Postcolonial Ekphrasis: Salman Rushdie Gives the Finger Back to the Empire

0. Introduction

“…Unfortunately, these postcolonial intermedial texts have been largely neglected so far, even if aspects like work-image intersections, ekphrasis and visual culture have raised some academic interest (Kortenaar 1997;Döring 2002;Emery 2007;Meyer 2009;Mendes 2012). Unfortunately, these postcolonial intermedial texts have been largely neglected so far, even if aspects like work-image intersections, ekphrasis and visual culture have raised some academic interest (Kortenaar 1997;Döring 2002;Emery 2007;Meyer 2009;Mendes 2012).…”

7. Postcolonial Ekphrasis in the Contemporary Anglophone Indian Novel

“…The "re-visionary effort" (Döring 2002, 166) of postcolonial writers is often preoccupied with countering the colonial gaze, intervening in the existing relationship of visuality and power, trying "to recover an authentic precolonial imagination" (Emery 1997, 261) in a neocolonial context, and with delivering subversive ekphrases of imperialist paintings (cf. Kortenaar 1997 andKortenaar 2012, who discussed the subversive potential of ekphrasis in Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children where Saleem describes Millais's 1870 painting The Boyhood of Raleigh). Since antagonistic and paragonal forces inhere in ekphrasis, postcolonial ekphrasis has been characterized as the urge of postcolonial translation and transgressive transformation (cf.…”