A Postcolonial Reading Of The Moor's Last Sigh

Salman Rushdie is one of the most famous Anglo-Indian novelists in contemporary English literature,who shares the name of "three giants of immigrant literature in British" with V.S.Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro.The Moor's Last Sigh is his fifth novel,which won The Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 1995.The Moor's Last Sigh tells the saga of a four-generation family.This four-generation family approximately spans the whole twentieth century,so it has undergone the process of colonization,imperialism,de-colonization and nationalism in India.This experience brings forth a few significant postcolonial issues to discuss,such as"cultural hybridity","ambivalence","nationalism" etc.This thesis,taking The Moor's Last Sigh as the research object and the postcolonialism,especially the theories of Said and Ashcroft as its theorectial methodology,intends to analyze the process of deconstruction of western power discourse and the construction of postcolonial discourses in the novel,the purpose of which is to illustrate that Bombay should choose the road of cultural symbiosis for its development.The thesis firstly introduces the author Salman Rushdie,his literary works,the literature review on Rushdie study and the theoretical bases.Secondly,the thesis proves that there still exists the western power discourse in postcolonial Bombay.It is a discourse of binary opposition,in which the power is highly centralized in a few people.In the novel,it takes the form of financial hegemony of Siodi Corp and religious hegemony of Mumbai's Axis.These two hegemonies finally turn into the exclusive and radical nationalism which destroys Bombay.Thirdly,the thesis mainly analyzes how Rushdie deconstructs the western power discourse from the linguistic aspect.In the novel,Rushdie mixes the standard English with Indian dialects,which makes a hybridized language style.The mixture of the standard English and the Indian dialects shakes the absolute writing right of the standard English.Meanwhile,Rushdie adopts the intertextuality of eastern and western texts.In doing so,he breaks the borderline of both cultures to achieve a hybridized text,thus proves that Indian culture is not minor.Through these two methods,Rushdie points out that the relationship between east and west is interdependent,which destabilizes the Western way of thinking,namely the binary opposition,and thus deconstructs the western power discourse.Fourthly,the thesis focuses on how Rushdie constructs the multiculturalism in the novel.Rushdie shapes a narrator Moraes who has multiple ethnic bloods and is combined with high arts and pop cultures.In the novel,it is only Moraes who survives.Rushdie also superimposes the multicultural Spanish History in Postcolonial Bombay.The surviving of Moraes and the use of Spanish history all attest that the multiculturalism is the proper discourse for postcolonial Bombay to develop.At last,after analyzing the process of Rushdie's quest and construction of postcolonial discourse for Bombay,the thesis illustrates that Rushdie provides mulculturalism as the proper discourse for Bombay's development,which is respecting the multicultural nature of Bombay and promoting cultural tolerance and cultural symbiosis.And the process of the quest and construction in the novel expresses Rushdie's attention to India's contemporary situation and his great expectation to India's future.Rushdie thinks it may be under the multiculturalism that the conflicts in Modern India will be solved and it paves the way to India to be a truly independent nation.