Bhabha’s metropolitan affinities drive excessive celebration of Rushdie

Evidence

The affinities of class and location then lead Bhabha, logically, to an exorbitant celebration of Salman Rushdie which culminates in pronouncements like che following, itself assembled in the manner of a postmodern pastiche: … America leads to Africa; the nations of Europe and Asia meet in Australia; the margins of the nation displace the centre; the peoples of the periphery return to write the history and fiction of the metropolis. The island story is told from the eye of the aeroplane which becomes that ‘ornament that holds the public and the private in suspense’ The bastion of Englishness crumbles at the sight of immigrants and factory workers. The great Whitmanesque sensorium of America is exchanged for a Warhol blowup, a Kruger installation, or: Mapplethorpe’s naked bodies. ‘Magical Realism’, after the Latin American boom, becomes the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 277

Categorization

• SEED: Examples how class/location shape theory’s object choices, giving a concrete biographical-materialist method for reading postcolonial critics rather than taking their discourse claims at face value.