Postmodern Chic and Postcolonial Cheek: A Map of Linguistic Resistance, Hybridity, and Pedagogy in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/2369-7326.40282Abstract
This essay examines how Salman Rushdie appropriates the colonial linguistic medium (English) in Midnight’s Children and embeds resistance within its commonplace and seemingly innocent lexical interstices through the insertion of Hindi/Urdu terms in his wordplay. This lexical hybridity may be examined as a creative example of Homi Bhabha's exegetical “third space” that is postmodern in its disruption of semiotic stasis and postcolonial in its disruption of the primacy of English. This paper contextualizes Rushdie’s code-mixing of English and Hindi/Urdu lexical registers to produce multiple meanings and puns, maps select examples through L.G. Heller’s mode of linguistic diagramming, and provides an overview of the resultant ideological considerations.References
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