{"id":95,"date":"2014-04-17T11:06:22","date_gmt":"2014-04-17T15:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/?p=95"},"modified":"2014-06-03T13:02:17","modified_gmt":"2014-06-03T17:02:17","slug":"read-outside-your-own-little-world-sir-salman-rushdie-on-literature-and-censorship-by-william-chu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/2014\/04\/17\/read-outside-your-own-little-world-sir-salman-rushdie-on-literature-and-censorship-by-william-chu\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cRead outside your own little world\u201d: Sir Salman Rushdie on Literature and Censorship by William Chu"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the course of the 2013-14 school year, the Center for the Arts and Humanities<\/strong> has hosted a series of conversations, exhibitions, film screenings, performances, and lectures to explore the themes of censorship and free speech.\u00a0 To conclude this campus-wide initiative, Sir Salman Rushdie<\/strong>, the most renowned of the series\u2019 speakers came to Colby College\u2019s Lorimer Chapel Thursday night for what would prove to be a humorous, thought-provoking, and forward-looking lecture on the role of art in our contemporary global world.<\/p>\n

\"Censorship<\/a><\/p>\n

Before delving into the details of Thursday night, I think it\u2019s necessary to elaborate on Sir Salman Rushdie\u2019s accomplishments and his reputation.\u00a0 Sir Salman Rushdie is both one of the most celebrated and also controversial authors of our time.\u00a0 From his first novel, Grimus<\/em> (1975), to his Booker prize winning Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em> (1981), to his collection of children\u2019s stories, Haroun and the Sea Stories<\/em> (1990), Rushdie has explored the ever-changing sociopolitical world landscape through his own style of magical realism, a style that combines realistic settings with fable, fantasy, and satire.\u00a0 Yet despite his artistic ingenuity so relevant to our contemporary moment, Rushdie is perhaps most well known for the ire received from Islamic fundamentalists following the publication of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses<\/em> (1988).\u00a0 Following its pub\"\"lication, the book was banned in several countries and caused riots and demonstrations in the UK, India, Pakistan, and South Africa.\u00a0 Many Islamic fundamentalists took offense a passage, where a character named Salman alters the prophet Mahound\u2019s dictation.\u00a0 Additionally, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran, declared a \u201cfatwa\u201d or death-sentence and multi-million dollar bounties on Rushdie.<\/p>\n

Although Sir Salman Rushdie\u2019s speech in Lorimer Chapel broadly revolved around the issue of censorship, he turned attention away from the spectacular nature of his conflict with Islamic fundamentalists and towards a deeper and more thought-provoking topic: the role of the artist and art in our global world.<\/p>\n

\"Censorship<\/a><\/p>\n

Sir Salman Rushdie\u2019s arrival was highly anticipated, and tickets to the event sold out quickly.\u00a0 To accommodate the community\u2019s desire to hear Rushdie, Colby also offered live streams of the event in Ostrove auditorium and Lovejoy.\u00a0 Even in light of this anticipation and the huge round of applause he received, Sir Salman Rushdie kept the mood of his talk light yet insightful, joking that although writers are not naturally prone to giving grand speeches, he follows the legacy left by Charles Dickens, whose rough schedule of performing \u201cgreatest hits\u201d has apparently caught on.<\/p>\n

\"Censorship<\/a>Rushdie was quick to pay homage to the writers who came before him.\u00a0 He especially commemorated the life and work of the extraordinary Columbian author, Gabriel Garcia M\u00e1rquez<\/strong>, who died that day, and whose magical realist stories illustrated provincial Columbia.<\/p>\n

\u00a0By honoring the legacies of authors such as Dickens and M\u00e1rquez, Salman Rushdie emphasized a vital role of literature: to bring news to people about a specific moment in time and place.\u00a0 To Rushdie, this role is getting more and more complicated as our world becomes increasingly global.<\/p>\n

In our contemporary moment, television and the Internet have become much more popular mediums to circulate news.\u00a0 However, as Rushdie pointed out, the quality of this news has greatly degraded as our popular contemporary culture has become more interested \u201cby Kim Kardashian\u2019s behind<\/strong>,\u201d the spectacular, and ultimately ignorance.<\/p>\n

\"Censorship<\/a>And whereas great national novels like Pride and Prejudice<\/em> used to be able to accurately and deeply portray their moments in time, Rushdie argued that literature can no longer be so parochial and achieve the same goal.\u00a0\u00a0 Whereas the great British novel could concern itself solely with local matters, Rushdie implored the audience that we must today \u201cread outside [our] own little world \u2026 [and] use literature as a way of learning about the world.\u201d\u00a0 Rushdie implored us to seek the news from literature like Phil Klay\u2019s Redeployment<\/em><\/strong>, which intimately takes readers to the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan.\u00a0 He implored us to read more translated works and works from around the world: for instance, the stories of the Vietnamese-born Australian writer Nam Le<\/strong>, and the South-Korean translator and writer Lee Yun-gi<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

To Rushdie, contemporary literature deals with a unique problem.\u00a0 It must intimately focus on specific human characters while simultaneously recognizing the impact of external factors that increasingly shape our lives: religion, politics, bombs, and catastrophes.\u00a0 Rushdie posed a series of question to the audience.\u00a0 What happens in a world when character is no longer destiny?\u00a0 When the Arab world collides with the lives of New Yorkers?\u00a0 When the fate of New Yorkers didn\u2019t rely on their greed or kindness or any of their individual character?\u00a0 Now we live in a world where, like Rushdie\u2019s<\/strong> Midnight Children<\/em> states, \u201cMost of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.\u201d\u00a0 Although we live in a world still populated by people and characters, we feel less in control of our destiny than perhaps ever before.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

To meet these challenges in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, Salman Rushdie tells us the artist must define his human characters more broadly than ever.\u00a0 But in this task, the artist inevitably encounters resistance from powerful political forces. Identity politics asks us to define ourselves in narrow terms- a single thing \u2013 Western, Muslim, Eastern.\u00a0 It is fashionable to define ourselves by opposition \u2013 we define ourselves within boundaries opposed to the things we don\u2019t like.\u00a0 But Rushdie emphasizes that the novel knows this to be a lie.\u00a0 Literature knows humans are richly complex and contradictory.<\/p>\n

Art tries to push out the boundaries and increase by some small measure the sum total of what we are able to think and feel, and therefore what we are able to be.<\/p>\n

Sir Salman Rushdie reminds us of art\u2019s resiliency and its power to expand the meanings of our identity in spite of powerful forces that \u201cwould prefer the universe to be shut down quite a lot.\u201d\u00a0 He reminds us that the word Impressionist was once used as an insult; that the poetry of Ovid<\/strong> outlived the restrictions of the Roman Empire. \u00a0Sir Salman Rushdie shows us art\u2019s power to uncover censorship<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“Gabriel\u00a0Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez.”\u00a0Encyclopaedia Britannica. <\/i>\u00a02014. \u00a0Britannica Online Academic <\/i>Edition. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.<\/p>\n

“Sir\u00a0Salman\u00a0Rushdie.”\u00a0Encyclopaedia Britannica.<\/i> 2014. Britannica Online Academic Edition<\/i>. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cSalman Rushdie.\u201d Gale Database:\u00a0Contemporary Authors Online<\/i>. 2012. Gale Literary Databases<\/i>. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the course of the 2013-14 school year, the Center for the Arts and Humanities has hosted a series of conversations, exhibitions, film screenings, performances, …","protected":false},"author":1706,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1706"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/censorshipeventsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}