Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis

Looking for Imaginary Homelands summary? This paper contains a synopsis, critical review, and analysis of Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie.

Introduction

The essay Imaginary Homelands describes the plight of the writers in the Diaspora as they attempt to reconnect with their homelands. However, the reconnection fails miserably due to incomplete memory. They are completely out of touch with their homelands and hence grossly alienated.

This essay will focus on the features of semantic and lexical structures employed in order to highlight the question of memory fragmentation. These are metaphors, semantic fields, intertextuality and text types, and register.

Imaginary Homelands Summary

Imaginary Homelands is a collection of essays by Salman Rushdie. The book written between 1981 and 1992 focuses on the author’s experiences in the time when Indira Gandhi was ruling India. The book is divided into six parts: Midnight’s children, The politics of India and Pakistan, Literature, Arts & media, Experience of migrants, and The question of Palestine.

Imaginary Homelands Analysis

Metaphor in imaginary homelands.

There is extensive use of metaphor in the essay Imaginary Homelands by Rushdie. This is driven by the need to convey the theme of alienation that people in the Diaspora are invariably plagued with.

Mostly, the exiles have to do with faint memories, which have gaping hiatuses and therefore, they have to fill in using their imaginations (Seyhan 2000). The use of metaphor, it can be argued, deliberately reflects on Rushdie’s personal history. The metaphors have been discussed as follows.

The old photograph that hangs in the room where Rushdie works is metaphorical. It represents a section of Rushdie’s past from which he has been totally alienated. He was not yet born when the photograph was taken. The old photograph is significant because it prompts Rushdie to visit the house immortalised on it.

This is a black and white image of the house, and as Rushdie discovers, his childhood memories were also monochromatic (Rushdie 1991, p. 9). This implies that his childhood memories were untainted.

Pillars of salt have also been used metaphorically. It is an allusion to the biblical story of Lot and his wife in which the latter turned into a pillar of salt upon looking back at the destruction that was befalling their homeland. Pillars of salt, therefore, refers to the dangers faced by those in exile when they try to reconnect with their homelands.

This point to the trouble that Rushdie faced from his motherland when he wrote the novel Satanic Verses which featured Prophet Mohammad sacrilegiously. Consequently, a fatwa was declared on him and he had to be given a round-the-clock police protection by the British government.

Then, there is the metaphor of the broken mirror. The metaphor denotes the distant and almost obscure memories that those in exile have about their homeland. The memories are made up of many pieces that cannot be patched up together. The fact that some crucial pieces are missing aggravates matters. In extreme cases, those living in diaspora have no recollection at all about their homeland.

Consequently, they resort to imaginations to complete the picture. In the essay, the author writes: “…we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10). He further admits that he made Saleem, the narrator in one of his earlier works; suspect that “his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory…” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10).

Closely related to the metaphor of broken mirror is the reference to shards of memory. Shards are small jagged pieces that result when something is shattered. It is impossible to reconstruct the original item using them. More often than not, a considerable number of them are irretrievable. This is a reflection of the hopelessly inadequate memories about their homelands that are nursed by those in the diaspora.

They can only afford tiny fragments of memories, which cannot be put together to build a complete picture of their motherland. They then resort to the “broken pots of antiquity” (Rushdie 1991, p. 12) to reconstruct their past. Rushdie further argues that as human beings, we are capable only of fractured perceptions (Rushdie 1991, p. 12) because we are partial beings.

Rushdie also likens meaning to a shaky edifice built from scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films among others. This implies that the meaning attached to the memories that those in exile harbour is constantly being amended. The shaky edifice has to receive constant patches and repairs in order to maintain it.

Semantic Fields in Imaginary Homelands

Brinton (2000) defines semantic field as a segment of reality symbolized by a set of related words (p. 112). The words in a semantic field share a common semantic property. There are various semantic fields in Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands.

Rushdie uses the expression “imaginary homelands” as a powerful metaphor to elucidate the shattered vision of the migrant who is abroad. This semantic field denotes the preoccupation with lost memories experienced by those in exile. To them, home is not a real place, but an imaginary rendition authored by discontinuous fragments of memory conceived in imagination.

According to Rushdie, it is impossible to reclaim the lost memories and, therefore, the need to recreate a vastly fictionalized “Indias of the mind” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10). This amplifies the alienation faced by those in exile.

Another semantic field is evident in the expressions “lost time” and “lost city” (Rushdie 1991, p. 9-10). In Rushdie’s essay, they refer to a lost history, which those in the Diaspora cannot recover. What are available are the disjointed shards of memory that are scarcely sufficient to build a history on.

Due to this, Rushdie is confined to creating his own version of India and as a result, he ends up writing a novel of memory and about memory. It implies that everything is lost thus making the exiles more alienated from their homelands.

The admonition on the bridge over a local railway line, “Drive like Hell and you will get there” (Rushdie 1991, p. 11) is another semantic field. This statement is curiously ambiguous. On the one hand, it may be a warning against over-speeding whose end result is likely to be death through a possible accident.

On the other hand, it might be a rallying call to drivers to zoom over the bridge so as to get to their destinations on time. Rushdie envisions a contradiction in this ambiguity. He holds fast to it because it is one of the fragments of memories about his homeland.

Then, there is the way in which Rushdie uses the expression “our worlds”. This is a semantic field that denotes people’s individual experiences, aspirations and dreams. In this essay, the author states that individuals have the freedom to describe their worlds according to the way they perceive them.

This is a deliberate attempt to escape the harsh reality of lost memories. He can find refuge in the use of imagination to recreate his own world; one that consists of memory fragments. It underscores the biting alienation afflicting those in Diaspora.

Imaginary Homelands: Narrative Forms

Rushdie’s essay is chiefly a literary text. This is because it employs narration as the method of presentation. The author narrates his moving experiences when he visits Bombay after many years.

He narrates: “A few years ago, I revisited Bombay, which is my lost city, after an absence of something like half my life.” (Rushdie 1991, p. 9). This is an effective way of reaching out to the readers, most of whom may not be familiar with the feeling of alienation experienced in exile.

The narrative forms involve orientation, which sets the scene, time and the characters in the essay. In this case, the scene is Bombay; the time is a few years ago; and the characters include the narrator himself. There is also the compilation, which outlines the problem that leads to a series of events.

In this essay, the old photograph made the author visit Bombay after many years. Narrative forms also involve a resolution. This is the answer to the problem elucidated in the essay. In this essay, the author reverts to the use of imagination to make up for lost memories. He creates the India that he can afford.

Being an essay, it can also be considered a factual text. This is because it entails a discussion on the problem of a fragmented memory. The author draws the reader’s attention to the plight of emigrant troubled by a lost history. Plagued by insufficient recollection, the author, as a literary artist, discovers that he is less than a sage.

Imaginary Homelands: Text Register

Closely related to the text type is the use of register. Register refers to the set of meanings, the configuration of semantic patterns that are typically drawn upon under the specific conditions, along with words and structures that are used with the realization of these meanings (Halliday 1978, p. 23). This draws interest to Rushdie’s contextual use of language in the essay Imaginary Homelands .

Rushdie examines the complex situation that encumbers the writer in the diaspora as they attempt to transform nostalgia into an ideal past (Mannur 2010, p. 28). But seeing the past through broken mirrors diminishes the idealised image of the past.

He further draws an analogy between the old black and white photograph and his childhood perceptions. History had added colour to those perceptions, but nostalgia has drained hue out of them: “the colours of history had seeped out of my mind’s eye” (Rushdie, 1991, p. 9).

Allusions in Imaginary Homelands

The essay Imaginary Homelands makes references to various other texts. These intertextual allusions serve to reinforce the plight of those living in exile. They heighten the alienation and the feeling of loss, which arise as a result of loss of memory. They also serve to build on the plot of the essay; thus, emphasizing the subject matter.

The first reference is made to L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go Between . The first sentence of the novel forms the caption to the old photograph in the author’s room. It states that the past is a foreign country. This implies that those in exile are not familiar with their pasts.

However, the author makes a fervent attempt to escape the harsh reality of the statement by trying to reverse it. He would have preferred to grasp his humble beginning, but unfortunately, he is hopelessly trapped in the present. So, the past becomes a lost home, a lost city shrouded in the mists of lost time (Rushdie 1991, p. 9).

Another instance of intertextuality is evident in the use of the metaphor “pillar of salt”. This has been borrowed from the biblical story in which fire rains down on Sodom and Gomorrah, home to Lot and his wife. Lot’s wife turns back, contrary to the instructions given by the angel, and turns into a pillar of salt.

Similarly, those in forced exile face potential demise should they turn back home. A few do turn back home in spite of the risk they expose themselves to. As for Rushdie, the people back home are baying for his blood as controversy rages about his novel, Satanic Verses.

Rushdie also makes reference to a book he is scripting while in north London. He looks out the window onto a city that is inherently dissimilar to the one being illustrated in the book. This instance is quite relevant here in that it helps bring to the fore the disparity between reality and fiction.

The city described in the book being written is built on some obscure memories, which result from missing history. This is the distortion occasioned by broken memories. In that book, the author makes the narrator to suspect that his mistakes are as a result of distorted memories.

The author draws a parallel to his other work of art, Midnight’s Children . He is still grappling with the disturbing issue of memory. Before penning the book, he spends a long time trying to recall what Bombay, his homeland, looked like in the 50s and 60s. Due to insufficient memory, he shifts the setting to Agra under the pretext of creating a certain joke about the Taj Mahal.

What is evident here is the substitution made by individuals afflicted with incomplete recall in order to make up for the gaps in their memories. This is what informs the rather baffling conclusion that writers are no longer sages, dispensing the wisdom of the centuries (Rushdie 1991, p. 12).

The essay has also borrowed from John Fowle’s Daniel Martin. The opening line in this book thus goes: “Whole sight: or all the rest is desolation” (Rushdie 1991, p. 12). The statement seems to be implying that the problem of broken memories could be universal. It is felt by all, not just Rushdie alone. It also points to the fact that it is not possible to experience a complete memory recall.

Any attempt to total recall may only lead to desolation. This also explains why there is a universal resort to imagination to complete the missing picture. Consequently, writers cease to be sages as they have no wisdom to dispense – only an imaginary homeland.

Rushdie has successfully employed the various features of semantics and lexicon structure in order to express his meaning. Through the use of metaphors and intertextuality, the author successfully depicts the problem of a fragmented memory and explains why those in exile have to resort to imagination in order to recreate the homes they can never attain (Ramsey and Ganapathy-Doré, 2011, p. 162).

The text type used is also appropriate since it helps connect with the reader who may not be familiar to the alienating experiences of those in exile and the reason as to why writers engage in imagination rather than portraying reality.

Semantic fields in the essay have accomplished the intended purpose of expressing meaning to as many readers as possible. Therefore, it is important to study the semantic and lexical structure employed by Rushdie in his works in order to understand them fully.

List of References

Brinton, L J 2000, The structure of modern English: a linguistic introduction , Illustrated edn, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Halliday, M A 1978, Language as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning, London: Edward Arnold Publishing Company.

Mannur, A 2010, Culinary fictions: food in South Asian diasporic culture , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Ramsey, H and Ganapathy-Doré, G 2011, Projections of paradise: ideal elsewheres in postcolonial migrant literature , New York: Rodopi.

Rushdie, S 1991, Imaginary homelands, London: Granta Books.

Seyhan, A 2000, Writing outside the nation , New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

  • Chicago (A-D)
  • Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, March 4). Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis. https://ivypanda.com/essays/imaginary-homelands-essay/

"Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis." IvyPanda , 4 Mar. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/imaginary-homelands-essay/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis'. 4 March.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis." March 4, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/imaginary-homelands-essay/.

1. IvyPanda . "Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis." March 4, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/imaginary-homelands-essay/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis." March 4, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/imaginary-homelands-essay/.

  • "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" by Salman Rushdie
  • Fanaticism in “The Prophet’s Hair” by Rushdie
  • Narayan’s and Rushdie’s Perspectives Regarding Hybrid Identity
  • Salman Rushdie: Effectiveness of the Writer
  • Hart Devlin Debate: Summary & Analysis
  • The Couter by Salman Rushdie
  • “Hell Heaven” Summary & Analysis Essay
  • “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”: Summary & Analysis
  • The Gift of the Magi Essay: Summary & Analysis
  • The Tortilla Curtain: American Dream - Characters, Summary & Analysis
  • Language Testing and Assessment
  • Multilingualism
  • Critical Summary: “The time course of semantic and syntactic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from eye movements” by Yang, Suiping, Hsuan-Chih and Rayner
  • Mandarin Chinese
  • Real Time and Apparent Time Studies
  • About the Author
  • Events & Appearances

imaginary homelands essay pdf

Imaginary Homelands

Essays & criticism 1981-1991.

Salman Rushdie at his most candid, impassioned, and incisive— Imaginary Homelands is an important and moving record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. These 75 essays demonstrate Rushdie’s range and prophetic vision, as he focuses on his fellow writers, on films, and on the mine-strewn ground of race, politics and religion.

“Whether he is analyzing racial prejudice in Britain or surveying an India riven by fundamentalism and politics of religious hatred, he writes as an impartial observer, a citizen of the world. Subtle and witty, these concise, eloquent pieces are a pleasure to read.”   —Publisher’s Weekly

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

Guide cover placeholder

Salman Rushdie

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1981

Plot Summary

Continue your reading experience

SuperSummary Plot Summaries provide a quick, full synopsis of a text. But SuperSummary Study Guides — available only to subscribers — provide so much more!

Join now to access our Study Guides library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on more than 5,000 literary works from novels to nonfiction to poetry.

See for yourself. Check out our sample guides:

Guide cover image

Toni Morrison

Guide cover image

Malcolm Gladwell

David And Goliath

Guide cover image

D. H. Lawrence

Whales Weep Not!

Related summaries: by Salman Rushdie

A SuperSummary Plot Summary provides a quick, full synopsis of a text.

A SuperSummary Study Guide — a modern alternative to Sparknotes & CliffsNotes — provides so much more, including chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and important quotes.

See the difference for yourself. Check out this sample Study Guide:

Salman Rushdie

Imaginary homelands.

Imaginary Homelands

Select a format:

Literature of the highest order

About the  author

More from this author.

imaginary homelands essay pdf

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our Privacy Policy

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

imaginary homelands essay pdf

  • This Just In
  • Grateful Dead
  • Old Time Radio
  • 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
  • Audio Books & Poetry
  • Computers, Technology and Science
  • Music, Arts & Culture
  • News & Public Affairs
  • Spirituality & Religion
  • Radio News Archive

imaginary homelands essay pdf

  • Flickr Commons
  • Occupy Wall Street Flickr
  • NASA Images
  • Solar System Collection
  • Ames Research Center

imaginary homelands essay pdf

  • All Software
  • Old School Emulation
  • MS-DOS Games
  • Historical Software
  • Classic PC Games
  • Software Library
  • Kodi Archive and Support File
  • Vintage Software
  • CD-ROM Software
  • CD-ROM Software Library
  • Software Sites
  • Tucows Software Library
  • Shareware CD-ROMs
  • Software Capsules Compilation
  • CD-ROM Images
  • ZX Spectrum
  • DOOM Level CD

imaginary homelands essay pdf

  • Smithsonian Libraries
  • FEDLINK (US)
  • Lincoln Collection
  • American Libraries
  • Canadian Libraries
  • Universal Library
  • Project Gutenberg
  • Children's Library
  • Biodiversity Heritage Library
  • Books by Language
  • Additional Collections

imaginary homelands essay pdf

  • Prelinger Archives
  • Democracy Now!
  • Occupy Wall Street
  • TV NSA Clip Library
  • Animation & Cartoons
  • Arts & Music
  • Computers & Technology
  • Cultural & Academic Films
  • Ephemeral Films
  • Sports Videos
  • Videogame Videos
  • Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

  • Wayback Machine (iOS)
  • Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

  • Explore the Collections
  • Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

  • Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Imaginary homelands : essays and criticism, 1981-1991

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

  • Graphic Violence
  • Explicit Sexual Content
  • Hate Speech
  • Misinformation/Disinformation
  • Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
  • Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

[WorldCat (this item)]

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

623 Previews

12 Favorites

Better World Books

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

EPUB and PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by [email protected] on December 4, 2009

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

  • We're Hiring!
  • Help Center

paper cover thumbnail

Salman Rushdie's "The location of Brazil": the imaginary homelands of fantastic literature

Profile image of Silvia Albertazzi

2014, Acta Neophilologica

In 1985, under the title "The Location of Brazil" Salman Rushdie published a long review of Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, which today is to be found in his collection Imaginary Homelands. My essay shows how…

Related Papers

Bruno Soares dos Santos

imaginary homelands essay pdf

Dr. Sunil S Macwan

Paulo Horta

Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures

Ketevan Kupatadze

Büşra Şentürk

Latin American Research Review

Diane Marting

Rita Barnard

José Angel García Landa

This paper analyses Salman Rushdie's novel THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH (1995) as a postmodernist text emphasising the role of narrative voice and of intertextuality within the intepretive act, and their implications for the study of intercultural understanding, the postmodern treatment of the exotic, of truth, and of the constructedness of the subject. Intertextuality becomes a central literary strategy whose function is to accomodate a multiplicity of cultural discourses and to articulate a postcolonial perspective on exoticism. In THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH, Rushdie acknowledges the cultural and historical positioning of the reading and writing of narrative fiction, and reflects on the nature of the limits between the visual and verbal text as well as the more general one between fiction and history, and uses his individual historical locus (the aftermath of the Rushdie affair) in order to play with the generic frames activated in reading different kinds of texts.

Santiago Juan-Navarro

Jose Chavarry

RELATED PAPERS

NINA OKTARINA

Frontiers in psychiatry

Anticancer research

Joanna Bakala

ACS Symposium Series

Angela Lindner

Contribuciones a las Ciencias …

Soleidy Rivero Amador

inAW Journal - Multidisciplinary Academic Magazine

Magdalena Jurkowska

Muğla Sıtkı Koçman Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi

Arzu Ozyurek

Frahma Dika

Interseções: Revista de Estudos Interdisciplinares

Felipe Sussekind

International Journal of Scientific Research in Environmental Sciences

Hany Abd El-Lateef

Cancer Genetics and Cytogenetics

Fiamma Buttitta

RICHARD CERVANTES JURO

Educational Theory

Steven Tozer

Journal of Instrumentation

Acta Silvatica et Lignaria Hungarica

Ferenc Lakatos

Journal of Applied Physics

Coriolan Tiusan

Revista de Saúde Pública

Ana Caroline

TEXTURA - ULBRA

Carles Feixa

William and Mary Quarterly

Michael Breidenbach

Global Biogeochemical Cycles

British Journal of Community Nursing

Justine Whitaker

European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry

Bruce Cassels

ECS transactions

Christodoulos Chatzichristodoulou

East African Journal of Science, Technology and Innovation

Prof. Adiel Magana

Paolo Romano

  •   We're Hiring!
  •   Help Center
  • Find new research papers in:
  • Health Sciences
  • Earth Sciences
  • Cognitive Science
  • Mathematics
  • Computer Science
  • Academia ©2024

Book cover

Writing the Multicultural Experience pp 149–158 Cite as

Imaginary Homelands and Moveable Feasts: An Indian Diaspora Woman Writer’s Perspective

  • Balli Kaur Jaswal 2  
  • First Online: 31 August 2022

182 Accesses

1 Citations

In this chapter, Balli Kaur Jaswal explores the issues surrounding audience expectation and representation and how it affects multicultural writers, especially South Asian diaspora women. She describes the struggle to maintain an authentic voice and how to resist catering to an audience’s desire for the exotic.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Buying options

  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The danger of a single story.” Filmed July 2009a at TEDGlobal 2009, Oxford University, UK. Video, 10:43.

Google Scholar  

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “Jumping Monkey Hill.” In The Thing Around Your Neck , by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 95–115 . London: Fourth Estate, 2009b.

Bhatia, Nandi. “Women, Homelands, and the Indian Diaspora.” The Centennial Review 42, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 511–526.

Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Goel, Savitha. “A Literary Voyage to India: Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance .” In Writers of the Indian Diaspora: Theory and Practice , edited by Jasbir Jain, 189–198. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 1998.

Gupta, Ashish. “The Extraordinary Composition of the Expatriate Writer.” In Writers of the Indian Diaspora: Essays on Culture and Identity, edited by Jasbir Jain, 44–45. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 1998.

Huggan, Graham. “The Postcolonial Exotic.” Transition , no. 64 (1994): 22–29.

Jayaram, Nayarama. The Indian Diaspora: Dynamics of Migration. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004.

Lau, Lisa. “The Language of Power and the Power of Language.” Narrative Inquiry 17, no. 1 (2007): 27–47.

Lau, Lisa. “Making the Difference: The Differing Presentations and Representations of South Asia in the Contemporary Fiction of Home and Diasporic South Asian Women Writers.” Modern Asian Studies 39, no. 1 (2005): 237–56, www.jstor.org/stable/3876512 .

Narayan, Uma. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Tradition and Third-World . New York: Routledge, 1997.

Parameswaran, Uma. “Home is Where Your Feet Are, And May Your Heart Be There Too.” In Writers of the Indian Diaspora: Essays on Culture and Identity , edited by Jasbir Jain, 33–34. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2007.

Poddar, Namrata. “‘Whiny Assholes’ or Creative Hustlers?: On Brownness, Diaspora Fiction, and Western Publication.” Transition , no. 119 (2016), 92–106.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991. 1st American ed. London: Granta Books, 1991.

Said, Edward. “From Orientalism .” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism , edited by Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John McGowan, and Jeffery J. Williams, 1991–2011. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Sen, Amartya. “Indian Traditions and the Western Imagination.” Daedalus 126, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 1–26.

Syal, Meera. Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee . London: Anchor 2000.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Yale-NUS College, Singapore, Singapore

Balli Kaur Jaswal

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Balli Kaur Jaswal .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Cite this chapter.

Jaswal, B.K. (2022). Imaginary Homelands and Moveable Feasts: An Indian Diaspora Woman Writer’s Perspective. In: Writing the Multicultural Experience. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06124-0_15

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06124-0_15

Published : 31 August 2022

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-031-06123-3

Online ISBN : 978-3-031-06124-0

eBook Packages : Literature, Cultural and Media Studies Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

  • Publish with us

Policies and ethics

  • Find a journal
  • Track your research

IMAGES

  1. Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie

    imaginary homelands essay pdf

  2. The Imaginary Homelands" by Patrick Moseley

    imaginary homelands essay pdf

  3. Salman Rushdie. Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

    imaginary homelands essay pdf

  4. Salman RUSHDIE / Imaginary Homelands Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

    imaginary homelands essay pdf

  5. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms, 1981-1991

    imaginary homelands essay pdf

  6. (PDF) Imaginary Homelands: Reconstituted Narratives in the Digital

    imaginary homelands essay pdf

VIDEO

  1. Don't do tiktok behind doors!

  2. Imaginary homelands by Salman Rushdie in hindi POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

  3. Homeland (Polytopia) Part I. Short Animation

  4. IMAGINARY HOMELANDS #PART2 #by #SalmanRushdie #summarymalayalam #5THSEM #CALICUTUNIVERSITY #EXAM 💯

  5. Tu To Gaya 🤓 Funny moment 😂 Wait for end😁#shorts #short #freefireshorts

  6. Kagerou Project

COMMENTS

  1. PDF Imaginary Homelands

    Created Date: 2/8/2007 10:52:12 AM

  2. Imaginary homelands : essays and criticism, 1981-1991

    Imaginary homelands : essays and criticism, 1981-1991 by Rushdie, Salman. Publication date 1991 Publisher London : Granta Books ; New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : In association with Viking ... Pdf_module_version 0.0.19 Ppi 360 Rcs_key 24143 Republisher_date 20220907210115 Republisher_operator [email protected] ...

  3. Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis of Essays by Salman Rushdie

    Imaginary Homelands Summary. Imaginary Homelands is a collection of essays by Salman Rushdie. The book written between 1981 and 1992 focuses on the author's experiences in the time when Indira Gandhi was ruling India. The book is divided into six parts: Midnight's children, The politics of India and Pakistan, Literature, Arts & media ...

  4. Imaginary homelands : Salman Rushdie : Free Download, Borrow, and

    Imaginary homelands by Salman Rushdie. Publication date 1992 Publisher Granta in association with Penguin Collection printdisabled; internetarchivebooks Contributor Internet Archive Language English. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-08-20 21:40:05 Boxid IA162919 ...

  5. Imaginary Homelands Summary

    Summary. Last Updated September 5, 2023. Salman Rushdie's essay "Imaginary Homelands" begins with an image of a photograph in the room where he writes. It is a picture of the house in which ...

  6. Imaginary Homelands Analysis

    In his own fictions, Salman Rushdie has created just such imaginary homelands: an India of the mind in Midnight's Children, a Pakistan of the mind in Shame, an Islam, Bombay, and London of the ...

  7. Imaginary Homelands : Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

    Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of Salman Rushdie's remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour, eloquence and indignation he carefully examines an expanse of topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan, censorship, the Labour Party ...

  8. Imaginary Homelands

    Imaginary Homelands. Imaginary Homelands is a collection of essays and criticism by Salman Rushdie. [1] The collection is composed of essays written between 1981 and 1992, including pieces of political criticism - e.g. on the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Conservative 1983 General Election victory, censorship, the Labour Party, and ...

  9. Imaginary Homelands

    Essays & Criticism 1981-1991. Salman Rushdie at his most candid, impassioned, and incisive—Imaginary Homelands is an important and moving record of one writer's intellectual and personal odyssey. These 75 essays demonstrate Rushdie's range and prophetic vision, as he focuses on his fellow writers, on films, and on the mine-strewn ground of race, politics and religion.

  10. Imaginary Homelands

    Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer's intellectual and personal odyssey. The seventy essays collected here, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects -the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie's contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of ...

  11. Imaginary Homelands : Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

    Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer's intellectual and personal odyssey. The seventy essays collected here, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects -the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie's contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of ...

  12. Imaginary Homelands : Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991

    Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. Imaginary Homelands. : Like George Orwell or Bruce Chatwin, Salman Rushdie observes and illuminates a stunning range of cultural, political, and intellectual issues crucial to our time. Imaginery Homelands is an important record of Rushdie's intellectual and personal odyssey, and the 75 ...

  13. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

    Plot Summary. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism from 1981-1991 is a book of essays by acclaimed author Salman Rushdie. Though Rushdie is best known for his provocative novels, most of which are set in and around India, this book features seventy-four of his essays, which examine issues of migration, literature and colonialism, socialism ...

  14. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

    Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of Salman Rushdie's remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour, eloquence and indignation he carefully examines an expanse of topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan, censorship, the Labour Party ...

  15. Imaginary Homelands

    Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of Salman Rushdie's remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour, eloquence and indignation he carefully examines an expanse of topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan, censorship, the Labour Party ...

  16. Imaginary Homelands Critical Essays

    Imaginary Homelands. Even before THE SATANIC VERSES provoked international controversy, Salman Rushdie had established himself as one of the most important writers in contemporary Britain. His ...

  17. Imaginary homelands : essays and criticism, 1981-1991

    Imaginary homelands : essays and criticism, 1981-1991 ... EPUB and PDF access not available for this item. IN COLLECTIONS Books for People with Print Disabilities Internet Archive Books American Libraries Texts to Borrow . Uploaded by sf ...

  18. (PDF) A Thematic Analysis of Salman Rushdie's Essay -"Commonwealth

    Published in the collection Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism in 1991, Rushdie's essay asseverates the central argument - that labeling a diverse and complex corpus of literature from ...

  19. PDF Imaginary Homelands and Moveable Feasts: An Indian Diaspora ...

    Imaginary Homelands and Moveable Feasts: An Indian Diaspora Woman Writer's Perspective. "How are we to live in the world?" asks Salman Rushdie in his essay "Imaginary Homelands" (Rushdie 18). It is a question posed to and about South Asian diaspora writers, speaking to the complexity of our "plural and partial" identi-ties and how ...

  20. (PDF) A Thematic Analysis of Salman Rushdie's Essay -"Commonwealth

    Published in the collection Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism in 1981, Rushdie's essay asseverates the central argument - that labeling a diverse and complex corpus of literature from the different corners of the world under the "new and badly made umbrella" Rajoria |3 of 'Commonwealth literature' does a great disservice to ...

  21. (PDF) Salman Rushdie's "The location of Brazil": the imaginary

    THE IMAGINARY HOMELANDS OF FANTASTIC LITERATURE Silvia Albertazzi Abstract In 1985, under the title "The Location of Brazil" Salman Rushdie published a long review of Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, which today is to be found in his collection Imaginary Homelands. My essay shows how Rushdie's article can be considered a sort of manifesto ...

  22. Imaginary Homelands and Moveable Feasts: An Indian Diaspora ...

    "How are we to live in the world?" asks Salman Rushdie in his essay "Imaginary Homelands" (Rushdie 18). It is a question posed to and about South Asian diaspora writers, speaking to the complexity of our "plural and partial" identities and how we bring history, exile, and a legacy of migrant aspirations onto the page (Rushdie 15).

  23. PDF Representation of Migrant Experience in Salman Rushdie's Imaginary

    Imaginary Homelands is a scholarly essay by the British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie. It is taken from the collection of essays entitled Imaginary Homelands (1991). The essay presents the migrant experience of the writer Salman Rushdie. The pain of being an outsider dominates the entire essay. As far as Rushdie is concerned, homeland always

  24. Passing as White Collar: The Black Typewriter and the Bureaucratization

    Although the color line deterred Black applicants from that side of the collar line, the Black typewriter as a literary type came to salience between 1886 and 1930, disrupting what I call the "bureaucratization of the racial imaginary": the process whereby the exclusionary white middle-class tenets underpinning the bureaucratized office ...