Biopolitics and Race in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Abstract

Salman Rushdie’s fiction has often been investigated with regard to its depiction of the psychological and violent effects of racism based on skin colour (phenotype). However, augmenting this analysis by considering additionally how Rushdie represents biopolitical technologies reveals that he engages with race more widely and variously than has been supposed. This paper argues that because his novels, especially Midnight’s Children, portray these technologies as animated by racialization which the state constructs based on any criteria it desires, they suggest consistently the inevitability of suffering and discrimination as an effect of multiple racisms. Attempts by his characters to transcend race and escape race-thinking prove invariably incomplete and provisional because of a conjunction of biopolitical state operations and the racism of those members of the population who perceive the racializing biopolitical state as guaranteeing their freedom, security and species. Michel Foucault’s foundational analysis of how biopower and race, especially his arguments regarding ‘a superrace and a subrace’, are reticulated outlines usefully the methods by which regimes of biopower seek to securitize themselves by constructing subraces. His thought that informs this paper’s exploration of the ways in which Rushdie depicts the various racisms of twentieth-century biopolitical states and their deleterious effects on the subraces these states constructed. However, Foucault’s theory of race lacks detail regarding the complementary role that non-state actors play in oppressing subraces. Rushdie’s novels suggest consistently the persistence of – and difficulty of resisting – racethinking of multiple types within modern states and populations alike requires a theory of race and biopower that goes beyond Foucault. By outlining how twentieth-century civilian groups of all phenotypes internalized the hierarchies that earlier colonial governments and discourses instituted, and through engaging with the specific character of non-state actors’ phenotypical, biocultural and ethnicist racisms, this theory reveals a greater pervasiveness of racism in Rushdie’s fictional worlds than has been supposed. It works towards a new conception of race and biopower appropriate to a biopolitical literary criticism of state and non-state racisms in the fiction of Rushdie and others.