagued with.

Mostly, the exiles have to do with faint memories, which have gaping hiatuses and therefore, they have to fill in using their imaginations (Seyhan 2000). The use of metaphor, it can be argued, deliberately reflects on Rushdie’s personal history. The metaphors have been discussed as follows.

The old photograph that hangs in the room where Rushdie works is metaphorical. It represents a section of Rushdie’s past from which he has been totally alienated. He was not yet born when the photograph was taken. The old photograph is significant because it prompts Rushdie to visit the house immortalised on it.

This is a black and white image of the house, and as Rushdie discovers, his childhood memories were also monochromatic (Rushdie 1991, p. 9). This implies that his childhood memories were untainted.

Pillars of salt have also been used metaphorically. It is an allusion to the biblical story of Lot and his wife in which the latter turned into a pillar of salt upon looking back at the destruction that was befalling their homeland. Pillars of salt, therefore, refers to the dangers faced by those in exile when they try to reconnect with their homelands.

This point to the trouble that Rushdie faced from his motherland when he wrote the novel Satanic Verses which featured Prophet Mohammad sacrilegiously. Consequently, a fatwa was declared on him and he had to be given a round-the-clock police protection by the British government.

Then, there is the metaphor of the broken mirror. The metaphor denotes the distant and almost obscure memories that those in exile have about their homeland. The memories are made up of many pieces that cannot be patched up together. The fact that some crucial pieces are missing aggravates matters. In extreme cases, those living in diaspora have no recollection at all about their homeland.

Consequently, they resort to imaginations to complete the picture. In the essay, the author writes: “…we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10). He further admits that he made Saleem, the narrator in one of his earlier works; suspect that “his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory…” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10).

Closely related to the metaphor of broken mirror is the reference to shards of memory. Shards are small jagged pieces that result when something is shattered. It is impossible to reconstruct the original item using them. More often than not, a considerable number of them are irretrievable. This is a reflection of the hopelessly inadequate memories about their homelands that are nursed by those in the diaspora.

They can only afford tiny fragments of memories, which cannot be put together to build a complete picture of their motherland. They then resort to the “broken pots of antiquity” (Rushdie 1991, p. 12) to reconstruct their past. Rushdie further argues that as human beings, we are capable only of fractured perceptions (Rushdie 1991, p. 12) because we are partial beings.

Rushdie also likens meaning to a shaky edifice built from scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films among others. This implies that the meaning attached to the memories that those in exile harbour is constantly being amended. The shaky edifice has to receive constant patches and repairs in order to maintain it.

Semantic Fields in Imaginary Homelands

Brinton (2000) defines semantic field as a segment of reality symbolized by a set of related words (p. 112). The words in a semantic field share a common semantic property. There are various semantic fields in Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands.

Rushdie uses the expression “imaginary homelands” as a powerful metaphor to elucidate the shattered vision of the migrant who is abroad. This semantic field denotes the preoccupation with lost memories experienced by those in exile. To them, home is not a real place, but an imaginary rendition authored by discontinuous fragments of memory conceived in imagination.

According to Rushdie, it is impossible to reclaim the lost memories and, therefore, the need to recreate a vastly fictionalized “Indias of the mind” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10). This amplifies the alienation faced by those in exile.

Another semantic field is evident in the expressions “lost time” and “lost city” (Rushdie 1991, p. 9-10). In Rushdie’s essay, they refer to a lost history, which those in the Diaspora cannot recover. What are available are the disjointed shards of memory that are scarcely sufficient to build a history on.

Due to this, Rushdie is confined to creating his own version of India and as a result, he ends up writing a novel of memory and about memory. It implies that everything is lost thus making the exiles more alienated from their homelands.

The admonition on the bridge over a local railway line, “Drive like Hell and you will get there” (Rushdie 1991, p. 11) is another semantic field. This statement is curiously ambiguous. On the one hand, it may be a warning against over-speeding whose end result is likely to be death through a possible accident.

On the other hand, it might be a rallying call to drivers to zoom over the bridge so as to get to their destinations on time. Rushdie envisions a contradiction in this ambiguity. He holds fast to it because it is one of the fragments of memories about his homeland.

Then, there is the way in which Rushdie uses the expression “our worlds”. This is a semantic field that denotes people’s individual experiences, aspirations and dreams. In this essay, the author states that individuals have the freedom to describe their worlds according to the way they perceive them.

This is a deliberate attempt to escape the harsh reality of lost memories. He can find refuge in the use of imagination to recreate his own world; one that consists of memory fragments. It underscores the biting alienation afflicting those in Diaspora.

Imaginary Homelands: Narrative Forms

Rushdie’s essay is chiefly a literary text. This is because it employs narration as the method of presentation. The author narrates his moving experiences when he visits Bombay after many years.

He narrates: “A few years ago, I revisited Bombay, which is my lost city, after an absence of something like half my life.” (Rushdie 1991, p. 9). This is an effective way of reaching out to the readers, most of whom may not be familiar with the feeling of alienation experienced in exile.

The narrative forms involve orientation, which sets the scene, time and the characters in the essay. In this case, the scene is Bombay; the time is a few years ago; and the characters include the narrator himself. There is also the compilation, which outlines the problem that leads to a series of events.

In this essay, the old photograph made the author visit Bombay after many years. Narrative forms also involve a resolution. This is the answer to the problem elucidated in the essay. In this essay, the author reverts to the use of imagination to make up for lost memories. He creates the India that he can afford.

Being an essay, it can also be considered a factual text. This is because it entails a discussion on the problem of a fragmented memory. The author draws the reader’s attention to the plight of emigrant troubled by a lost history. Plagued by insufficient recollection, the author, as a literary artist, discovers that he is less than a sage.

Imaginary Homelands: Text Register

Closely related to the text type is the use of register. Register refers to the set of meanings, the configuration of semantic patterns that are typically drawn upon under the specific conditions, along with words and structures that are used with the realization of these meanings (Halliday 1978, p. 23). This draws interest to Rushdie’s contextual use of language in the essay Imaginary Homelands .

Rushdie examines the complex situation that encumbers the writer in the diaspora as they attempt to transform nostalgia into an ideal past (Mannur 2010, p. 28). But seeing the past through broken mirrors diminishes the idealised image of the past.

He further draws an analogy between the old black and white photograph and his childhood perceptions. History had added colour to those perceptions, but nostalgia has drained hue out of them: “the colours of history had seeped out of my mind’s eye” (Rushdie, 1991, p. 9).

Allusions in Imaginary Homelands

The essay Imaginary Homelands makes references to various other texts. These intertextual allusions serve to reinforce the plight of those living in exile. They heighten the alienation and the feeling of loss, which arise as a result of loss of memory. They also serve to build on the plot of the essay; thus, emphasizing the subject matter.

The first reference is made to L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go Between . The first sentence of the novel forms the caption to the old photograph in the author’s room. It states that the past is a foreign country. This implies that those in exile are not familiar with their pasts.

However, the author makes a fervent attempt to escape the harsh reality of the statement by trying to reverse it. He would have preferred to grasp his humble beginning, but unfortunately, he is hopelessly trapped in the present. So, the past becomes a lost home, a lost city shrouded in the mists of lost time (Rushdie 1991, p. 9).

Another instance of intertextuality is evident in the use of the metaphor “pillar of salt”. This has been borrowed from the biblical story in which fire rains down on Sodom and Gomorrah, home to Lot and his wife. Lot’s wife turns back, contrary to the instructions given by the angel, and turns into a pillar of salt.

Similarly, those in forced exile face potential demise should they turn back home. A few do turn back home in spite of the risk they expose themselves to. As for Rushdie, the people back home are baying for his blood as controversy rages about his novel, Satanic Verses.

Rushdie also makes reference to a book he is scripting while in north London. He looks out the window onto a city that is inherently dissimilar to the one being illustrated in the book. This instance is quite relevant here in that it helps bring to the fore the disparity between reality and fiction.

The city described in the book being written is built on some obscure memories, which result from missing history. This is the distortion occasioned by broken memories. In that book, the author makes the narrator to suspect that his mistakes are as a result of distorted memories.

The author draws a parallel to his other work of art, Midnight’s Children . He is still grappling with the disturbing issue of memory. Before penning the book, he spends a long time trying to recall what Bombay, his homeland, looked like in the 50s and 60s. Due to insufficient memory, he shifts the setting to Agra under the pretext of creating a certain joke about the Taj Mahal.

What is evident here is the substitution made by individuals afflicted with incomplete recall in order to make up for the gaps in their memories. This is what informs the rather baffling conclusion that writers are no longer sages, dispensing the wisdom of the centuries (Rushdie 1991, p. 12).

The essay has also borrowed from John Fowle’s Daniel Martin. The opening line in this book thus goes: “Whole sight: or all the rest is desolation” (Rushdie 1991, p. 12). The statement seems to be implying that the problem of broken memories could be universal. It is felt by all, not just Rushdie alone. It also points to the fact that it is not possible to experience a complete memory recall.

Any attempt to total recall may only lead to desolation. This also explains why there is a universal resort to imagination to complete the missing picture. Consequently, writers cease to be sages as they have no wisdom to dispense – only an imaginary homeland.

Rushdie has successfully employed the various features of semantics and lexicon structure in order to express his meaning. Through the use of metaphors and intertextuality, the author successfully depicts the problem of a fragmented memory and explains why those in exile have to resort to imagination in order to recreate the homes they can never attain (Ramsey and Ganapathy-Doré, 2011, p. 162).

The text type used is also appropriate since it helps connect with the reader who may not be familiar to the alienating experiences of those in exile and the reason as to why writers engage in imagination rather than portraying reality.

Semantic fields in the essay have accomplished the intended purpose of expressing meaning to as many readers as possible. Therefore, it is important to study the semantic and lexical structure employed by Rushdie in his works in order to understand them fully.

List of References

Brinton, L J 2000, The structure of modern English: a linguistic introduction , Illustrated edn, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Halliday, M A 1978, Language as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning, London: Edward Arnold Publishing Company.

Mannur, A 2010, Culinary fictions: food in South Asian diasporic culture , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Ramsey, H and Ganapathy-Doré, G 2011, Projections of paradise: ideal elsewheres in postcolonial migrant literature , New York: Rodopi.

Rushdie, S 1991, Imaginary homelands, London: Granta Books.

Seyhan, A 2000, Writing outside the nation , New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

• “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”: Summary & Analysis
• The Gift of the Magi Essay: Summary & Analysis
• The Tortilla Curtain: American Dream - Characters, Summary & Analysis
• Language Testing and Assessment
• Multilingualism
• Critical Summary: “The time course of semantic and syntactic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from eye movements” by Yang, Suiping, Hsuan-Chih and Rayner
• Mandarin Chinese
• Real Time and Apparent Time Studies
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, May 17). Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis. https://ivypanda.com/essays/imaginary-homelands-essay/

"Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis." IvyPanda , 17 May 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/imaginary-homelands-essay/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis'. 17 May.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis." May 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/imaginary-homelands-essay/.

1. IvyPanda . "Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis." May 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/imaginary-homelands-essay/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis." May 17, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/imaginary-homelands-essay/.

Plot Summary? We’re just getting started.

Add this title to our requested Study Guides list!

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1981

Plot Summary

Continue your reading experience.

SuperSummary Plot Summaries provide a quick, full synopsis of a text. But SuperSummary Study Guides — available only to subscribers — provide so much more!

Join now to access our Study Guides library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on more than 5,000 literary works from novels to nonfiction to poetry.

See for yourself. Check out our sample guides:

Toni Morrison

Malcolm Gladwell

David And Goliath

D. H. Lawrence

Whales Weep Not!

Related summaries: by Salman Rushdie

Good advice is rarer than rubies, haroun and the sea of stories, joseph anton: a memoir, midnight's children, shalimar the clown, the enchantress of florence, the golden house, the ground beneath her feet, the moor's last sigh, the satanic verses, two years eight months and twenty-eight nights, victory city.

A SuperSummary Plot Summary provides a quick, full synopsis of a text.

A SuperSummary Study Guide — a modern alternative to Sparknotes & CliffsNotes — provides so much more, including chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and important quotes.

See the difference for yourself. Check out this sample Study Guide:

• Novel & Dramas
• Non-Fiction Prose

Exploring Rushdie's essay Imaginary Homelands

You may like these posts

Post a comment, social plugin, search this blog, popular posts.

• June 2022 1
• August 2022 6
• November 2022 1
• April 2023 3
• June 2023 4
• July 2023 1
• November 2023 1
• January 2024 34
• February 2024 30
• March 2024 13
• April 2024 13

Hello, I am Parishmita Roy

Default Variables

Our website uses cookies to improve your experience. Learn more

• Podcasts & Videos
• Newsletters

London Review of Books

More search Options

• Advanced search
• Search by contributor
• Browse our cover archive

Browse by Subject

• Arts & Culture
• Biography & Memoir
• History & Classics
• Literature & Criticism
• Philosophy & Law
• Politics & Economics
• Psychology & Anthropology
• Science & Technology
• Latest Issue
• Contributors
• About the LRB
• Close Readings

Imaginary Homelands

Salman rushdie.

Please sign in to read the full article.

An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall of the room where I work. It’s a picture, dating from 1946, of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born. The house is rather peculiar – a three-storied gabled affair with tiled roofs and round towers in two corners, each wearing a pointy tile hat. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ goes the famous opening sentence of L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between , ‘they do things differently there.’ But the photograph tells me to invert this idea: it reminds me that it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time.

A few years ago I revisited Bombay, which is my lost city, after an absence of something like half my life. Shortly after arriving, acting on an impulse, I opened the telephone directory and looked for my father’s name. And, amazingly, there it was: his name, our old address, the unchanged telephone number, as if we had never gone away to the unmentionable country across the border. It was an eerie discovery. I felt as if I were being claimed, or informed that the facts of my faraway life were illusions: that this – this continuity – was the reality. Then I went to visit the house in the photograph and stood outside it, neither daring nor wishing to announce myself to its new owners. (I didn’t want to see how they’d ruined the interior.) I was overwhelmed. The photograph had naturally been taken in black and white; and my memory, feeding on such images as this, had begun to see my childhood in the same way, monochromatically. The colours of my history had seeped out of my mind’s eye; now my other two eyes were assaulted by colours, by the vividness of the red tiles, the yellow-edged green of cactus-leaves, the brilliance of bougainvillaea creeper. It is probably not too romantic to say that that was when my novel Midnight’s Children was really born: when I realised how much I wanted to restore the past to myself, not in the faded greys of old family-album snapshots, but whole, in Cinemascope and glorious Technicolor. Bombay is a city built by foreigners upon reclaimed land; I, who had been away so long that I almost qualified for the title of farangi , was gripped by the conviction that I, too, had a city and a history to reclaim.

Writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by an urge to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost: that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, lndias of the mind. Writing my book in North London, looking out through my window on to a city scene totally unlike the ones I was imagining on to paper, I was constantly plagued by this problem, until I felt obliged to face it in the text, to make clear that (in spite of my original and, I suppose, somewhat Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost time so that the past reappeared as it actually had been, unaffected by the distortions of memory) what I was actually writing was a novel of memory and about memory, so that my India was just that: ‘my’ India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions. I tried to make it as imaginatively true as I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never became what perhaps I was meant to be) was willing to admit I belonged.

This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration: his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and of circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary. It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. But there is a paradox here. The broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed. Before beginning Midnight’s Children , I spent many months trying simply to recall as much of the Bombay of the 1950s and 1960s as I could; and not only Bombay – Kashmir, too, and Delhi and Aligarh which, in my book, I’ve moved to Agra to heighten a certain joke about the Taj Mahal. I was genuinely amazed by how much came back to me. I found myself remembering what clothes people had worn on certain days, and school scenes, and whole passages of Bombay dialogue verbatim, or so it seemed; I even remembered advertisements, film-posters, the neon Jeep sign on Marine Drive, toothpaste ads for Binaca and for Kolynos, and a footbridge over the local railway line which bore, on one side, the legend ‘Esso puts a tiger in your tank’ and, on the other, ‘Drive like Hell and you will get there.’ Old songs came back:

O my shoes are Japanese, The trousers English, if you please, On my head’s a Russian hat, But I’m Indian for all that.

I knew that I had tapped a rich seam: but I’m not gifted with total recall, and it was precisely the partial nature of these memories, their fragmentation, that made them so evocative for me. The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance because they were remains : fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true: but the writer who is out-of-country, even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being ‘elsewhere’. This may enable him to speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal.

The broken glass is not merely a mirror of nostalgia. It is also a useful tool with which to work in the present. John Fowles begins Daniel Martin with the words: ‘Whole sight: or all the rest is desolation.’ But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death. The Fowles position seems to me a way of succumbing to the guru-illusion. Writers are no longer sages, dispensing the wisdom of the centuries. And those of us who have been forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties, have perhaps had modernism forced upon us. We can’t lay claim to Olympus, and are thus released to describe our worlds in the way in which all of us, whether writers or not, perceive them from day to day.

In Midnight’s Children , my narrator introduces, at one point, the metaphor of a cinema screen to discuss this business of perception: ‘Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up ... until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions ... it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality.’ The movement towards the cinema screen is a metaphor for the narrative’s movement through time towards the present, and the book itself, as it nears contemporary events, quite deliberately loses deep perspective, becomes more ‘partial’. I wasn’t trying to write about (for instance) the Emergency in the same way as I wrote about events half a century earlier. I felt it would be dishonest to pretend, when writing about the day before yesterday, that it was possible to see the whole picture. I showed certain blobs and slabs of the scene.

A few months ago I took part in a conference. Various novelists, myself included, were talking earnestly of such matters as the need for new ways of describing the world. Then the playwright Howard Brenton suggested that this might be a somewhat limited aim: does literature seek to do no more than to describe? Flustered, all the novelists at once began talking about politics. Let me apply Brenton’s question to the specific case of Indian writers, in England, writing about India. Can they do no more than describe, from a distance, the world that they have left?

This is, of course, a political question, and must be answered at least partly in political terms. It should be said, first of all, that description is itself a political act. The black American writer Richard Wright once wrote that black and white Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of reality. Their descriptions were incompatible. So it is clear that redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it. And it is particularly at times when the state takes reality into its own hands, and sets about distorting it, altering the past to fit its present needs, that the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicised. ‘The struggle of man against power,’ Milan Kundera has written, ‘is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth. The ‘state truth’ about the war in Bangladesh, for instance, is that no atrocities were committed by the Pakistani Army in what was then the East Wing. This version is sanctified by many people who would describe themselves as intellectuals. And the official version of the Emergency in India was well expressed by Mrs Gandhi in a recent BBC interview. She said that there were some people around who claimed that bad things had happened during the Emergency, forced sterilisations, things like that: but, she stated, this was all false. Nothing of this type had ever occurred. The interviewer, Robert Kee, did not probe this statement at all. Instead he told Mrs Gandhi that she had proved many times over her right to be called a democrat.

So literature can, and perhaps must, give the lie to official facts. But is this a proper function of those of us who write from outside India? Or are we just dilettantes in such affairs, because we are not involved in their day-to-day unfolding, because by speaking out we take no risks, because our personal safety is not threatened? What right do we have to speak at all? My answer is very simple. Literature is self-validating. That is to say, a book is not justified by its author’s worthiness to write it, but by the quality of what has been done. There are terrible books that arise directly out of experience, and extraordinary imaginative feats dealing with themes which the author has been obliged to approach from the outside. (Just one example of this latter category: Sophie’s Choice , by William Styron, a book which seems wholly to justify its use of Auschwitz, even though Styron is not a Jew, let alone a survivor of the Holocaust.) Literature is not in the business of copyrighting certain themes for certain groups. And as for risk: the real risks for any artist are taken in the work, in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it – when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

So if I am to speak for Indian writers in England I would say this, paraphrasing G.V. Desani’s H. Hatterr: the migrations of the 1950s and 1960s happened. ‘We are. We are here.’ And we are not willing to be excluded from any part of our heritage: which heritage includes both a British-born Indian kid’s right to be treated as a full member of this society, and also the right of any member of this post-diaspora community to draw on its roots for its art, just as all the world’s community of displaced writers has always done. (I’m thinking, for instance, of Grass’s Danzig-become-Gdansk, of Joyce’s abandoned Dublin, of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Maxine Hong Kingston and Milan Kundera and many others. It’s a long list.) On the other hand, the Indian writer, looking back at India, does so through guilt-tinted spectacles. (I am, of course, once more, talking about myself.) I am speaking now of those of us who emigrated ... and I suspect that there are times when the move seems wrong to us all, when we seem, to ourselves, postlapsarian men and women. We are Hindus who have crossed the black water; we are Muslims who eat pork. And as a result – as my use of the Christian notion of the Fall indicates – we are now partly of the West. Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools ... but however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles. Or it may be that that is what we must think in order to do our work.

Midnight’s Children enters its subject from the point of view of a secular man. I am a member of that generation of Indians who were sold the secular ideal. One of the things I liked, and still like, about India is that it is based on a non-sectarian philosophy. I was not raised in a narrowly Muslim environment; I do not consider Hindu culture to be either alien from me or more important than the Islamic heritage. I believe this has something to do with the nature of Bombay, a metropolis in which the multiplicity of commingled faiths and cultures creates a remarkably secular ambience. Saleem Sinai makes use of whatever elements from whatever sources he chooses.

I want to make one last point about the description of India that Midnight’s Children attempts. It is a point about pessimism. The book has been criticised in India for its ultimately despairing tone. And the despair of the writer-from-outside may indeed look a little easy, a little too pat. But I do not see the book as despairing or nihilistic. The point of view of the narrator is not entirely that of the author. What I tried to do was to set up a tension in the text, a paradoxical opposition between the form and the content of the narrative. The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to despair. But the story is told in a manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration. This is why the narrative constantly throws up new stories, why it ‘teems’. The form – multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country – is the optimistic counterweight to Saleem’s personal tragedy. I do not think that a book written in such a manner can really be called a despairing work.

England’s Indian writers are, of course, by no means all the same type of animal. Some of us, for instance, are Pakistani. Others Bangladeshi. Others West, or East, or even South African. And V.S. Naipaul, by now, is something else entirely. This word ‘Indian’ is getting to be a pretty scattered concept. Indian writers in England include political exiles, first-generation migrants, affluent expatriates whose residence here is frequently temporary, naturalised Britons, and people born here who may never have laid eyes on the subcontinent. Clearly, nothing that I say can apply across all these categories. But one of the interesting things about this diverse community is that, as far as Indo-British fiction is concerned, its existence changes the ball-game, because that fiction is in future going to come as much from addresses in London, Birmingham and Yorkshire as from Delhi or Bombay. One of the changes has to do with attitudes towards the use of English. We can’t simply use the language in the way the British did: it needs remaking for our own purposes. Those of us who use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free. But the British Indian writer simply does not have the option of rejecting English, anyway. His children, her children, will grow up speaking it, probably as a first language; and in the forging of a British Indian identity the English language is of central importance. It must, in spite of everything, be embraced. (The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation: I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.)

To be an Indian writer in this society is to face, every day, problems of definition. What does it mean to be ‘Indian’ outside India? How can culture be preserved without becoming ossified? How should we discuss the need for change within ourselves and our community without seeming to play into the hands of our racial enemies? What are the consequences, both spiritual and practical, of refusing to make any concessions to Western ideas and practices? What are the consequences of embracing those ideas and practices?

In common with many Bombay-raised middle-class children of my generation, I grew up with an intimate knowledge of, and even sense of friendship with, a certain kind of England: a dream-England composed of Test Matches at Lord’s presided over by the voice of John Arlott, at which Freddie Trueman bowled unceasingly and without success at Polly Umrigar; of Enid Blyton and Billy Bunter, in which we were even prepared to smile indulgently at portraits such as ‘Hurree Jamset Ram Singh’, the ‘dusky nabob of Bhanipur’. I wanted to come to England. I couldn’t wait. And to be fair, England has done all right by me: but I find it a little difficult to be properly grateful. I can’t escape the view that my relatively easy ride is not the result of the dream-England’s famous sense of tolerance and fair play, but of my social class, my freak fair skin and my ‘English’ English accent. Take away any of these, and the story would have been very different. Because of course the dream-England is no more than a dream.

Sadly, it’s a dream from which too many white Britons refuse to awake. Recently, on a live radio programme, a professional humorist asked me, in all seriousness, why I objected to being called a ‘Wog’. He said he had always thought it a rather charming word, a term of endearment. ‘I was at the zoo the other day,’ he revealed, ‘and a zoo keeper told me that the Wogs were best with the animals; they stuck their fingers in their ears and wiggled them about and the animals felt at home.’ The ghost of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh walks among us still. But it’s easy to be anecdotal. The point is that the British are deluded about themselves and their society. They still, for the most part, think it the fairest, most just, most decent society ever created: an attitude which has created, in Britain, what might be termed a gulf or rift in reality. As Richard Wright found long ago in America, black descriptions of society, and white, are no longer compatible. Fantasy, or the mingling of fantasy and naturalism, is one way of dealing with these problems. It offers a way of echoing in the form of our work the issues faced by all of us: how to build a new, ‘modern’ world out of an old, legend-haunted civilisation, an old culture which we have brought into the heart of a newer one. But whatever technical solutions we may find, Indian writers in these islands, like others who have migrated to the north from the south, are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective: because they – we – are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this society. This stereoscopic vision is perhaps what we can offer in place of ‘whole sight’.

Of all the many elephant traps lying ahead of us, the largest and most dangerous pitfall would be the adoption of a ghetto mentality. To forget that there is a world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers would be to go voluntarily into that form of internal exile which in South Africa is called the ‘homeland’. We must guard against creating, for the most virtuous of reasons, British-Indian literary equivalents of Bophuthatswana or the Transkei. This raises immediately the question of whom one is writing ‘for’. My own, short answer is that I have never had a reader in mind. I have ideas, people, events, shapes, and I write ‘for’ those things, and hope that the completed work will be of interest to others. But which others? In the case of Midnight’s Children I certainly felt that if its subcontinental readers had rejected the work, I should have thought it a failure, no matter what the reaction in the West. So I would say that I write ‘for’ people who feel part of the things I write ‘about’: but also for everyone else whom I can reach. I am of the same opinion as Ralph Ellison, who says that he finds something precious in being black in America: but that he is also reaching for more than that. ‘I was taken very early,’ he writes, ‘with a passion to link together all I loved within the Negro community and all those things I felt in the world which lay beyond.’ Western writers have felt free to be eclectic in their selection of theme, setting, form: I am sure we must grant ourselves an equal freedom.

Indian writers in England have access to a second tradition, however, quite apart from their own racial history. It is the cultural and political history of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group. We can quite legitimately claim, as our ancestors, the Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews; the past to which we belong is an English past, the history of immigrant Britain. Swift, Conrad, Marx are as much our literary forebears as Tagore or Ram Mohan Roy. America, a nation of immigrants, has created great literature out of the phenomenon of cultural transplantation, out of examining the ways in which people cope with a new world: it may be that by discovering what we have in common with those who preceded us into this country, we can begin to do the same. I stress that this is only one of many possible strategies. But we are inescapably international writers at a time when the novel has never been a more international form (a writer like Borges speaks of the influence of Robert Louis Stevenson on his work, Heinrich Böll acknowledges the influence of Irish literature, cross-pollination is everywhere); and it is perhaps one of the more pleasant freedoms of the literary migrant to be able to choose his parents. My own – selected half-consciously, half-not – include Gogol, Cervantes, Kafka, Melville, Machado de Assis: a polyglot family tree, against which I measure myself, and to which I would be honoured to belong. There’s a beautiful image in Saul Bellow’s latest novel, The Dean’s December . The central character, the Dean, Corde, hears a dog barking wildly somewhere. He imagines that the barking is the dog’s protest against the limits of dog experience: ‘For God’s sake,’ the dog is saying, ‘open the universe a little more!’ Bellow is not really talking about dogs, or not only about dogs, and I have the feeling that the dog’s rage, and its desire, is also mine, ours, everyone’s. ‘For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!’

Send Letters To:

The Editor London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HN [email protected] Please include name, address, and a telephone number.

Download the LRB app

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app , available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Please enable Javascript

This site requires the use of Javascript to provide the best possible experience. Please change your browser settings to allow Javascript content to run.

• About the Author
• Events & Appearances

Imaginary Homelands

Essays & criticism 1981-1991.

Salman Rushdie at his most candid, impassioned, and incisive— Imaginary Homelands is an important and moving record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. These 75 essays demonstrate Rushdie’s range and prophetic vision, as he focuses on his fellow writers, on films, and on the mine-strewn ground of race, politics and religion.

“Whether he is analyzing racial prejudice in Britain or surveying an India riven by fundamentalism and politics of religious hatred, he writes as an impartial observer, a citizen of the world. Subtle and witty, these concise, eloquent pieces are a pleasure to read.”   —Publisher’s Weekly

Buy this book

Barnes & Noble •  IndieBound •  Powell’s

French Journal of English Studies

Home Numéros 60 Introduction

Introduction

1 In his celebrated essay, "Imaginary Homelands", Salman Rushdie writes about a visit to Bombay, after an absence of twenty years or so, and the unsettling realization that his family's old home is not black and white as it is in the old picture hanging in his study. Standing outside the riotously colourful house, the writer makes a crucial, if painful, discovery: "[t]he colours of my history had seeped out of my mind's eye" (Rushdie 9). Motioned from the grays of memory to the colours of reality, Rushdie inevitably derives a sense of loss from this unfortunate seepage. The past is of course irretrievable. The writer who looks back can only "create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind" (Rushdie 10), and whoever writes about the past "is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost" (Rushdie 11).

2 If the past is past, if memory is unreliable and forgetting inescapable, the interplay of memory and forgetting as Rushdie sees it may also be the crucible of literary creation:

[t]he broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed. ... [I]t was precisely the partial nature of these memories, their fragmentation, that made them so evocative for me. The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance, because they were remains ; fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities. (Rushdie 11)

3 Thus the "broken mirror" of oblivion releases new perspectives, new angles, new narrative configurations. It is with the potentially productive uses of forgetting, with its creative interplay with memory, that this volume will be dealing. This in turn calls for a reappraisal of the commonly accepted opposition between memory and oblivion. After Paul Ricœur and Marc Augé among others, remembering and forgetting will be seen as a collaborative pair, with forgetting as the condition of memory (Ricœur) or as the lifeblood of memory ("la force vive de la mémoire", Augé). The articles included here are contributions to the delineation of an ars oblivionis , a poetics of forgetting in which oblivion's ghostly remains make for emancipatory swerves from the past, for the advent of the new.

4 We are looking indeed for a shift of perspective in line with Rushdie's "new angles". We wish to explore forgetting as something different from memory's unreliability, from loss, traumatic obfuscation or distortion. We will thus not deal with the type of forgetting that Derrida, reading Freud, links to the death drive, a type of oblivion which "threatens the archival desire" (Derrida 1996, 12), "destroys in advance its own archive" (Derrida 1996, 10) and "incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory" (Derrida 1996, 11). Forgetting produces variations, rewritings, the writer's "imaginative truth" (Derrida 1996, 10), a transfigured pronouncement about the past.

5 Freud talks of oblivion as "motivated" (Freud 149. Translation mine), as a "spontaneous selection process" (Freud 128) derived from repression. Expert in the mechanisms of memory lapses, he analyses people's "wish for forgetting" (Freud 10), their secret wish not to remember that is counterbalanced by "false reminiscences", true "deceptions" or "illusions of memory" (Freud 150) like those described by Rushdie. In turn, Marc Augé sees oblivion as the main editor of the narrative configurations of our individual or collective lives. Forgetfulness can thus be read as a paradoxical dynamis , a driving force produced by the interplay of oblivion and memory. As Derrida puts it: "forgetting corresponds to the moment of living appropriation. ... One must forget the specter ... so that history can continue" (Derrida 1994, 137). In this contradictory drive, this remembering-while-forgetting-enough, meaning and narratives come to be engendered. As Rushdie underlines, the "broken mirror" of oblivion may also be "a useful tool with which to work in the present" (Rushdie 12), not just in one's quest for the past.

6 Forgetting has been an object of inquiry in the field of social science; perhaps not so much in the field of literary studies. Yet, as Rushdie's essay highlights, narratives, as fictional constructs, investigate and challenge oblivion. We may thus wonder in what ways, both in their formal and thematic explorations, they weave forgetting, writing and storytelling together, how they represent what Derrida calls "the life of forgetting".

7 To clarify what this life actually is, we wish to make a short detour to analyse the image we chose for the volume's cover. Untitled (Two Women) by Daisy Patton belongs to a series the artist started four years ago, entitled Forgetting Is So Long . It is an apt illustration of the active process of forgetfulness, of the living appropriation it entails. Between the erasure or disappearance of memory and the legacy of the "spirit of the past" (Derrida 1994, 136), the life of forgetting points to the need to acknowledge and accept loss—"to keep loss as loss" (Derrida 1996, 19)—and to preserve its traces. As Derrida makes clear concerning photography, "[o]ne keeps the archive of 'some thing' (of someone as some thing) which took place once and is lost, that one keeps as such, as the unkept, in short, a sort of cenotaph: an empty tomb" (Derrida 2010, 19). This echoes Patton's own words when describing her creative process: "[n]ot alive but not quite dead, each person's newly imagined and altered portrait straddles the lines between memory, identity, and death. They are monuments to the forgotten" (Artist statement).

8 Patton works with discarded family photographs she collects from thrift shops, flea markets or on the Internet. She scans them, enlarges them and paints over them. Her collection of anonymous faces composes an archive of disappearance and erasure:

[Family photographs] show a mother, a child, a past self, full of in-jokes and the mundane meaningful only to a select few. But divorced from their origins, these emotion-ridden images become unknowable and lost in translation. (Artist statement)

9 The artist talks about a double death, the second one being inflicted by oblivion. She does not wish to recollect or reconstruct memories: her images are freed from any recognisable context; they stand as nameless orphans—all of them remain untitled—free-floating in anachronic times. Daisy Patton's painterly gesture thus updates forgotten presences, their absence suddenly brought closer to us. "With Forgetting Is So Long , my aim is to actually de-historicize the individuals from the past to make them present" (Patton 2018). Defacing her subjects to re-figure them as portraits, she secures a future for images emerging from an unknown past. Patton brings forgetting to life as she does not even try to search for things past and lost but exploits oblivion and confronts us with a renewed presence rather than with the absence of those who have irretrievably vanished. "I paint to disrupt, to reimagine, to re-enliven these individuals until I can either no longer recognize them or their presence is too piercing to continue" (Artist statement).

10 Preserving the mark of loss means working on what survives, a secret and ineffable tenuous presence. It means making the afterlife appear, "a being from the past that keeps surviving" (Didi-Huberman 33) through a painterly defacing/refacing process. Such is the Warburgian survival analysed by art historian Georges Didi-Huberman: that which abolishes chronology to reveal constant becoming and sketch a new temporality, the out of joint, private time of intimacy and hauntedness. Patton reckons on disappearance, on what remains in what we have forgotten and which might bring renewal:

I like the idea that photography is a representation of death (death of a moment, from Barthes), while painting is an elongation of time, or at least allows for a dynamic understanding of what time can be. My challenge with this series is to strike that tightrope walk of transforming the photograph into something new and alive through paint, permitting neither medium to overpower the other and totally destroy each other. (Patton 2016)

11 Shunning nostalgia, Daisy Patton confesses to being touched by mysterious details she then hides under colourful ornaments, by poignant remains that prick her and trigger emotions which allow for the "regenerating reviviscence of the past" (Derrida 1994, 136).

12 As the title of her series—a quote from Neruda's "Tonight I Can Write"—suggests, forgetting lingers and endures. It holds on. Because they preserve their first photographic face underneath the paint, Patton's transfigured portraits make the persisting presence of unidentified people very vivid. In the folds of the photo-pictorial palimpsest, what-has-been survives retouched. Daisy Patton's work is thus shaped "between a mechanical reproduction of the specter and an appropriation that is so alive, so interiorising, so assimilating of the inheritance and of the 'spirit of the past' that it is none other than the life of forgetting, life as forgetting itself " (Derrida 1994, 136).

13 Forgetting also lingers and endures in the field of 20th- and 21st-century British literature as the essays collected in this issue will show. "The life of forgetting" ripples on, producing narratives where oblivion is spun into memory, where elusive absences are captured and new presences are summoned.

14 The ambivalent and fruitful relation between remembering and forgetting is at the centre of T.S. Eliot's poetry. Analysing the poet's evolution through Nietzsche's construction of history and modernity, Philippe Birgy understands forgetfulness as a crucial aspect of modernity, one that cannot be separated from the desperate urge to memorialise and the backward glance it occasions. Reappraising Eliot's conservative, even reactionary, attitude towards modernity and its crisis of memory at the turn of the 20th century, Philippe Birgy shows in what ways oblivion works with poetic liberation and how creativity needs to be released from human time to shape the new. 

15 In turn, Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio explores the memory of forgetting in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Jacob's Room . Focusing on reading scenes which rework inter-intra-textual references to Tennyson and Grimm, she analyses how "forgotten fragments of past texts are inscribed in the narrative present in a form of working through". Her analyses of the afterlife of forgetting takes on the writings of Benjamin, Freud and Fédida in order to reveal the ghosts of a future past, timeless dream images prefiguring the loss and destruction of World War 1. 

16 In Adam Thorpe's Still , oblivion is not presented either as a negative foil to memory or as absolute nothingness, but as a compound of presence and absence. Delving into linguistic and stylistic inventiveness, Alexandre Privat explores the subject's mediated relationship to negativity, which oblivion is part of, to shed light on the creative potential of the gap between remembering and forgetting.

17 In Armelle Parey's article, Alzheimer's disease and its gradual loss of memory and of cognitive function are shown to be the breeding ground of new possibilities for contemporary British fiction. In Emma Healey's Elizabeth is Missing , forgetting paradoxically starts a heuristic process which leads to the solving of an old mystery, and contributes something to the renewal of the conventions of detective fiction: through the unusual association of forgetting and sleuthing, the conventional closure which the genre postulates is revised into a less comforting stagnation, as well as a "post-postmodern" imperative to listen to the voice of those afflicted with dementia.

18 Although more tangentially, Alzheimer's disease is also present in Lisa Appignanesi's The Memory Man , the novel discussed in Silvia Pellicer-Ortín's essay. The author explores the links between memory, forgetting and trauma, arguing that forgetting is a new direction in memory studies and that forgetting and remembering are "two sides of the same memory coin". Retracing the protagonist's journey from forgetting to remembering, the paper offers insightful analyses of the interaction of the two at individual and collective levels, but also of the tension between the totalising discourse of neurobiology and the multiperspectival approach of the memory novel.

19 With Katia Marcellin's study of two novels by Ali Smith, we step into ethical ground. We see how the figure of metalepsis produces both an ethical and healing kind of oblivion that presides over the emergence of a dispossessed self. Laying the ghosts of the past, taking the self out of a neoliberal logic of accumulation of goods or memories, metalepsis performs emancipation and transformation, and makes way for an encounter with the vulnerable other within and without.

20 Finally, Jean-Michel Ganteau's essay presents Jon McGregor's novel, Reservoir 13 , as a narrative which captures forgetting in the making through the recording of insignificant details of the everyday which blur into forgetting as soon as they are perceived. The impossible task of this ars oblivionis consists in gesturing towards forgetting and its lacunae which the saturated textual matter, the blunting of perception, repetition and metalepsis are symptoms of. Thus, to go back to Ricœur, forgetting is not only the condition of memory; it is also the condition "of the capacity to create and to tell stories".

Bibliography

AUGE, Marc, Les Formes de l'oubli, Paris: Rivages, 2001.

DERRIDA, Jacques, Specters of Marx , Peggy Kamuf trans., New York and London: Routledge, 1994.

DERRIDA, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression , Eric Prenowitz trans., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

DERRIDA, Jacques, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography , Jeff Fort trans., Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010.

DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges, L'Image survivante: Histoire de l'art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg , Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002.

FREUD, Sigmund, Mémoire, souvenirs, oublis , Paris: Payot, 2010.

PATTON, Daisy, " Forgetting Is So Long . Artist Statement", 2014. < http://daisypatton.com/galleries/forgetting-is-so-long-2014-2015/ >. Last accessed 31 August 2018.

PATTON, Daisy, "Forgetting is So Long", Backroom , 1 July 2016. < http://backroomcaracas.com/escritura-expandida/forgetting-is-so-long/ >. Last accessed 29 August 2018.

PATTON, Daisy, "Re: The Life of Forgetting: reproduction rights", email to A. Cassigneul, 30 April 2018.

RICŒUR, Paul, La Mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli , Paris: Seuil, 2004.

RUSHDIE, Salman, "Imaginary Homelands", Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91 , London: Granta and Penguin, 1991, 9-21.

Bibliographical reference

Adèle Cassigneul and Sylvie Maurel , “Introduction” ,  Caliban , 60 | 2018, 5-10.

Electronic reference

Adèle Cassigneul and Sylvie Maurel , “Introduction” ,  Caliban [Online], 60 | 2018, Online since 01 December 2018 , connection on 06 June 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/4206; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.4206

About the authors

Adèle cassigneul.

University Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, CAS EA 801

By this author

• Marie Cordié-Lévy, L’autoportrait photographique américain (1839-1939) [Full text] Paris : Mare & Martin, 2014, 292 p. Published in Caliban , 53 | 2015

Sylvie Maurel

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 . All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Full text issues

• 67-68 | 2022 Religious Dispute and Toleration in Early Modern Literature and History
• 65-66 | 2021 Peterloo 1819 and After: Perspectives from Britain and Beyond
• 64 | 2020 Animal Love. Considering Animal Attachments in Anglophone Literature and Culture
• 63 | 2020 Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic and SF
• 62 | 2019 Female Suffrage in British Art, Literature and History
• 61 | 2019 Land’s Furrows and Sorrows in Anglophone Countries
• 60 | 2018 The Life of Forgetting in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century British Literature
• 59 | 2018 Anglophone Travel and Exploration Writing: Meetings Between the Human and Nonhuman
• 58 | 2017 The Mediterranean and its Hinterlands
• 57 | 2017 The Animal Question in Alice Munro's Stories
• 56 | 2016 Disappearances - American literature and arts
• 55 | 2016 Sharing the Planet
• 54 | 2015 Forms of Diplomacy (16 th -21 st century)
• 53 | 2015 Representing World War One: Art’s Response to War
• 52 | 2014 Caliban and his transmutations

Anglophonia/Caliban

• Issues list

Presentation

• Editorial Policy
• Instructions for authors
• Ventes et abonnement

Informations

• Mentions légales et Crédits
• Publishing policies

Newsletters

• OpenEdition Newsletter

In collaboration with

Electronic ISSN 2431-1766

Read detailed presentation  

Site map  – Syndication

Privacy Policy  – About Cookies  – Report a problem

OpenEdition Journals member  – Published with Lodel  – Administration only

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search

• Literature & Fiction
• History & Criticism

Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Amazon Prime includes:

Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.

• Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
• Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
• Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
• A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
• Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
• Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access

Important:  Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.

Buy new: .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } -13% $15.59 $ 15 . 59 FREE delivery Thursday, June 13 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35 Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

Return this item for free.

Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select your preferred free shipping option
• Drop off and leave!

Save with Used - Acceptable .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } $8.07 $ 8 . 07 FREE delivery Friday, June 14 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35 Ships from: Amazon Sold by: -OnTimeBooks-

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 Paperback – May 1, 1992

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 448 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Books
• Publication date May 1, 1992
• Grade level 12 and up
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 7.84 x 5.16 x 1.02 inches
• ISBN-10 0140140360
• ISBN-13 978-0140140361
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Similar items that may ship from close to you

Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (May 1, 1992)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140140360
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140140361
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.84 x 5.16 x 1.02 inches
• #1,375 in British & Irish Literary Criticism (Books)
• #4,113 in Essays (Books)
• #12,832 in Short Stories Anthologies

About the author

Salman rushdie.

Sir Salman Rushdie is the author of many novels including Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury and Shalimar the Clown. He has also published works of non-fiction including The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz and, as co-editor, The Vintage Book of Short Stories.

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Salman Rushdie

Imaginary homelands.

Select a format:

Literature of the highest order

About the  author

More from this author.

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our Privacy Policy

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Imaginary homelands : essays and criticism, 1981-1991

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

112 Previews

6 Favorites

Better World Books

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station20.cebu on August 20, 2022

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)