Salman Rushdie's "The location of Brazil": the imaginary homelands of fantastic literature

Abstract

In 1985, under the title "The Location of Brazil" Salman Rushdie published a long review of Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, which today is to be found in his collection Imaginary Homelands. My essay shows how Rushdie's article can be considered a sort of manifesto of his poetics, pivoting on his idea of a political use of the fantastic and his concept of the migrant as a central figure of modernity. Rushdie's theories seem to anticipate on the one hand Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on minor literatures and, on the other, Arjun Appadurai's views on "modernity at large".

Keywords

• modernity
• film
• migrants
• literary studies