Universal Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

Abstract

Following the attack on the World Trade Center and other events on September 11, 2001, commonly known as 9/11, Salman Rushdie’s writing took a sharp turn to the right, as alarmed and disappointed critics have noticed. Due to a number of non-fiction pieces written for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, wherein Rushdie expressed unequivocal support of the United States’s war on terror(ism), as well as Rushdie’s acceptance of a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II (2007), critics such as Sabina Sawhney and Simona Sawhney wonder: “Where is the writer of The Satanic Verses?” (433).² Robert Spencer deals with this issue by insisting that Rushdie’s twenty-first- century non-fiction must now be distinguished from the cosmopolitanism he praises so highly in Rushdie’s previous fiction. (Spencer too extends The Satanic Verses as the exemplary representation of Rushdie’s previously praiseworthy features.) Like Spencer, Pranav Jani resolves to distinguish Rushdie’s (early) fiction from his recent non-fiction: “[W]hatever Rushdie’s current ideas and however problematic his canonization, his novels, especially the early ones, remain crucial contributions” (12).

Outside the whale there is a genuine need for … books that draw new and better maps of reality.

“For God’s Sake, Open the Universe a Little More!”

Salman Rushdie¹