ANA CRISTINA MENDES. Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace.
2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 274 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/res/hgu080
ISSN1471-6968
Autores Tópico(s)South Asian Studies and Conflicts
ResumoAna Cristina Mendes’s monograph is a welcome addition to the field of Rushdie studies. This text, similar to Jenni Ramone’s recent monograph Salman Rushdie and Translation (2013), is ambitious in attempting to break new ground by analysing how Rushdie and his work is situated in a global culture industry. Its five chapters are divided into related topics on Rushdie as the gatekeeper of Indian Writing in English, his role in the canon-formation of Indian and postcolonial literature, Rushdie’s criticism on film and television, ‘Music and the Brown Culture Industry’ and Rushdie as a public intellectual. Mendes analyses Rushdie’s status as a ‘global brand’ and seeks to ‘address a critical blind spot in Rushdie studies [ … ] not by disavowing Rushdie, the literary author, but by drawing him into a nuanced, multi-layered picture composed of many other (at times paradoxical) Rushdies, in keeping with a postmodern emphasis on self-referentiality and cultural interplay’ (p. 172). The focus of Mendes’s monograph is surprisingly often not on Rushdie and his texts but on novels such as Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (2008) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997), films such as the Merchant-Ivory production Shakespeare Wallah (1965) and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the British TV comedy series Goodness Gracious Me and British Asian bands such as the Cornershop and Asian Dub Foundation. However, occasionally Mendes’s laudable aim to refer to a varied range of other cultural texts and to record a multitude of voices of those who contribute to the discourses surrounding the culture industries, such as reviewers, writers, critics, artists, journalists and politicians, blurs the study’s focus and threatens to obscure the author’s critical stance.
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