writing ourselves silly

anna winham

Though postmodernism has robbed us of modernism’s gravity, this new realm allows us to play, to defy, to bend the rules, to write ourselves silly. This postmodernist twist allows us access to all traditions, but leaves us interpretation, limbo, space, in-betweens. Where are our politics and how can we access them? While these collapsing boundaries of category, of space, of time, seem to deny us the development of any kind of class-consciousness by denying us class-ification, there remains the possibility of subverting this apolitical moment. Using a Foucauldian (1) theory of the duplicity of site of power, we see that the apolitics asserted by Western postmodernism provide the opportunity for resistance, specifically postcolonial resistance (2). While parallels exist between the postmodern and the postcolonial – indeed, this defiance of hegemonic categorisation is characteristically postcolonial – the “post-” in “postcolonial” cannot be the “post-” in “postmodern.” As Kwame Anthony Appiah explores in his essay “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” (3) the role of postcolonial peoples in Western postmodernism must remain distinct from the role of postmodernism in the postcolonial world (356). Postmodernism appeals to a universalism with regards to interpretation, or a lack thereof, but while postmodernism is universalist, it is not inherently globalist. In contrast, postcolonialism is vehemently and inescapably globalist. Postcolonialism holds more at stake in its specifics, in its politics, in its material reality, while postmodernism’s practice of universalising can invisibilise those stakes. In postcolonialism, the material matters: the historical-geographical implications of specific instances influence interpretations and consequences. The postcolonial context has strong Marxist tendencies, particularly with regard to class consciousness or the subaltern, even if the  class or the subaltern in question is a nation or a people. Therefore, when we consider postmodernism in the postcolonial context, we must consider how Marxism applies to and in postmodernism. How  can we unite class consciousness with the collapse of categorisation, politics with apolitical play? To answer this question I will review two texts: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I will argue that both novels are postcolonial texts and that they both approach their postcolonial politics through postmodern play, allowing levity to play against gravity to articulate a resistance of hegemony, the openings of possibility and creativity, and a politics of liberation. While in the midst of the freedom struggles taking place in 2020 it may seem vain or quaint to discuss postcolonial liberation through the vehicle of the novel, the liberatory politics expounded upon in these texts are relevant to our ongoing emancipatory dreams, imaginations, and struggles. 

First let us examine how the postmodern changes between its origins in the Euro-American context and its transition to the postcolonial context. While it’s difficult to pin down an exact definition of the postmodern, I choose to draw from Ihab Hassan’s (4) eleven distinctive traits of literary postmodernism, as here translated from the French by Geetha Ganapathy-Dore (5) for the purposes of this essay:

the uncertain character of the text,  fragmentation, dislodging of the canon of grand narratives in favour of numerous local language games or micronarratives, the erasure of the subject, irrepresentibility, irony, a deformation of cultural genres via hybridation, parody and pastiche, carnivalization, performance that fills the gaps of the text, constructionism and an immanent semiotic system that invents a blind escape. (5) 

However, the postmodern is used and applied differently in different contexts, as we shall see. In the Western cultural context, postmodernism fractures and subverts all topics which it presents. This universal fracturing ends up homogenising what might otherwise be a very heterogeneous landscape or experience. Since in postmodernism any interpretation or sense of stable meaning might be undermined, it can be hard to make political assertions with regard to what is true about the world. In many cases, this has led postmodernism down a seemingly apolitical path, all seemingly apolitical paths ultimately bolstering the status quo (and in this way becoming highly political, though not marked as such in common discourse). 

Ironically, through its universalising destabilisation of meaning, postmodernism often supports the continuation of the ruling regime. The apolitical tendency of postmodernism is usefully noted through what was, in the first fifteen years of the 21st century, a seemingly ubiquitous cultural symbol:  the emergent phenomenon of the hipster, in which Western postmodernist cultural attitudes are perhaps best symbolized. Hipster is based upon a brand of postmodern irony, an expression of intense self-awareness (perhaps without actual self-awareness) of historical referentiality. In “Would All the Hapa Kids Stop Copping Swagger?” Aimee Le (6) writes, “Hip ‘irony’ means only to duplicate culturally significant behavior without organizing subjectivity or significance behind it. ‘I do it, but I don't mean it.’” The Althusserian (7), materialist conception of action as belief renders the hipster merely an unwitting imperialist: the ‘ironic’ imperialist is indistinguishable from ‘actual’ imperialism and blithely functions as such” (44). This is the danger of postmodernism: a sense of irony erasing consciousness of imperialism and other material modes of oppression. 

Postcolonialism, unlike Western contexts, cannot afford such unwitting imperialism, nor such false consciousness. Therefore postmodernism in a postcolonial context must differ from postmodernism in a Western context. Le continues, “Hipster never elaborates into a politics because, like any neurosis, it just repeatedly stages the transgression of the Law which it re-founds” (44).  Postcolonialism, even postcolonialism that makes use of postmodernism, cannot be Western in nature. When postcolonial writers use Western forms, such as the novel or even European languages themselves, they change them. They mix them. They make them new. They make them postcolonial and therefore not Western. In order to have a postcolonial orientation at all, postcolonial postmodernism must actually transgress the Law, the prevailing colonial order, in order to subvert it, to change it, to destroy it. While postmodernism, somehow both universal and unstable, contains the danger materialised by hipster, it also contains the possibility for a different kind of danger: a threat to the status quo. Both Midnight’s Children and The Unbearable Lightness of Being elaborate their politics through playing with postmodernism. This sense of play implies that both Rushdie and Kundera utilise postmodern methods but also resist, delegitimize, and transform them. As Foucault writes in History of Sexuality, “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (1629). The hegemony of postmodernism (ironically) presupposes the resistance against it; monolithic postmodernism predicts postcolonial postmodernism. Thus, we end up, repeatedly, with politics of and through play. 

Throughout Midnight’s Children, Rushdie presents us with serious subject matter yet refuses to let us take the narrator, the narration, or even the construction of history seriously. He accomplishes this levity through a combination of linguistic playfulness, amusing symbols conflated with serious discussion, and magical realism. From the very beginning, Rushdie is playing with traditions and subverting them. Midnight’s Children begins with “I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time” (3). Immediately Rushdie references the Western moralistic story-telling traditions of the fable, yet by repurposing the traditional beginning as the second half of a sentence, he is already subverting (and literally inverting) these traditions. Rushdie is demonstrating to his audience that he can use and abuse traditions, that he can find sites of resistance within sites of power. He begins with a reference to didactic purity, introducing the idea that this will be a tale with a moral, but the reversal already implies that it will be a telling that moralises in a way that inverts Western hegemony’s own morals. The next sentence demonstrates Saleem’s level of self-reflection, another hallmark of postmodern writing, “No, that won’t do... The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more . . . On the stroke of midnight as a matter of fact” (3). This stream of consciousness of our narrator, Saleem, re-directed towards the act of narrating demonstrates some anxiety on his part to impress upon the reader the importance of details as well as reveals the thought process behind establishing these details. It is as though Rushdie is giving his readers a glimpse back-stage into the construction of narrative, of history. 

Additionally, Rushdie here establishes Saleem as a meta-historical character aware of himself, his reader, and the way in which he is constructing history. The self-consciousness Rushdie allows Saleem to reveal establishes in the reader an awareness that Saleem is not to be entirely trusted to tell the ‘truth.’ As the book continues, however, it becomes clear that we can trust no character to tell the ‘truth’ any more than another. We are plunged immediately into a world of uncertainty where we must guess at truth, at meaning, much in the same way as we must guess at the meanings of signifiers as though they exist in a constantly sliding scale. This kind of linguistic play – inversion of traditions, breaking the fourth wall, reminders of the possibility for multiple meanings – creates a realm of possibility by establishing uncertainty. This kind of unwillingness to establish one meaning for the reader to discover is fundamentally postcolonial: the postcolonial context requires suspicion of dominant narratives and an deafening awareness of the subaltern narrative’s silence. Making the entire truth regime uncertain from the very beginning, through playful sentence construction, Rushdie forces his readers to acknowledge our involvement in the construction of meaning, narrative, and history. In the case of an Indian novel written in English, there are likely to be Western readers, who will interpret the work using their English context. Rushdie forces his readers from the former colonial power to understand that their conceptions of truth are flawed and hegemonically derived. Decentering the truth regimes of these readers through linguistic play employs postmodernism for postcolonial, that is, liberational, political ends. 

As well as using inventive syntax, Rushdie employs the use of light or bizarre symbols such as noses, knees, and chutney to establish serious discussions of lineage, violence, fragmentation, nationalism, and diaspora. One might even claim that these bizarre symbols, in conjunction with their grave employment, are funny. Now indeed, humour is subjective; I would not try to claim objectivity. It may be that some do not find snotty noses, strong knees, and chutney as metaphor for history funny, absurd, or even light, but from a Western cultural context, drawing upon my European and American socialisation, these symbols function playfully in the text. I find them funny, and I imagine that at least other Westerners also do so. Thus, to a Western audience at least, Rushdie uses humorous symbols in serious context to create incongruence and absurdity while forcing us as readers to accept this mode of storytelling. This refusal to be serious about that which society has designated serious and sacred is resistance. This placing of snotty noses at the centre of discourse on postcolonial Indian nationalism is a characteristic of postcolonial literature: it resists the social norms of respect and acceptance of history, authority, and a tradition of symbols. Rushdie uses these incongruous symbols to open for the reader the possibility and ability to question these things – history, authority, tradition – by undermining them with humour. 

The very fact that humour is subjective and that I am unsure whether others find these symbols funny speaks to the discomfort Rushdie inspires through these symbols: because it is a faux pas to laugh at history, especially violent or tragic history, though this is what Rushdie is inspiring me to do, I am made uncomfortable by the fact that I am finding this story amusing – and don’t know whether I am alone in my socially inappropriate amusement. Rushdie thus is playing with my ingrained respect and serious attitude towards history, authority, and tradition. Saleem’s grandfather’s nose plays a significant role in his marriage and his choices about religion, while Saleem’s nose ends up making him into a tracker dog. Among the first indications of Aadam Aziz’s and Naseem’s love for each other is when they first encounter each other’s faces due to Naseem’s long- awaited complaint of a headache: “‘But Doctor, my God, what a nose!’ Ghani, angrily, ‘Daughter, mind your . . .’ But patient and doctor were laughing together, and Aziz was saying, ‘Yes, yes, it is a remarkable specimen. They tell me there are dynasties waiting in it . . .’ And he bit his tongue because he had been about to add, ‘ . . . like snot’” (24). The symbol of the nose becomes this mixture of levity and gravity. At the same time as there are “dynasties” waiting in Aadam’s nose, it is full of snot. Indeed, these dynasties are snot. Though our narrator Saleem does not acknowledge it, there is refusal from Rushdie here to take seriously the love story, the history, indeed his own story. Equating dynasties to snot, encountering one’s beloved through a series of illnesses as diagnosed through a hole in a sheet, and using a nose (rather than the more Western example of the eyes, the proverbial windows to the soul) as the key feature on which a love story turns all bring an unacknowledged element of the absurd into the story. It is strange and unexpected that these things play such a pivotal role, that these light symbols indeed are so important, so grave, for the direction of the story. This incongruence is the humour, is the play. Rushdie asserts seriousness as he asserts this playfulness. We readers are forced to accept the snotty nose, the breast viewed in front of a father and bodyguards through a hole in a sheet, and a marriage negotiated through minor illnesses, but they remain funny. 

The symbol of Shiva’s strong knees functions similarly to the dominance of the nose.  Though in recent times the act of taking a knee, whether it be to protest police violence against Black people, as in the case of Colin Kapernick’s long standing protest, or to enact that very violence, as in the case of Derek Chauvin’s terrorizing murder of George Floyd, has taken on new social significance, in the Western tradition, we are accustomed to considering hearts, arms, or entire people as denoting strength, but here in Midnight’s Children specifically knees are the weapon. Knees are an often-overlooked body part, so imbuing them with this special power, especially because that power demonstrates the power of a person, a midnight’s child, is also incongruous, unexpected, and absurd. While the dead women found killed by wounds from strong knees demonstrate a material seriousness – they are dead – they also demonstrate the humour. We know we shouldn’t find dead women funny, but the absurdity of death-by-knee creates an uncomfortable, macabre humour. Rushdie makes us squirm, keeps forcing us to accept the absurdity of his story. We laugh inappropriately, and our accepting, bourgeois, liberal values are affronted by ourselves, by our own social incongruence. Rushdie plays with our social emotions by pushing together what society asserts as separate.  The use of these incongruous symbols makes them seem bizarre and even humorous; this is a postmodernist feature employed for postcolonial ends. 

The closing metaphor of the chutney and pickle jars also serves as a light object imbued with serious thematic meaning, the juxtaposition of which creates humour that at least the Western reader is uncomfortable with. Passages like, “but the future cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty” (532) and “One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history” (531), expertly mix the jovial with the grave. Saleem is discussing the possibility of history, of time, of future, but he’s talking about these things through the metaphor of pickles! While chutney is a descriptively apt metaphor for postcolonial India, the bringing together of many elements mixed into one jar, one country, it feels an oddly light choice for the closing of a book ultimately pessimistic about the postcolonial Indian project. The choices feels light because, appropriate as it is for the logistics of the metaphor, chutney is familiar, homely, and comfortable. The text, however, is discussing the relative successes and failures of the postcolonial subcontinent: a grave subject if there ever were one. While I can assert that this is funny to the Western reader, I present the possibility that it may be even funnier to the Indian reader since it is something so common and base. Saleem declares, 

Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs 

which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!” (529) 

The self-consciousness evident in this passage reminds us of the constructed nature of the story, reminds us that six hundred million eggs actually cannot fit inside a pickle jar. The levity of the comparison between history and chutney, time and pickles, demonstrates irreverence for history, for time, for the official or unofficial version of the story. This irreverence insults the gravity with which we wish to treat postcolonial projects, histories of imperialism, war, death, and famine. It insults the way we wish to approach books, literature, politics, and the academy. It insults our theoretical frameworks for interacting with the world. This insistence upon irreverence in the face of seriousness subverts apolitical postmodernism in the aid of postcolonial remolding of thought processes. To assert a new kind of history is not enough; we must embarrass and thus subvert the idea of History itself. 

Another subversive aspect of play in Midnight’s Children is its magical realism. The presence of magic throughout this story of postcolonial India is as absurd as the chutnification of history or the snot of dynasties. Saleem’s constant assertions that key events in Indian history happened purely because he influenced them or purely in order to influence his life remind us of Saleem’s construction of the narrative, which in turn reminds us of the construction of all historical narratives. Similarly, the absurdities introduced by the magical realism into the historical narrative, which we accept as part of the story, remind us of all the absurdities that we daily accept as part of our historical narrative. Saleem moves through various magical powers throughout the book, but perhaps the most magical is the ability to hold telepathic conferences in his head. He says of his newfound power, 

I found that it was possible not only to pick up the children’s transmissions; not only to broadcast my own messages; but also (since I seem to be stuck with this radio metaphor) to act as a sort of national network, so that by opening my transformed mind to all the children, I could turn it into a kind of forum in which they could talk to one another, through me. So, in the early days of 1958, the five hundred and eighty-one children would assemble, for one hour, between midnight and one a.m., in the lok sabha or parliament of my brain. (259) 

This situation clearly is absurd, but we must accept it in order to follow the plot. Saleem’s assertion that this is true plays with our concepts of truth and reality, demonstrating to us the untruths our own minds can accept in order to construct a story. Within the story, everyone’s acceptance of magical occurrences, the realism component, parallels our acceptances of the absurdities of the history we are within and which we are being told. The playfulness of the magical realism in Midnight’s Children lies in the magic of writing itself: creating something which did not exist before, asserting something not true as true. Rushdie flouts European literary conventions of complete realism. The introduction of the magic further serves to collapse boundaries between the real and the imagined, the normal and the absurd, the believable and the unbelievable. Magical realism is thus indisputably postmodern, but because the playfulness of the magical realism in Midnight’s Children serves to subvert concepts of monolithic, hegemonic history, it also becomes indisputably postcolonial. The employment of magic here has a postcolonial agenda since it resists hegemony, but the agenda is achieved through postmodern techniques. 

Though located in Europe, Kundera is a postcolonial writer and The Unbearable Lightness of Being is truly a postcolonial work. In Kundera’s case, his homeland, Czechoslovakia (8) at the time of his birth, was colonised by the Soviet Union. As will be explored later, Eastern and even Central Europe have additionally been sites of colonisation from the East, rendering them Orientalised in the eyes of Western Europe, the site of postmodern empires such as Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. We must acknowledge Kundera’s critique of History as a postcolonial critique, despite his European positionality. According to Irvine and Gal in “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation,” the notion of fractal recursivity involves the projection of an opposition that exists at one level of a relationship onto another level of the relationship, much like a fractal in geometry (38), for example the separating of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ by the walls of a building, followed by the separating of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ by rooms within a building. In the European psyche, the construction of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, is a result of fractal recursivity: by the end of the nineteenth century, the views held during the Renaissance of regarding the division of productive, more-European North from the mercantile, more-foreign South was quickly being replaced by a division of Orientalised Eastern Asia from civilised Western Europe. Following a pattern of fractal recursivity, however, “this distinction between Europe and Asia, between East and West, could be deployed again and projected onto Europe itself, thereby producing a backward orient within Europe”, to ultimately deem Central Europe ‘Eastern Europe’, as is now the case, mistakenly, in the common imagination.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the southeast of the continent was known as the ‘Near East’ or ‘l’Orient européen’” (Irvine & Gal 62). The division between Eastern and Western Europe extends back to the Roman Empire, which noted a division between Eastern, Greek-speaking regions and those Western regions which adopted the language of their conquerors. The Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity in 1054 marks further division, but the Orientalisation of Eastern Europe came later. Various Iranian invasions and later particularly the 15th century Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire led to a conception of Eastern Europe as Oriental Europe. This Orientalisation then justified the lack of action on the part of Western European nations in the face of Soviet imperialism anywhere on the continent east of Berlin. Eastern and Central Europe were allowed to become colonised Europe as it was already a non-Europe Europe. Kundera writes of his imagined non-Europe from Europe, just as Rushdie does. As Moore argues in “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? : Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” “the term ‘postcolonial,’ and everything that goes with it – language, economy, politics, resistance, liberation and its hangover – might reasonably be applied to the formerly Russo- and Soviet- controlled regions post-1989 and -1991, just as it has been applied to South Asia post-1947 or Africa post-1958. East is South” (116). Former Soviet bloc states are often left out of postcolonial discourse, but they ought to be included. Kundera, then, like Rushdie, is the diaspora writing back, the scribe against empire. His postmodern play is not apolitical or European; it is instead political and postcolonial. 

Published three years after Midnight’s Children, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being also uses tactics of postmodern playfulness, the absurd, and the juxtaposition of lightness and weight to achieve a politics of liberation, common to postcolonialism. Like Rushdie, Kundera is a writer of diaspora: dislocated from his country, writing of imaginary homelands, Pragues of the mind. As Rushdie writes in Imaginary Homelands, 

It may be that writers of my position, exiles or immigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. (10) 

Kundera, a Czech expatriate writing from Paris, is a writer in Rushdie’s position, looking back, reclaiming. Kundera, like Rushdie, is self-aware of the constructed nature of narrative and history, and tells his story through four protagonists, never providing a unified perspective, and interspersing musings upon the nature of time, history, and eternal return. He ponders, “If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one” (4). Kundera, like Rushdie, alerts the reader to the social construction of history. Explicitly examining Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return and how it affects our understanding and attitudes towards the narrative of history we accept, like Rushdie – according to David Price in “Rushdie’s Use and Abuse of History in Midnight’s Children” – Kundera tells a self-reflective story wrapping Nietzschian notions of history into folds of narrative. He commands the postmodern, collapsing past into present, juxtaposing the lightness of feathers with the weight of the guillotine like pickles with history, but doesn’t give up his politics, deconstructing both European and Soviet stories of the past. 

Kundera’s play comes out chiefly in the recurrence of specific objects, metaphors, and themes. While Rushdie uses Saleem’s breaking of the fourth wall to remind us of the construction of narrative, Kundera himself speaks about his characters as ideas as well as explicitly discussing the repetition of his metaphors. He disrupts his own already fragmented narratives to explain motives of his construction, emphasising modes of storytelling. Regarding Tomas and Tereza, he writes, “Their love story did not begin until afterward.” Though Kundera has been telling the story for two hundred and nine pages, he returns to beginnings, to moments, rewrites as he writes, disrupts time and subjectivity. Meanwhile, a prevalent metaphor, the bulrush basket, returns again: “he realized that someone had sent her downstream in a bulrush basket” . Kundera’s mode of drawing attention to the construction of narrative and history is to make the artifice of his own narrative so obvious that we cannot help but notice the nature of its composition, and thus we are forced to reflect upon the architecture of other narratives that we daily accept. Continuing, Kundera enters his own text: “I have said before that metaphors are dangerous” (209). Kundera acknowledges not only the constructed nature of narrative itself, but also the possible danger of these constructions, the peril of ideas and beliefs. For example, when the Soviets change street signs and names of places, people quickly forget the history that used to be told in those names. Even in peacetime, our landscape is the battleground of our memory. We see this battle playing out even now, as freedom fighters topple statues of slave traders, slave owners, and colonialists. Every statue helps to construct the narrative of our history. Removing the statues changes the stories we tell about who we are and how we got here. These sites of memory are metaphors for the past, and since through their renaming they are transformed, the past itself is also transformed. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the bulrush basket rewrites itself each time it appears due to information received in between appearances. This kind of play, this weaving of metaphors, timelines, and stories, disrupts the idea of an overarching historical narrative, forcing readers to interrogate our own individual historical narratives, the narratives of history that we believe. 

Obsessed with memory as history, Kundera chooses metaphors and objects as sites of repetition, sites of memory. Indeed, as Anna Karenina becomes a site of memory within The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Unbearable Lightness of Being through the process of fractal recursivity itself exists as a site of memory for the Soviet invasion of Prague, though it is a self-conscious, and thus postmodern, such site. Kundera, then, asserts his anti-Soviet politics by establishing his book as a site for remembering Soviet imperialism, but remains postmodern by including within his book disruptions of monolithic history and meaning. Kundera pushes us into a Derridian (9) sense of symbols at play, narratives in motion. 

Rushdie and Kundera both harness postmodernism, specifically through playfulness, to pursue postcolonial agendas. Though postmodernism contains the dangerous possibility of apoliticism and unwitting imperialism, it also contains – as Rushdie and Kundera prove – the possibility for postcolonial politics. Though the “post-” functions differently in each case, postmodernism and postcolonialism interact. The key, then, is to decolonise postmodernism instead of depoliticising postcolonialism through  global hegemonic European narrative of postmodernism. Employing fun, contradictions, collapsing history, and levity, both Rushdie and Kundera manage to establish postcolonial politics in postmodern form. Instead of trivialising the very real, material, bloody struggles of postcolonial movements, this levity creates a contrast with the serious, demanding of readers that we reflect upon the lightness with which we approach certain moments in history and the respect which we accord some narratives. Rushdie and Kundera both exploit the way that lightness can expose social constructions surrounding which narratives are credible and which narratives get to become history. Postmodernism in Midnight’s Children and The Unbearable Lightness of Being occurs as part of the postcolonial projects, as a component of politics of liberation. 

Works Cited 

Appiah, Kwame. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991): 336-357. PDF. 

Foucault, Michel. “From The History of Sexuality.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Themes. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 1627-1636. Print. 

Kundera, Milan. 1984. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999. Print. 

Irvine, Judith and Susan Gal. “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” Regimes of language : ideologies, politics, and identities. Ed. Paul V. Kroskrity. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1999. 35-83 PDF. 

Le, Aimée. “Would All the Hapa Kids Stop Copping Swagger?” English Honors Thesis, Dartmouth College, 2012. PDF. 

Moore, David Chioni. “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? : Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique.” PMLA 116. 1 (2001): 111-128. 

Price, David. “Rushdie’s Use and Abuse of History in Midnight’s Children.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 25.2 (1994): 91-107. PDF. 

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. New York: Granta Books London in association with Penguin Books, 1992. PDF. 

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. 1981. New York: Random House, 2006. Print.