An Elegy In The Exile

Salman Rushdie, a British Indian novelist and essayist, has undoubtedly been one of the most important writers in world literature in the past quarter of a century and a leading figure in the field of postcolonial literature. Rushdie was awarded the British Knighthood for his services to literature in 2007 and the cultural hybridity in his works is highly valued by many writers of postcolonialism. Generally speaking, he first achieved fame with his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker Prize in 1981. The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was perceived as an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad, and the spiritual leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sent a fatwa to call for the execution of Rushdie. Then Rushdie spent nearly a decade largely underground. It took Rushdie five years to complete The Moor's Last Sigh, his latest major publication written in the shadow of the fatwa and his political exile from his former homeland.Current studies have focused their attention on Salman Rushdie's works from various aspects, such as his literary strategies of magical realism, postmodernism and postcolonialism. In this thesis, the writer is going to use Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh which depicts a family epic ranging over some 100 years of India's history as text to analyze his special cultural identity of postcolonialism and political stand based on the postcolonial theories of hybridity, mimicry, the third space, etc.This thesis is divided into three parts: the introduction, two chapters of analysis and the conclusion.The first part includes a brief introduction of Salman Rushdie and his literary works. The emphasis will be placed on the plot and motif of The Moor's Last Sigh and the explanation on the definition of postcolonial theory. Then the author of the thesis gives us an overview of the researches on Rushdie and his works home and abroad. And the last section of the introduction will be the planning structure of the following two chapters.In the first chapter, the author analyzes the permeating atmosphere of postcolonialism in The Moor's Last Sigh to locate Rushdie's cultural identity from the hybrid and ambivalent one according to Homi Bhabha's masterpiece The Location of Culture. Therefore, Rushdie, as "a man living in between" or a "marginalized man", has his special cultural identity of postcolonialism.In the second chapter, the author probes into the hidden meaning of "the last sigh" in the title of the novel, trying to summarize Rushdie's postcolonial stand. The word "sigh" does not only reflect Rushdie's worries about the political and cultural condition in India, but the helpless attitude toward the bubble blueprint of Nehru's secularism advocated in India's Independence in 1947. Furthermore, it shows Rushdie's protest against the "rootlessness" in his life during the exile. As a result, it proves his unique postcolonial cultural identity.The thesis concludes that Rushdie, by rewriting the past and present of India, presents the reader a present-day India with multi-cultural hybridity, especially through the detailed illustration of the metropolis—Bombay. As a master writer of postcolonialism, Rushdie continues his pondering on anti-fundamentalism and yearning for cultural amalgamation.