![]() ![]() As the city grew in size and importance, so the levels of antagonism rose among its inhabitants, for, like any large-scale urban environment, it was filled with what Georg Simmel labels “overwhelming social forces” (1950:410). ![]() ![]() Photography, film and advertising (with its twin-sister, propaganda) are constant presences in Rushdie’s novels in this chapter, I read them as both instruments of cultural critique and symptoms of leveling globalization, both potential preservers of memory and magnifying (often distorting) lenses of an obsessive contemporary pursuit of fame and immortality.įrom its founding, New York City has served as the gateway to the New World and has been the impetus behind the American Dream. ![]() From their earlier incarnations as instruments of ideological control in Midnight’s Children and Shame to the pervasive ‘colonization by images’ featuring in novels such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury, various techniques of visual representation appear as deeply ambivalent metaphors for contemporary society’s excessive reliance on signifying systems. With more than a nod to Milan Kundera’s concept of ‘imagology’, developed most fully in his 1991 novel Immortality, this chapter attempts a selective reading of Salman Rushdie’s fictional use of modern technologies of representation to interrogate public and private constructions of place, history and identity. ![]()
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