Rushdie shifted from a myth of unbelonging to one of excess belongings.

Evidence

Thus, Rushdie’s idea of ‘migrancy’ for example, which is quite central to his self-representation both in fiction and in life, has come to us in two versions. In the first version, fully present in Shame and in the writings that came at more or less the same time, ‘migrancy’ is given to us as an ontological condition of all human beings, while the ‘migrant’ is said to have ‘floated upwards from history’ In the second version, articulated more fully in the more recent writings, this myth of ontological unbelonging is replaced by another, larger myth of excess of belongings: not that he belongs nowhere, but that he belongs to too many places. This is one kind of thrust in Rushdie’s work, which appears to refer to the social condition of the ‘Third World’ migrant but is replete also with echoes from both the literary tradition of High Modernism and the poststructuralist philosophical positions. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 493

Categorization

• DEFINE: Documents Rushdie’s own mutable self-presentations across two periods of his writing.
• XREF: The two versions of ‘migrancy’ map onto the classic strategic-essentialist bind: an ontological/universalizing myth versus a hyper-specific repertoire of belongings, both displacing class. — connects to: Rushdie’s exilic lightness differs from Joyce’s willed, tragic self-exile — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 534; Rushdie’s implied reader is a global postcolonial migrant sharing filmic and literary echoes — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 200; Rushdie’s leavetaking rhetoric collapses into the ambivalence it claims to overcome — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 530

Broader Connections

• Rushdie’s implied reader is a global postcolonial migrant sharing filmic and literary echoes #expands (0.80) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 200
• Rushdie’s exilic lightness differs from Joyce’s willed, tragic self-exile #qualifies (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 534