| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Wednesday, March 24, 2010 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk Centre For International Studies 1 Devonshire Place |
Asian Institute PhD Seminar Series
In Anglophone Indian literature, Bombay is depicted as infinitely fragmented, a city whose rapid, ceaseless growth speeds its decay. Using examples from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I examine how narrators order the city’s chaos to reveal the social dynamics of particular versions of Bombay. In my dissertation, I look at the fiction of Vikram Chandra, Rohinton Mistry, Manil Suri and Salman Rushdie and follow characters through street spaces, apartment houses, and international travel in order to explore how the narrative negotiation of local and global communal associations create different types of privileged narrative perspectives and map various versions of the city. In these texts, the city remains an unwelcoming place that characters struggle to call “home,” even as it becomes an inextricable part of their conceptions of their own identities. The formal emphasis on narration foregrounds individual control over the manipulation of identity and saves each narrator from the realm of the silenced subaltern masses or the anonymous urban crowd, but the narration simultaneously renders other individuals invisible within the narratives. In the novels of Salman Rushdie in particular, this struggle against alienation and against communalism often manifests as the interaction of specific locales in Bombay with the dangerous instability of ground beneath our feet.
Kelly A. Minerva is a doctoral candidate in the English Department in collaboration with the Centre for South Asian Studies.
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