Ana Cristina Mendes is a researcher at ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies) in Portugal. Her interests span postcolonial cultural production and its intersection with the culture industries. Her publications include O Passado em Exibição (Cosmos, 2011) and the co-edited book Re-Orientalism and Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Other Within (Routledge, 2011).
1. Editor's Introduction: Salman Rushdie's "Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art," or Considerations on Undisciplining Boundaries Ana Cristina Mendes 2. Merely Connect: Salman Rushdie and Tom Phillips Andrew Teverson 3. Beyond the Visible: Secularism and Postcolonial Modernity in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, Jamelie Hassan's Trilogy and Anish Kapoor's Blood Relations Stephen Morton 4. 'Living Art': Artistic and Intertextual Re-envisionings of the Urban Trope in The Moor's Last Sigh Vassilena Parashkevova 5. In Search for Lost Portraits: The Lost Portrait and The Moor's Last Sigh Joel Kuortti 6. Paint, Patronage, Power, and the Translator's Visibility Jenni Ramone 7. Show and Tell: Midnight's Children and 'The Boyhood of Raleigh' Revisited Neil ten Kortenaar 8. 'Nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary': Midnight's Children and the Visual Culture of Indian Popular Cinema Florian Stadtler 9. Visual Technologies in Rushdie's Fiction: Envisioning the Present in the 'Imagological Age' Cristina Sandru 10. Bombay/'Wombay': Refracting the Postcolonial Cityscape in The Ground Beneath Her Feet Ana Cristina Mendes 11. Screening the Novel, the Novel as Screen: The Aesthetics of the Visual in Fury Madelena Gonzalez 12. Media Competition and Visual Displeasure in Salman Rushdie's Fiction Mita Banerjee
In Salman Rushdie's novels, images are invested with the power to manipulate the plotline, to stipulate actions from the characters, to have sway over them, seduce them, or even lead them astray. Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture sheds light on this largely unremarked - even if central - dimension of the work of a major contemporary writer. This collection brings together, for the first time and into a coherent whole, research on the extensive interplay between the visible and the readable in Rushdie's fiction, from one of the earliest novels - Midnight's Children (1981) - to his latest - The Enchantress of Florence (2008).