Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's Writings
10.13125/2039-6597/157
After a brief discussion of the main facets that a theme such as the border becomes, this paper examines how the works of Salman Rushdie have offered new perspectives on the interpretation of the role and the sense of the border. With the aid of some studies, such as those by Simmel and Derrida which highlight the complex phenomena of inclusion/exclusion/encounter that the boundary creates on a sociological, political, cultural and aesthetic level, it has been possible to reread some of the most meaningful works of one of the authors to which the theme of exile and migration has been devoting more attention. Works such as Shame, The Satanic Verses, Step Across This Line, and The Enchantress of Florence, in particular, become carriers of the reflection on the roots and influence through the use of a dialogic form at a linguistic and intertextual level, as well as through a constant theming of the frontier-crossing.
application/pdf
2039-6597
157
1
it
Radhouan Ben Amara
Between
Diaspora
Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's Writings
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
1
Writing and Visions:  Threshold Crossings
2011-05-29
2011-05-29
2011-04-21
2011-05-29
1
Radhouan Ben Amara
2011/05/29
10.13125/2039-6597/157
Università di Cagliari
2039-6597
1
Diaspora
it
Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's Writings
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/157/134
1
               Frontiers and Thresholds
                 in Rushdie's Writings
                          Radhouan Ben Amara


                                      A boundary is not that at which
                                      something stops but, as the Greeks
                                      recognised, the boundary is that from
                                      which something begins its presencing.
                                                                    Heidegger



        Frontiers, Thresholds, and Language Betrayal

     Despite the discursive inflation and the tremendous quantities of
texts on de-territorialisation, frontiers, borders and margins are still
relevant for many across the globe. It is not an easy task to understand
how borders function and what may happen when they relate to
intrastate conflicts. It must be first acknowledged that, as Georg
Simmel wrote, the border is «not a spatial fact with sociological effects,
but a sociological fact which takes a spatial form» (Simmel 1999: 607).
The other assumption is that the only way to appreciate a frontier is to
observe its essence or whether it is crossed, and why. Borders have to
be measured for their presence, or absence, and the role they play in
constructing social relations. They can be walls that hinder mobility,
ideal lines that describe the geographical location of political
communities. But there is also a substantial difference whether a wall is
“built” to protect the inside from the outside, or is meant to discourage
the population from moving abroad. In some localised crisis situations,



Between, vol. I, n. 1 (Maggio/ May 2011)
Radhouan Ben Amara, Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's Writings



fences may be erected by neighbouring countries to avoid
“contagion”1. This becomes even more relevant when applied to
conflict areas - in the case of refugees - and it presents serious
consequences for the lives of millions of people every year. Borders are
barriers, and understanding them in their concrete dimensions, as
walls, is crucial to any analysis of their relation to intrastate conflicts.
But contrary to the concept of “borderless world”, and the frequently
assumed irrelevance of frontiers in response to contemporary welfare,
we notice every day that borders have been strengthened in several
cases. The 9/11 attacks, the growing xenophobia and nationalisms,
racism and fundamentalism all contributed to highlight homeland
security and border control.
      Being on the border, means more than simply facing a frontier. So
the understanding of borders as constituted by walls or ideal lines that
depend on context, historical moment and location, is important but
incomplete. The physical frontiers, the social boundaries and the
geographical extension of borderlines are also necessary elements that
define complex areas. When Simmel - as we mentioned before - argues
that the frontier line that creates the borderline is the result of a
sociological fact, he means that the institution of a frontier, and the
subsequent creation of a borderland, are sociological facts that take a
spatial form. But borderlands can also be established to affirm one
group's dominance above others, or as solutions for intrastate wars. In
civil conflicts where the central authority deals with “insurgents” or
“minorities” within the homeland, fences can be raised unilaterally by
the “sovereign state”, creating enclaves.
      Borders are spatial, social, and cultural facts, but they are above
all political facts. A «space comes into being» as soon as a border is
established, and an observer looks at both sides of the border including
at the border separating the sides. «Without the border, no space». But
there is also an aesthetic concept of space, a condition of the possibility
of certain phenomena, that is to say, the possibility of the subject to
imagine itself and objects as claiming to exist in different places in it.

      1
          Cfr. Acuto 2008.


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The concept of space should start with the acknowledgment of the
degrees of freedom we discover while hitting on the restrictions we
attribute to it. Jacques Derrida for example refers to space as a «lieu
d'inscription de tout ce qui au monde se marque» (Derrida 1993: 52). In
other words, space, to be sure, presupposes its own khora the very
moment it gets marked, thus producing the concept of spaces
entangled within spaces. There is always, therefore, the necessity
through the space of this world without which there is, properly
speaking, nothing. For Kant, space is the place where boundaries are to
be drawn and distinctions to be crossed. As Heidegger puts it - in Sein
& Zeit - space is, «the place where de-distanciation and alignment take
place» (cfr. Banham 2008).
      Philosophy traditionally begins by asking the question, «What is
the frontier», and demanding something like a definition. I think that
any experience of the frontier is an experience of life as life on the edge.
The frontier, carries the notion of a place that is an edge, an edge
between the known and the unknown, the settled and the wild; it can
also be a mental realm of new ideas, ideas about space and time, and
even the origins of the world.
      Today, the frontier is as much a marketing concept as an idea or
an ideal. However, the experience of the frontier is intrinsically
perilous in that as such, it exposes to something as yet unknown or
beyond a frontier, and this experience is perhaps none other than what
gives rise to the sense of wonder, of traumazein revived by Heidegger
from Aristotle as the root of all philosophy.
      At the frontier, says literature, life is on the line, identities tremble,
something passes into something else, somewhere new opens up. At
this point, “experience” is never a simple accretion of knowledge or
wisdom, because on the frontier, at the edge, I am not quite me, but the
opening of identity to an alterity. Frontiers are always points both of
contact and of separation; the point of contact is itself a frontier,
between the frontier as question and the frontier as experience.
Consequently, boundaries, edges, frontiers, thresholds, like horizons,
are forever in translation, always receding from our efforts to
transgress them. The circumstance calls us into the open, decentring


                                                                                   3
Radhouan Ben Amara, Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's Writings



our attunement within an atmosphere of questioning. We have entered
a liminal space, a veil between inner and outer. The border represents
then a unique case of entry into the social contract: it is not an entry
that is inherited or claimed by right but a status that is requested. At
the border, one is neither citizen nor foreigner in the face of the agent
of customs. The bordering process constituted by the decision to
include/exclude is a dialogue between body and body politic requiring
the confession of all manner of bodily, economic, and social
information. Of utmost importance is Derrida's treatment of the theme
of hospitality and the question about foreigners (xenos). In De
l’hospitalité, for istance, he notes that in the dialogues of Plato, the
foreigner is frequently presented as the one who asks about others; and
as a consequence, the foreigner is he who shakes the rein of dogmatism
about being and not-being. The very notion of hospitality is treated
here within the context of the rights of the foreigner. This question
which Derrida repeats throughout his book, is a broadly abstract
metaphor that symbolises the restrictions that often face a stranger
when he is far away from home. Going through The Apology of Plato,
Derrida maintains that «among the problems we handle here, there is a
foreigner who unable to speak the language of the host country, may
be rejected or injured without any type of defence» (Derrida 2000: 21).
The language of the host interrogates violently and abruptly, since it
imposes the home owner's interpretation. Therefore, the foreigner is
forced to adopt another ”tongue” which is not the one he usually
speaks or writes in. The host's translation is part of his very own abode
and, according to Derrida, it is precisely the point where the possibility
of hospitality takes place. But what happens when hospitality becomes
hostility? One would even admit that «both hospitality and hostility
imply the possibility of the other». The ambivalence is important and
even recognised in the tensions detected in the words, host, hospitality
and hostility. Visser provides a detailed overview of the etymology:
confusing as it seems at first sight, the word “host” and “guest”
originally meant the same thing, deriving as they did from the Indo-
European term “ghostis” meaning “stranger”. Visser explicates further,
referring to the antecedents of the origins of the world “hospitality” as


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being derived from the Latin hostis (stranger equated to enemy), and
the French “hôte” both used to denote host and guest (cfr. Visser 1993).
That hospitality transgresses the boundaries between the
stranger/unknown and us/known, may be attributed to the use of the
rituals of hospitality as a means of communication. The stranger is the
stranger precisely because (they) are not recognised as from within the
socially constructed space that is “home”. Hospitality thus acts as
cultural agent, facilitating the (re)negotiation of both collective (social)
and personal identity. Historically the concept of a bordered space
ensured the notion of hospitality and was considered a collective ideal,
conditioning individual behaviour and ensuring the domination and
continuation of a structural power. The notion of bordering is both a
defining characteristic of, and space of, tension between the ideal of
hospitality and its “performance as practice” in contemporary and
social reality2. Borders furthermore create dialectical construction
within hospitality and, as such, it is through these borders that
hospitality exists: a notion of bordered space such as “home” and
“away”; embodied borders such as “self” and “other”; borders of social
identity such as “host” and “guest”; or “hostility” and “friendship”.
Therefore, it is through borders that hospitality maintains its
ascendency. In other words, hospitality would not be, either as practice
or moral virtue, but for the contested space brought about by border
transgressions. But there remains an implicit need to establish
boundaries in host-guest relationships and define who is known and
who is “the other”: it should be a clearly expressed relationship, where
each party is defined in the context of “self” and “other” with mutually
understood boundaries. The interaction of hospitality helps reinforce
the inclusion and the exclusion while mediating exchange between the
two. This inclusion/exclusion ritual in the hospitality context endures
as airport staff routinely targets some “profiles”, the demonised and
“dangerous other”, for in-depth questioning before the nation lays
open its hospitality to them. This view of hospitality also brings into
sharper focus the rhetoric of equality and equalitarianism in the

     2
         Cfr. Rossello 2001.


                                                                                 5
Radhouan Ben Amara, Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's Writings



pseudo-equity where people only from certain countries are
demonised for overstaying their visas (Sheringham - Daruwalla 2007:
37).
      Frontiers in translation mark the interface of empire and excess.
There is a strong sentiment within postmodern thought to lodge this
translation activity at the margins of liminal excess, to investigate this
dynamic of translation, and articulate its relation to the perpetual
interplay of normalisation and excess. Normalisation implicates, in
fact, a fundamental outside, even if, as Judith Butler contends, a
universal presumption can only be challenged «from (its own) outside»
(Butler 1996: 49) to summon up the figure of the foreigner, the stranger;
it is to affirm – as Montaigne said – that «nous pensons toujours
ailleurs». Sometimes, it is even difficult to differentiate an exile from an
immigrant. Nabokov was both an immigrant and an exile, but to him,
such a distinction was unnecessary, as he often maintained that the
writer's nationality was a «secondary importance» and the writer's art
was his «real passport». Writes he:


         I have always maintained, even as a schoolboy in Russia, that
      the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance.
      The more distinctive an insect's aspect, the less apt to the
      taxonomist is to glance first of all at the locality label under the
      pinned specimen in order to decide which of several vaguely
      described races it should be assigned to. The writer's art is his real
      passport. (Nabokov 1967)


     We can also think about Paul Celan, and the figure of the artist
that emerges in this case, is really baffling: Celan is loudly proclaimed
as one of the greatest if not the greatest “German poet” of the century –
since Rilke, or Trakl – when in fact he was a naturalised French citizen
of Jewish-Bukovinan descent who never lived in German soil, though
he wrote (nearly) all his life in his mother's language, German. The
correspondence with his wife shows that Celan was a superb writer in
French, and had he decided to write at least some of his work in that



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language (or even translated his work in French), no doubt the French
could and most likely would have claimed him as one of their own – as
they did, for example, with Samuel Beckett, Tristan Tzara, Eugene
Ionesco, and, more to the point, Cioran and Gherasim Luca. That he
did not do this is of course essential but needs to be analysed and
contextualised within the complex relationship he entertained with his
mother's tongue and his harsh hysterical scriptures against poets
attempting to write in a language other than the mother tongue. Celan,
a proficient multilingual poet, returned to this theme several times, the
strongest formulation being reported by Ruth Lackner, to whom he
said: «Only in the mother tongue can one speak one's own truth, in a
foreign language the poet lies» (Chalfen 1991: 148). Later, in 1961, he
formulated the quandary again, as an answer to a questionnaire, “The
Problem of the Bilingual”, from the Flinker Bookshop in Paris:


        I do not believe there is such a thing as bilingual poetry.
     Double-talk, yes, this you may find among our various
     contemporary arts and acrobatics of the word, especially those
     who manage to establish themselves in blissful harmony with
     each fashion of consumer culture, being as polyglot as they are
     polychrome. Poetry is by necessity a unique instance of language.
     Hence never – forgive the truism, but poetry, like truth, goes all
     too often to the dogs – hence never what is double. (Celan 1986:
     23)


     And      yet   despite   the  evident    multiculturalism      and
multilingualism, throughout his life, Celan saw himself as part of
“German” literature, wanted his work to be a visible presence in that
country, wanted it to have an impact on German letters. Unfortunately,
this desire is more ambiguous, and may be closer to a sort of love/strife
dynamic. Celan was always alert, too much afraid, but also worried
that someone somewhere was preparing an attack on him. The fear
and profound mistrust in Germany, even after the defeat of the Third
Reich, has often been read as misplaced and ungrounded, and thus as
nothing more than paranoia and a symptom of the incipient psychic


                                                                                 7
Radhouan Ben Amara, Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's Writings



disorder that was to darken his later days. But Celan knew whereof he
was speaking when he called the new Germany a “landscape of fear”.
And yet he would return again and again to read his work in
Germany. A wounded and psychologically exhausted Celan would
return to Paris from these various expeditions into Germany.
     When Salman Rushdie declares that “the most precious book I
possess is my passport”, we obviously understand roughly that art is
also the only available passport; that only through literature a genuine
return for the exiled writer is possible. For many writers and exiles, the
attachment to one's own land remains a trauma, and this attachment
can become unreasonable and even unjustified, as the narrator's of
Rushdie's novel Shame refutes:


         We know the forces of gravity, but not its origins; and to
      explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend
      that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You
      will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I
      sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in
      places. (Rushdie 1983: 90)


     The debunking of the tree metaphor makes it clear that human
beings are different from trees and should be rootless and entirely
mobile. This is indeed a radical idea, which, in a way, the novel
dramatizes, just as its protagonist Omar Khayyam is destroyed after he
returns to his native place. But human beings are not always rational
animals: in Shame the narrator himself cannot help but feel shamefaced,
while admitting, «And to come to the 'roots' idea, I should say that I
haven't managed to shake myself free of it completely. Sometimes I do
see myself as a tree, even, rather, grandly, as the ash Yggdrasil, the
mythical world-tree of Norse legend» (ibid.: 92). As Ha Jin sustains,
what is fundamental here is the playfulness manifested in the
metaphor of the ash Yggdrasil, which, existing in the domain of
Scandinavian mythology, has little to do with the narrator's native
place, but which is transplanted into his being through artistic



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imagination. Thus, art has become his way of reconciliation and
transcendence. The question is always how to survive as an artist -
while making one's art thrive - and how to rearrange the landscapes of
our envisioned homes. The dichotomy inherent in the word
“homeland” is more significant now than it was in the past. Its
meaning can no longer be separated from home, which is something
the migrant should be able to build away from his native land.
Therefore, it is logical to say that your homeland is where you build
your home. We should also bear in mind that, no matter where we go,
we cannot shed our past completely – so we must strive to use parts of
our past to facilitate our journeys. Connections are not connections
through identities but despite differences. Isn't culture after all, a space
of continuous conflict, where the issue of identity is permanently
negotiated? Isn't one of the most subtle strategies of domination,
denomination, as Derrida teaches us, when he admits that to give names
is very close to dominate? Even literature itself is a political space, and
the very space of the text could be understood as a time of gathering:


        gatherings of exiles, émigrés and refugees; gathering on the
     edge of 'foreign' culture; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in
     the ghettos or cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-
     light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another's
     language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance,
     degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of
     underdevelopment, of other world lived retroactively; gathering
     the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. (Bhabha 1994:
     139)


     Rushdie gestures towards the political backdrop of border
troubles, such as those attending the long division of territory of East
Bengal from West Pakistan, before the former became Bangladesh. The
very figure of Rushdie's diasporic “translatedness” is crystallised in his
conceptualisation of Pakistan as a second “home”, irrevocably bound
to the metaphor of the border because it lies, spatially and
chronologically, “between” his first home (India) and his current home


                                                                                    9
Radhouan Ben Amara, Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's Writings



(England), an interstitial space which never quite resolves the question
of cultural borders for his “midnight's child”: where does he really
belong to? The answer could be that we seldom inhabit the same
home-world for long stretches of time. Even if our own situation
remains relatively stable, situations are changing around us all the
time. As Rushdie points out in Imaginary Homelands, social migration,
cultural displacement, cross-pollination, and influences «from beyond
the community to which we belong» all serve to expand «our narrowly
defined cultural frontiers» and challenge «our narrow sense of being-
at-home» (Rushdie 1991: 19-20). Consequently, crossing into the
boundary zones of home-life commits us to translation activity.
Translation makes it possible for us to move from the familiar “partial”
ground of our home-space into more abstract territory. In the process,
Rushdie notes, we are exposed to «new angles at which to enter
reality». Rushdie's writings are to be valued for the way they celebrate
exposure to influences that open our home-worlds to the wild pollens
and fragments of different memories, meanings, and descriptions. The
power of literature and other cross-pollinating sources to increase our
exposure to new experiences of meaning serve also to expand our
capacity to translate intangible features of our private home-worlds
into more tangible articulations. As we assimilate translations born
from exposure to the wild, we can use these to forge new inroads –
perhaps even new styles – of reciprocal belonging.
      The main idea behind most of the writings of Rushdie is that
whenever we cross a significant boundary, we step into an unsetting
in-between zone, where we have to abandon accepted structures and
truths. Yet this liminal zone can also open up possibilities for inner
transformation, leading to the birth of a new sense of fellowship. In The
Satanic Verses, a novel about frontier-crossing, transgression is the key to
the issue of diasporas' identity: in juxtaposing the re-imagination of the
rise of Islam and the representation of the black immigrant community
in London, Rushdie traverses the frontiers of fact, fiction and
antagonistic cultures and identities with his deferred/different cultural
translation of the “authentic” English/Islamic culture. In this dialogic
form, the novel represents a palimpsest vision of metropolitan culture.


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                                             Between, vol. I, n. 1 (Maggio/May 2011)



In transgressing cultural frontiers, Rushdie no doubt productively
turns the neurosis into an impetus for making the newness. But in Step
Across This Line, Rushdie returns to the theme of crossing frontiers, the
central issue of our time: «how to preserve our freedom to cross
physical, artistic, economic and intellectual borders without
succumbing to “our” enemies, who can cross borders too, to destroy
our freedom?». Can we «fight back without becoming the enemy's
mirror image, without becoming», in Rushdie's words, «the suits of
armour our fear makes us put on?» (Rushdie 2003: 354-356, 367-369).
Rushdie resorts to Vladimir Nabokov, whom he considers the greatest
writer ever to make a successful journey across the language frontier,
and enumerated meticulously Nabokov's “three grades of evil” that
can be discerned in the strange world of verbal transmigration. He then
explores the diversity of frontiers in life and advocates for frontier-
crossing as the best evidence of freedom's existence. Already the
imperative in the title “Step Across this Line!” entreats the reader's not
to be repelled by artificial lines. In the deepest core of human desires
lies the crossing of lines, exploring, inventing, criticising, that is to say
moving freely, in mind or body. Frontiers are therefore quite inevitably
part of any human existence; mankind not only creates them, be they
imaginary or physical, but also suffers from their consequences – above
all the political ones.
      «The curse of human race is not that we are so different from one
another, but that we are so alike». These are the words of Niccolò
Vespucci, protagonist of Salman Rushdie's latest novel, The Enchantress
of Florence, a traveller from Florence who crosses the ocean to find the
Emperor Akbar, and relay to him a great and secret story. A yellow-
haired trickster who hides away in pirate ships and creates death.
Vespucci is a cosmopolite who


        could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanish, Arabic,
     Persian, Russian, English and Portuguese. He had picked up
     languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages
     were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.
     (Rushdie 2008)


                                                                                 11
Radhouan Ben Amara, Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's Writings



      His story is an international epic, one that connects the Italian
metropolis of the Mughal court in a sparking mesh of love, secrets, and
political intrigue. Akbar's favourite wife, Jodha – in Rushdie's account
a perfect but purely imaginary consort – is this “Other” kind of person,
who considers travel as pointless, because it removed (you) from the
place in which (you) had a meaning ... and it spirits (you) away into
fairylands, where (you) were, and looked, frankly absurd. Jodha sits in
the Mughal court pulling Akbar home from his journeys of conquest –
and the power she has over the emperor is her extraordinary sexual
artistry. Rushdie uses also his cross-borders story to talk about the
choices a woman – such as Jodha – might make in a man's world and
the consequences of those choices. But what is of most importance is
the kind of “skinlessness” out of which Rushdie draws his writing, and
which represents the best way of being in the world. I personally
consider The Enchantress as the most implicit treatment of Rushdie's
eternal themes on exile, displacement, nomadism, border-crossing, and
the dense web of connection binding East and West. As Rushdie
admits, with the Renaissance Italians, such as Macchiavelli or Vespucci
are caught in the intrigue of their times. Akbar, philosopher and proto-
democrat, dreams outside his era of a “culture of inclusion”, where
liberty, equality and brotherhood are the rule. Rushdie deconstructs in
this way, the myth of the European culture. He states that the idea of
humanism, which people constantly say is the great creation of the
European Renaissance, is also present in the philosophies - the
metaphysics, and ideas – that are being explored in India at those
times. These things are not merely creation of the West. The West does
not have the monopoly on these virtues; neither by the way, does it
have the monopoly of brutality. Both worlds are also savage. Rushdie's
Akbar, like Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian, does think the unkindly
thoughts that history obliterates. Rushdie holds an ongoing dialogue
with other writers: one is occasionally reminded of the exchanges
between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities;
of Pamuk's border-crossing protagonist in The White Castle; and of the
musings on art and reality in his My Name is Red, in which the
experiments in realism of Akbar's court painters are cited. There is also


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a resounding echo of the Indo-Persian storytelling tradition, with its
lush images, forked progressions and digressions, its obliterations of
boundaries between magic and reality. Akbar feels that the lands of the
Occident are «exotic and surreal» to a degree incomprehensible to the
humdrum people of the East3. In Rushdie's deft reversal of the
orientalist gaze, Mughal India, the East, is often portrayed as more
tolerant, philosophical and progressive than Europe. But as Akbar
learns from his storytelling kinsman, in one sense at least, West and
East are not as distant as they seem: “The curse of the human race is
not so much that we are so different from one another, but that we are
so alike”; thus the real becomes undisconnectable from the unreal and
the inscription of several polyphonic voices is made fairly possible.




    3
        Cfr. Hussein 2008.



                                                                             13
Radhouan Ben Amara, Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's Writings




                                   Works cited

Acuto, Michel, “Edges of the Conflict: A Three-Folded
     Conceptualization of National Borders”, Borderlands, 7:1 (2008).
Appel, Alfred Jr., “Nabokov's Interview”, Winconsin Studies in
     Contemporary Literature, VIII. 2 (Spring 1967).
Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture, New York, Routledge, 1994.
Butler, Judith, “Universality in Culture”, Nussbaum, Martha, For Love
     of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, New York, Beacon,
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Celan, Paul, Collected Prose, Manchester, Carcanet Press, 1986.
Chalfen, Israel, Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth, New York, Persea
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Collin, Sheringham – Pheroza, Daruwalla, “Transgressing Hospitality:
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     Eds. Conrad Lashley - Paul Lynch - Alison Morrison, Amsterdam,
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Derrida, Jacques, Khôra, Paris, Galilée, 1993.
Id., Of Hospitality, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000.
Gary Banham (ed.), Space, Geometry and Aesthetics. Through Kant and
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Hussein, Aemar, “A Forking Path of Fable that Unites East and West”,
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Rosello, Mireille, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest,
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Rushdie, Salman, Shame, New York, Knof, 1983.
Id., Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, London,
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Id., Step Across this Line, New York, The Modern Library, 2003.
Id., The Enchantress of Florence, London, Jonathan Cape, 2008.
Simmel, Georg, Sociologie. Etudes sur les formes de socialisation, Paris,
     Presses Universitaires, 1999.



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Visser, Margaret, The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution,
    Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners, London, Penguin, 1993.


                              The author

Radhouan Ben Amara

       Ricercatore di Lingua inglese e traduzione all’Università di
Cagliari. Ha pubblicato vari libri fra cui: The Fragmentation of the Proper
Name and the Crisis of Degree in King Lear, Munster, Verlag, 1991;
Tradition, Traduction et Interprétation en Orient et en Occident, Cagliari,
CUEC, 1997; The Desert in Travel Writing, Cagliari, Edizioni AV, 2006;
Language and its Discontens. Essays on Speech, Writing, Grammar &
Meaning, Roma, Aracne, 2008; Language and Cultural Translation. An
Exile & a Permanent Errance, Roma, Aracne, 2009.

      Email: radhouan@unica.it




                              The paper

Data invio: 30/10/2010
Data accettazione: 30/01/2011
Data pubblicazione: 30/05/2011




                     How to quote this paper

Ben Amara, Radhouan, “Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's
Writings”, Between, I.1 (2011), http://www.between-journal.it/


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Radhouan Ben Amara, Frontiers and Thresholds in Rushdie's Writings




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