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The Imperial Superhero

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2013

Chris Gavaler
Chris Gavaler*
Affiliation:
Washington and Lee University
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Extract

Set in 1978, the year Edward Said published Orientalism, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children depicts “magic children” born in the first hour of August 15, 1947, “within the frontiers of the infant sovereign state of India” (1981, 226, 224). Through some “freak of biology” or “preternatural power,” the children receive “miraculous” abilities, including such superhero staples as flight, time-travel, and “a boy who could increase or reduce his size at will” (224, 227, 228). For his mind-reading narrator, Rushdie evokes the Shadow's 1930s radio slogan: “the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men” (229). The American Shadow, like so many of his descendants and predecessors, gained his powers from the mythical Orient, but the fantastical abilities that Rushdie awards the first citizens born in independent India mark the end of colonial exploitation and the transfer of real-world political power from colonizers to the formerly colonized.

Type
Symposium: The Politics of the Superhero
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 108 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2014 

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