
Contents
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Magical Multitudes, Real Multitudes: The Salience of Genre Magical Multitudes, Real Multitudes: The Salience of Genre
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Stereotyping the Singular Universal Stereotyping the Singular Universal
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Multitudes and Carnal Power Multitudes and Carnal Power
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Collectives beside the Nation: Fuzzy Multitudes Collectives beside the Nation: Fuzzy Multitudes
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Multitudes of Queers Multitudes of Queers
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Women at Work: Another Multitude Women at Work: Another Multitude
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Multitudes of the Poor Multitudes of the Poor
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Coda: Multitudes Unleashed Upon the World Coda: Multitudes Unleashed Upon the World
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2 To Understand Me, You’ll Have to Swallow a World: Margins, Multitudes, and the Nation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
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Published:September 2014
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Abstract
This chapter considers the stereotypical representation of crowds and overpopulation in Salman Rushdie's narrative, Midnight's Children. The novel's overarching theme centers on the anxieties regarding the future of the Indian subcontinent's newly formed postcolonies, which represent the political threshold of decolonization as a collective, polyphonic experience. Drawing on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's thesis that the “productive flesh of the multitude” has the “unruly” capacity to challenge the neoliberal world order, Rushdie's magical realism in the story reinvents the colonial stereotypes of “dirty” and “disorderly” mobs to reflect a new immanent potential for the children of Midnight. The multitude exists in Rushdie's fiction to reify stereotypical images of the subcontinent as teeming, chaotic, heteronormative, excessively consumptive, and fecund—a vision of a people aligned with the goals of a liberal state.
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