Document Type
Article
Abstract
Rushdie's own global stardom, built on his celebration of migrancy and uprootedness as well as on the “fatwa” that marked him as a global target, informs his 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In this novel, Rushdie's usual focus on crossing boundaries and challenging national loyalties follows the musical stardom of his two protagonists, Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama. They not only evoke famous pop stars, like Madonna or Michael Jackson, but also the trans-historical allegiance to the most enduring myth of poetic dislocation, the myth of Orpheus. In exploring the musical star's potential to cross the impossible boundaries (even between the living and the dead), Rushdie examines the star's claim to ubiquity and radical displacement: what if the desire to be everywhere amounts to existing nowhere? My essay focuses on Rushdie's most potent image of the star's rootless existence — the vexed relationship between groundedness and transcendence. What kind of spatiality emerges from this unresolved desire to be at one and the same time rooted and migrant, human and super-human, author and product, temporal and timeless? Because it seems impossible to close the gap that separates these conceptual binaries, I question the postcolonial reliance on the notion of “interstitiality,” which aims to resolve the problem of conceptual and geographical dislocation created by such binary propositions.
Repository Citation
Radović, Stanka. "Buried Stars in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 12, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–13. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol12/iss1/8