Salman Rushdie's Cities: Reconfigurational Politics and the Contemporary Urban Imagination

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Employing Salman Rushdie as a guide to a historicized contemporary, this study offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the plurality of cities along his transnational trajectory. It engages with the geographically identifiable Bombay, Karachi, Islamabad, London or New York; the phantasmal, politically coded, Jahilia or Mildendo, the inspirational yet flawed urban precedents of Fatehpur Sikri or Renaissance Florence and the ways these cities generate, interact with and transform each other. The book situates Rushdie's cities in relation to developments in Bombay, Karachi, Islamabad and London writing and focuses on novels which shuttle between cities. Parashkevova attends to cities' cultural and historical contexts, to many of Rushdie's numerous literary, cinematic and artistic influences and to diverse events, processes and paradigms - earthquakes, translations, seductions - that politically re-position cities and citizens on the contemporary urban map.

Reviews

Written in a lucid and compelling style, Salman Rushdie's Cities is both a major contribution to work on Rushdie's fiction and a probing investigation of the relationships between interconnected global cities. Tracing parallels across cultures, Parashkevova explores the significance of Rushdie's urban praxis for a historicized view of the 'contemporary', which stresses the political worldliness of literature. -- Professor John Thieme, University of East Anglia, UK
In Salman Rushdie's Cities, Vassilena Parashkevova provides timely and theoretically astute analysis of Rushdie's representations of suchcities as Bombay, New York, Karachi, and London, arguing that his depictions are inspired by the reflective yet illusory potential of the mirror. As in the Indian embroidery tradition of mirror work (by which Rushdie himself has also been inspired), the writing and research in this important monograph is meticulously detailed and elegantly patterned. -- Dr Claire Chambers, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
Reading Rushdie through topographies both real and imaginary, from his idealising nostalgia for Bombay to his vision of Jahilia, has given Vassilena Parashkevova a subtle passkey to this author's polymorphous and ever-provocative mind. She has entered the invisible cities of Rushdie's fiction and political thought, with their mirror pairs of utopias and dystopias, transgressors and conservatives,transformers and self-exiles, strangers, and natives, and fashioned a lucid, learned, richly detailed and stimulating analysis, which does justice to Rushdie's brilliance and fertility, while taking cognizance of his tics and limits. -- Professor Marina Warner, University of Essex, UK, and author of Stranger Magic

Author Bio

Vassilena Parashkevova is the Bibliography Editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Postdoctoral Research Fellow/Associate Lecturer in English Literature at London South Bank University, UK.