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Abstract(s)
This essay focuses on the ways images of Bombay are in the writer Salman Rushdie’s case bound to affective practices. Besides addressing the issue of photography as representation and affective practice, a correlated purpose of the chapter at hand is to bring together two apparently unconnected texts, penned more than half a century apart by two seemingly unrelated authors: Benjamin’s essay on the project of European modernity epitomised by the city of Paris under the Second Empire – ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ – and Rushdie’s novel, set during its first half in the Indian metropolis of Bombay depicted as an example of a former European colony in belated quest of a modernity disavowed by colonialism. This image of Bombay, today one of the vast megalopolises that are contributing to reconceptualize the idea of the city, is the rationale for the present brief incursion into the meanings of the city in modernity. Even if an European city might appear an atypical starting point for addressing the representation of an Asian postcolonial city, the essay ‘Paris, the Capital’ can productively act as a counterpoint to Rushdie’s text chiefly because Benjamin’s Paris, the urban centre of European modernity, generates in itself a discourse that might be transposed to postcolonial urban contexts.
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Keywords
Visual culture Rushdie, Salman, 1947-….. The Ground Beneath Her Feet Postcolonial studies Postcolonial literature Postcolonial cultural production British literature Bombay India Photography City Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940 - Crítica e interpretação
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Mendes, AC. (2012) “Bombay/ ‘Wombay’: Refracting the Postcolonial Cityscape in The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, AC Mendes (org.), Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture: Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders. New York and London: Routledge, 158-181.