A ‘Space-Clearing Gesture’: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism at a Crossroads - Historiographic Metafiction and Magical Realism in Midnight’s Children (1981, 2012)
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2019-07-04
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en
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This thesis will investigate how the two prominent movements of postmodernism and postcolonialism relate to one another and how their convergence is appropriated in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and its film adaptation (Mehta, 2012) to capture the post-independence reality of India. Acknowledging the problematic issues involved, it will argue that the overlap of postcolonialism with the postmodern can be a creative source of energy for postcolonial writers. The literary forms of historiographic metafiction and magical realism will be considered as the sites of this overlap. An examination of their presence in Salman Rushdie’s novel and Mehta’s film version will reveal how they have offered these media different ways to deal with the divisions and conflicts that the protagonist Saleem Sinai encounters in postcolonial India.
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