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Post-Orientalist “Pluriverses”: Transmodern Revenants in the Fiction of Rabisankar Bal and Salman Rushdie

In: Asian Review of World Histories
Author:
Dhee Sankar Guest Lecturer, Department of English, Sanskrit College and University Kolkata India

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Abstract

This article examines two novels with reference to “transmodern perspectives on literature” (Aliaga-Lavrijsen and Yebra-Pertusa 2019), focusing on a common denominator in their plots: the motif of two real, historical figures conversing with each other from beyond the grave. Rabisankar Bal’s Bengali novel Dozakhnama (2010), translated into English as Dozakhnama: Conversations in Hell (2012), is premised on a posthumous dialogue between Mirza Ghalib and Saadat Hasan Manto – two prominent figures in Urdu literature. Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015) pivots around a posthumous debate between two medieval Arab philosophers, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Al-Ghazali. I invoke Enrique Dussel’s concept of “trans-modern pluriversality” to account for the juxtaposition, in these novels, of postmodern narrative devices with the premodern genres of the dastan and the qissa. I use the term post-Orientalism to designate the metafictional and anticolonial uses of Orientalist tropes in these works.

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