Cultural Liminality and the Construction of a Space-other in Salman Rushdie's “The Courter”

Abstract

The Courter, a story from the East, West collection (1994) by Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie, problematizes the paradox of both divided and fused migrant identity. The story fictionalizes various cultural misunderstandings, clashes among individuals from different cultures, the stereotyping of migrants (particularly Indian)by the dominant culture, hybridity and negotiations of meanings. The objective of this work is to describe and characterize such cultural dynamics in The Courter through certain constructs proposed by the Indian critic Homi Bhabha, such as hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence and cultural difference. From the analysis carried out, we observe that hybridity, cultural contamination, mixture and difference appear in The Courter in a symbolic key through the game that is established with language. In addition, the migrant characters imitate the English culture and this translation is materialized through cultural intertexts that provide them with alternative frames of reference from which their experiences find meaning. English society is represented as being ordered on the basis of a homogeneous, dominant, host society that "accommodates" other cultures while it is the diasporic identities that destabilize the achieved socio-cultural order. The story then proposes a space-Other, a third, liminal space in which identities are recreated to give rise to something totally new and hybrid.