Mapping Imaginary Spaces in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction

Mapping Imaginary Spaces in Salman Rushdie's Fiction

Daniela Rogobete

Today everything that derives from history and from historical time must undergo a test. Neither ‘cultures’ nor the ‘consciousness’ of peoples, groups, or even individuals can escape the loss of identity that is now added to all other besetting terrors… nothing and no one can avoid trial by space. (Lefebvre in Burgin, 1996: 23)

Space and its recontextualisation, its metaphoric representations and political remappings have always preoccupied the theorists of postcolonialism who tried to find new ways of reading its physical and metaphorical coordinates. A relativisation of both space and time was long ago operated so that territories were reshaped, boundaries retraced in an attempt to reconfigure reality according to new dimensions. Relocation of centre and periphery, margins and interstitial spaces were redefined within what has been called the politics of location requiring a new vocabulary belonging to spatial language. It places identity, no longer envisaged in