Title: Writing Back to the Empire and Re-mapping World Literature: A Study of Midnight’s Children of Salman Rushdie

Abstract: The Indo-Anglian writer Salman Rushdie and the British writer E.M. Forster have both written about an Indian Muslim Dr Aziz. Such a coincidence deserves attention from literature, politics and culture. On the one hand, the similarity between the two Azizes forms intertextuality between Midnight’s Children and A Passage to India. Through a review of Forster’s Indian writing compared with Rushdie’s Dr. Aziz, it is possible to discern the embedded colonial ideology in British literature and the revision of such discourses initiated by the contemporary Indo-Anglian writer, which is a typical literary case of writing back to the empire. On the other hand, if we take into account the self-reference in Rushdie’s fiction, postcolonial literature’s writing-back to colonial literature is not a finished and static discursive resistance, but rather successive negotiation and reconfiguration of power and cultural influences between central and peripheral literatures. Based on these, this paper first focuses on Midnight’s Children’s adaptation of Forster’s Indian writing so as to demonstrate its two functions of both supplementing Indian colonial history and discursive resistance of postcolonial literature. This paper then analyses British literature’s cultural anxiety and the feasibility of Indo-Anglian literature’s re-mapping world literature based on a study of the self-reference in Rushdie’s fiction as well as the reception of One Thousand and One Nights in Europe.

Keywords: Salman Rushdie, E. M. Forster, Midnight’s Children, A Passage to India, Indo-Anglian literature

Authors: Peilin Wang, Ph.D. Candidate, School of International Studies, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, Guangdong, China; Jianchong Nan, Professor, School of English Studies, Xi’an International Studies University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2024.04.006