Undoing the Sorcery of Nationalist Representations in History and Culture:

A Neo/Transnationalistic Reading of Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

Abstract

Nationalist representations, in the past, have proved to be the most powerful weapons against colonialism, realized in the form of national, emotive and cultural symbols; like the spinning wheel popularized by Gandhi as a symbol of swaraj in India. In the wake of postcolonial writings that emerged after Edward Said’s Orientalism, the conflicting nature of nationalist representations, as signified in the history and culture of the ex-colonies were dissected/problematized. The very first cries of objection to the immutability of nationalist representations could be heard in the writings of theorists like Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson. Their denial to the very idea of ‘nation’ is purely postcolonial in motive, as they believe that the notion of ‘nation’ is Western in origin.