Released five years ago, Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton (2012) serves as an important review of his life and oeuvre up to that point, (re)written from the author's changing ideological positions and reflective of his attitudes one decade into the twentyfirst century. Three years later, Rushdie published his most recent novel to date, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015).This special issue dedicated to exploring "New Directions in Rushdie Studies" sets out to survey the meaning and impact of this prolific author's body of work up to the present moment, while highlighting some of the most innovative approaches in the field. Our aim is to offer new insights to the decades-long discussion over how Rushdie, as a writer, critic, and cultural icon, circumvents any categorization. In the pursuit of this aim, we acknowledge and seek to challenge the critical emphasis often placed on "po-fa" Rushdie. This term, coined by Rushdie and theorized by Robert Eaglestone (2013), denotes a popular reading of Rushdie's work through the lens of the fatwa as a critical turning point. Such an interpretation is understandable, especially given the centrality of the fatwa to Rushdie's memoir (its title is the alias he adopted while in hiding during the "Rushdie affair"). As he writes of himself in Joseph Anton:He had always been post-something according to that mandarin literary discourse in which all contemporary writing was mere aftermath -post-colonial, post-modern, post-secular, postintellectual, post-literate. Now he would add his own category, post-fatwa, to that dusty postoffice, and would end up not just po-co and po-mo but po-fa as well. (2012: 442)
This article examines some of the highlights, limitations, and contradictions of Rushdie’s authorial personas that have been perpetuated and challenged by his critics and the mass media. I argue that Joseph Anton, published in 2012, exhibits evidence of Rushdie’s attempt at authorial self-fashioning, and therefore the memoir represents an important part of his effort to shape the public narrative about him. Joseph Anton highlights Rushdie’s exilic persona through direct comparisons to figures like Voltaire and Galileo, and attempts to privilege this position above his other authorial selves. This authorial self has deep roots in a narrative fashioned by Rushdie that has been abetted by some of his critics and the media since the fatwa. My essay critiques this emphasis, suggesting that Rushdie’s self-fashioning is out of step with his twenty-first-century political ideals and affiliations. Ultimately, the third-person “distancing” of the memoir helps to highlight what it seeks to mitigate: a plurality of Rushdie’s competing for public attention.
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