Narratives of ‘Liquid Modernity’: Translation, Migrancy and Nomadism in Salman Rushdie’s Novels
Narratives of ‘Liquid Modernity’: Translation, Migrancy and Nomadism in Salman Rushdie’s Novels

Summary/Abstract: This paper looks at translation, migrancy and nomadism as strategies of self-definition and self-location in several of Salman Rushdie’s works. In contrast with the alleged solidity of the myths legitimating the birth of ‘imaginary homelands,’ novels like Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983) promote the notion that countries need to be fluidly projected into existence. In his more recent narratives, such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001) and Shalimar the Clown (2005), Rushdie seems to confirm, as well as amend to some extent, Zygmunt Bauman’s diagnosis of the progressive liquefaction of the age of modernity, whereby solid, rigid, traditional societal and power structures are being supplanted, in this ‘post-panoptical’ stage, by more fluid and flexible, extra-territorial figurations.

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