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The Liminal Space in Salman Rushdie’s The Midnight’s Children

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... Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Midnight's Children, becomes a conduit for collective memory and history, projecting the struggles and aspirations of post-colonial India into his own personal memory, where he recalls and recounts specific details and events from his past through his extraordinary memory. This postcolonial approach enables Rushdie to utilise magic realism to reinvent history and challenge dominant narratives of power and nationalism (Mukherjee, 2021). ...
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Erich Neumann's The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype provides a profound and comprehensive analysis of the mother archetype, delving into its deep-rooted significance in the human psyche. Neumann explores how this universal representation of motherhood represents not only life, nourishment, and protection but also encompasses broader themes of creation, sustenance, and empowerment. By examining its manifestations across diverse cultures, myths, and religions, he uncovers the far-reaching impact of this archetype on both individual and collective consciousness. Neumann's analysis of the mother archetype particularly emphasises the mother’s role in shaping human experiences, relationships, and cultural narratives. The writer examines Salman Rushdie’s novel Victory City based on these aspects of matriarchy leading to the complex interplay between the personal and collective unconscious, highlighting how the mother archetype influences understandings of femininity, masculinity, and the dynamics of power.
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The paper deals with two real regions in India that acquire a magical quality in Salman Rushdie’s novel, Midnight’s Children, the Kashmir Valley, where the narrator-protagonist’s family history begins, and the Sundarbans, where Saleem regains his memory. It begins with Rushdie’s assertion that the spaces and places in the novel are as fictional as they are real, described during a time when the writer no longer lived in India. The paper then introduces Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia which shares key characteristics with the two spaces analysed: both are isolated, yet penetrable, function in relation to surrounding space, and reach their full potential when characters break with traditional time. The main analysis focuses on the realistic elements of the Kashmir Valley and the Sundarbans before highlighting the magical aspects that transform them. In the Kashmir Valley, the landscape is personified, resisting intrusion, particularly from Doctor Aadam Aziz, who returns with a new worldview after studying in Germany. The valley’s timelessness, its association with Paradise, and its extraordinary inhabitants – exemplified by Tai the boatman – are also explored. The Sundarbans similarly resists change, rejecting four strangers – Saleem Sinai, Ayooba Baloch, Farooq Rashid and Shaheed Dar –after initially attempting to assimilate them. Its symbolic association with a tomb, the theme of symbolic death followed by a rebirth and the exaggerated features of the forest are also discussed. The paper concludes by drawing parallels between the two spaces, both of which possess agency, resist intrusion, and function as atemporal havens where unconventional solutions to crises are sought.
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Derived from the Latin term “limen”, which means threshold, the term ‘liminality’ was first traced in the Dutch, German and French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep’s book Le Rites de Passage. Van Gennep examines the ceremonies occupying an individual’s “life crises” into three major distinctions rites of separation, transition and the rites of incorporation. If Gennep’s tripartite structure is studied very carefully and explored in the characters of Mamang Dai’s magnum opus The Black Hill, it can be very well observed that the Adi and the Mishmi tribes of Arunachal Pradesh, about whom Dai has penned down this novel are the same liminal beings, who are in the transitional status of being yet not being. Conferred with the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award for the novel, author Mamang Dai, basically scribbles the painful dilemma of three central characters- Gimur, Kajinsha and Father Krick- who have undergone a typical unsettling situation on one hand and an unlimited freedom on the other hand throughout their journey in the novel. The characters’ anxieties, frustrations and uncertainties are quite akin and can best be expressed through the impactful words of critic Bjorn Thomassen, who in his book Liminality and the Modern Living Through the In-Between writes that liminality is about human beings’ journey through various experiences and their reaction to change. So, placing the liminal theory on one side and the predicament of Adi and Mishmi villagers as portrayed in Dai’s The Black Hill on the other side, this paper is an earnest attempt to trace the liminal spaces that occurred in the daily routinized structures of Arunachali tribes in the dilemmatic historic period between 1847-1855. Keywords: Liminality, adi , mishmi, culture, space
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Taking up the roles that Salman Rushdie himself has assumed as a cultural broker, gatekeeper, and mediator in various spheres of public production, Ana Cristina Mendes situates his work in terms of the contemporary production, circulation, and consumption of postcolonial texts within the workings of the cultural industries. Mendes pays particular attention to Rushdie as a public performer across various creative platforms, not only as a novelist and short story writer, but also as a public intellectual, reviewer, and film critic. Mendes argues that how a postcolonial author becomes personally and professionally enmeshed in the dealings of the cultural industries is of particular relevance at a time when the market is strictly regulated by a few multinational corporations. She contends that marginality should not be construed exclusively as a basis for understanding Rushdie's work, since a critical grounding in marginality will predictably involve a reproduction of the traditional postcolonial binaries of oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized that the writer subverts. Rather, she seeks to expand existing interpretations of Rushdie's work, itineraries, and frameworks in order to take into account the actual conditions of postcolonial cultural production and circulation within a marketplace that is global in both orientation and effects.
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Rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity - one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change, Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.
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Travel writing, it has been said, helped produce the rest of the world for a Western audience. Could the same be said more recently of so-called "postcolonial" writing? In this work, Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is given to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using both literary-critical and sociological methods of analysis, Huggan discusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies, and the means by which postcolonial "products" are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption. This volume examines everything from well-meaning multiculturalism, tourism and pseudo-anthropology, to the Booker Prize, anthologies and academic texts. It points to the urgent need for a more carefully grounded understanding of the processes of production, dissemination and consumption that have surrounded the rapid development of the postcolonial field..
Hybridity and Postcoloniality: Social, and Historical Innovations in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. (Master's Thesis)
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