Jamie Sullivan (Mount Marty College, South Dakota): Riddles of Identity in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Among the myriad concerns of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is the problem of identity and how it is connected to history, nation of origin, religion, ideology, class, and race among other factors. For Rushdie identity is a kind of assemblage that is amorphous, fluid, and--in some sense-- fictive. In other words, Rushdie’s notion of identity is postmodern. This approach to identity, however, takes on added significance, and becomes far more complex, in Midnight’s Children since the problematic identity of its narrator, Saleem Sinai, it tied inextricably to India as it emerges from British rule. Saleem, whose mind is telepathically inhabited by the thousand and one voices of children born in the hour of India’s independence, identity is a riddle whose terms are continually being altered or inverted. The make-up or status of Saleem’s identity is crucial because he is, or believes himself to be, a personification of India—what he does India does, what happens to him happens to India. As he grows, so will India grow.

What then does a postcolonial India viewed from a postmodern perspective look like? Can the multiple religious, linguistic, and ethnic components of India be integrated in a national identity? How have partition and bitter political struggle altered Indian identity? How, precisely, do individual and national identity interact? Rushdie’s posing of these questions and his tentative and restive answers still resonate more than twenty-five years after the publication of Midnight’s Children.


Kevin Brooks (North Dakota State University): Season of Migration to the West: Sudanese Literature and the Call for Domestic Peace'

This presentation will compare Dave Egger’s What is the What?, a novelization of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achek Deng’s life-story, with the most famous Sudanese novel, Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih. Just as Salih depicts northern Arabs’ experiences with London as difficult and violent, Deng through Eggers depicts the Sudanese Lost Boys’ experiences in the US as fraught with challenges: education has been hard to attain, and violence has followed the Sudanese to the US, both internally and through encounters with Americans.

This presentation will sketch some of the most striking parallels between the two novels, then focus on “the heart of darkness” in both. The most disturbing element of Season is the serial killing of young women by the main character, and the personal tragedy at the heart of What is Deng's loss of his girlfriend to a brutal, domestic attack. These parallel events highlight that, 35 years apart, and worlds of Sudanese experiences apart, these cultures are plagued by internal as well as external violence, and the need for gender equality and domestic peace in Sudan remains one of the most important stages of economic and social development for the country.

Ammar Naji (University of North Dakota): The Making of 'Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art': Re-imaging India Through Art in The Moor's Last Sigh.

This paper examines Rushdie’s presentation of India as a creative work of art (High-Masala-Art) with dislocated structures and dissolved contradictory tastes that re-define the boundaries of cultural identity. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie highlights the multiple realities and contradictions that India presents in the creation of its pluralistic “art” as a site of identification characterized by oppositions, discontinuities and disunities that complicate the role of the artist in blurring cultural boundaries and initiating an unresolved transnational dialectic. The kind of artistic reality that both artists, Vasco Miranda and Aurora, envision in the novel don’t simply re-inscribe a new postcolonial reality on an eroded piece of history as some critics contend, rather skillfully aims to dismantle the unity of artful creation to mimic the unstable (fluid) realities that India encompasses today. Like the “‘Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art,’” India is an artful creation made out of endless entities and conflicting realities all woven together by the artist’s imagination. By analyzing the transcultural values that Rushdie ascribes to “art” as a new space of identity marked by plurality of meaning and impurity of forms, this paper aims to unravel the political-intellectual interventions that Rushdie inhabits in the making of India into a “one universe” where different views clash and yet draw from each other. The imaginary nature of these interventions makes us rethink not only Rushdie’s fluid position in and out of the discourse of politics, but more significantly his intellectual commitment to politics through the depiction of art.