SUMMARY
Rushdie’s novel 'The Satanic Verses' and the fatwa issued in response to it by the Ayatollah Khomeini remains a cause celebre. Whilst much literary criticism has recommended that we should avoid reading the text and ignore the furore caused by the 'Rushdie affair”, along the harmful binary lines of Eastern tyranny and Western freedom, this paper addresses the question of the rhetoric of cultural difference directly.
Arguing that an unhistorical idea of the Enlightenment is becoming increasingly central to the way that Rushdie and others explain what they perceive as the gulf between “Islam” and “the West”, and analysing Rushdie’s recent tendency to construct himself as “the new Voltaire”, the research presented in this paper traverses centuries and disciplines as it tracks the ways in which the discursive figure of the Islamic despot has become a pivot for cultural critiques.
BRIEF BIO OF SPEAKER
Adam Perchard has recently completed a PhD at the University of York. His thesis was entitled "The Battle for the Enlightenment: Rushdie, Islam, and the West" and his research funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2013, he was awarded a Doctoral Fellowship recognising him as the most promising senior doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Related Literature in 2013. He has travelled widely over the course of his studies, spending time examining the Rushdie Papers as a research fellow at Emory University in the US, and presenting his research at conferences across Europe. He is currently in India working on a new project about Rushdie's representations of Akbar and Fatehpur Sikri in The Enchantress of Florence.
Dr. Perchard's forthcoming publications include "The Fatwa and the Philosophe: Rushdie, Voltaire, and Islam" for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2015), and "Islam - Bible in Literature" for The Encyclopaedia of the Bible and its Reception (De Gruyter,2015).
Please contact Professor Rukmini Bhaiya Nair (rukmini.nair@gmail.com) for more information.