SOURCE: Sawhney, Sabina, and Simona Sawhney. “Reading Rushdie after September 11, 2001.” Twentieth-Century Literature 47, no. 4 (winter 2001): 431-43.

In the following essay, Sawhney and Sawhney investigate how Rushdie's political essays changed after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and discuss the shifting critical reaction to his political viewpoints.

The appearance of yet another collection of essays on Rushdie's work will no doubt seem odd to many people. Isn't there too much already written about Rushdie, for Rushdie, against Rushdie? Can't postcolonial critics talk about someone else for a change? Perhaps it is the very fact of Rushdie's familiar presence on the contemporary literary scene that makes this collection seem both redundant and necessary. For it might be equally odd if a journal devoted to twentieth-century literature did not, at the end of that century, take a moment to dwell upon the work of this man. At least for...