SOURCE: Cook, Rufus. “The Art of Uncertainty: Cultural Displacement and the Devaluation of the World.” Critique 41, no. 3 (spring 2000): 227-35.

In the following essay, Cook finds Rushdie's central contribution to contemporary literature to be his exploration of cultural change and transformation.

In a “century of wandering” such as ours, Salman Rushdie suggests, it is the migrant who can be most productively identified as “the central or defining figure” (Imaginary Homelands 277), whose experience of “uprooting, disjuncture, and metamorphosis” can provide the most useful metaphor for coping with the confusions and contradictions characteristic of the postmodern world (IH [Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991], 394). Modern technological change and the radical discontinuity between industrial end-products and the raw materials from which they are made, which Wendell Berry describes (What Are People For? 193-94), have transformed all of us into “migrant peoples” (IH 279), displaced “from where [we] belong by history, culture, deeds, association...