Salman Rushdie and Multiple Identities

The study Salman Rushdie and Multiple Identities explores the different angles from which Salman Rushdie approaches the issue of identity within the postcolonial paradigm. At the same time, it deals with the fragmented and performative image that his global readership construes of both the author and his writings. 

First, the author's biographical condition is in question, with its fragmented pieces assembling a picture in continuous motion: perpetual migrant, simultaneously an insider and an outsider of several countries and cultures, appropriating the English language and re-making it creatively. Also, Rushdie's destiny created itself, as he was made to inhabit a bleak version of reality which he turned to his own literary advantage: fatwa represented a defining occurrence for the current version of the author's identity.

Secondly, the study analyses the novels' and the characters' identities who are formed and perform in an in-between fluid space of fantasy and reality, with nations transgressing territorial units and individuals migrating through time. History, wars and violence define national identity and ancestry re-invents itself to permanently re-create volatile images of nations. Gendered identity is also flexible and hybridity seems to underline a never stable social construct.  

Finally, Salman Rushdie's presence on the Romanian book market is another way through which his auctorial image is construed in his public's eyes. It goes hand in hand with the somewhat parallel historic backgrounds of postcolonialism and postcommunism, and follows a coordinated publicity effort to present him from multiple perspectives.