79 91 Abdelaziz El Amrani

CONSTRUCTING “NON-IDENTITY” AND “GLOCALIZATION”
IN THE POST-9/11 WORLD
IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S SHALIMAR THE CLOWN
ABDELAZIZ EL AMRANI*

Abstract. The present paper attempts to address the issue of “nonidentity” and “glocalization” in the post-9/11 context in Salman Rushdie’s
Shalimar the Clown. In other words, we are going to investigate the representation of and the relationship between the distant and the close, the local and the global, and the foreign and the exotic in the post-9/11 world, through an in-depth analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown.

Keywords: non-identity, glocalization, distant and close, local and global, post-9/11 world, Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown.

Introduction

Situating himself in a position of perpetual in-betweenness, a migrant caught between three countries, unable to exist comfortably in any one, Salman Rushdie has always been a vehement supporter of discourses that encourage transworld, supraterritorial, transplanetary and “translocal mélange cultures”. He is, Edward
Said contends, “the intifada of the imagination”1, and his works operate “as agents of social, intellectual and cultural change, because they introduce whole new worlds”2. Referred to as a post-9/11 novel3, Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the
Clown is seen as an example of how the contemporary postcolonial novel debates multiculturalism, globalization, identity, tradition, terrorism, neo-imperialism and
Islamic radicalism. It has been described by many pundits as one of the key books of our time, as a novel that delves deeply into the roots of religious terrorism, and as an exploration of the post-9/11 world. Through Shalimar the Clown, Salman
Rushdie attempts to celebrate the fluidity of identity, the dynamism of spaces and

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* PhD student at both Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities Sais-Fez,
Morocco and Amesterdam University, Faculty of Humanities, Netherlands, [e-mail].
1 Said, “Against the Orthodoxies”,

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