Salman Rushdie's Cities

Book excerpt: Employing Salman Rushdie as a guide to a historicized contemporary, this study offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the plurality of cities along his transnational trajectory. It engages with the geographically identifiable Bombay, Karachi, Islamabad, London or New York; the phantasmal, politically coded, Jahilia or Mildendo, the inspirational yet flawed urban precedents of Fatehpur Sikri or Renaissance Florence and the ways these cities generate, interact with and transform each other. The book situates Rushdie's cities in relation to developments in Bombay, Karachi, Islamabad and London writing and focuses on novels which shuttle between cities. Parashkevova attends to cities' cultural and historical contexts, to many of Rushdie's numerous literary, cinematic and artistic influences and to diverse events, processes and paradigms - earthquakes, translations, seductions - that politically re-position cities and citizens on the contemporary urban map.