“You Must Remember This”: Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh

Abstract

Salman Rushdie's fiction is the writing of capitalist neo-colonialism. We see this in the fiction's celebration of cultural eclecticism and hybridity, the reification of local cultures and traditions into so many consumerist choices and lifestyle options. Rushdie's fiction has come to stand, almost emblematically, for the writing of postcolonial literature, a literature that somehow reconciles the untroubled textual playfulness of a consumer culture with the historical and political legacy of anti-colonial struggle. The writing allows us to evade the necessity of concrete political and ethical choices. It provides us, as in the case of Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, with a text self-consciously constructed from a multitude of other texts, each chosen to further the eclectic range of the hybrid, postcolonial work. Every dilemma faced by a character, each troubled judgement reached by a reader, all are absorbed into the mis-en