ABSTRACT
Salman Rushdie’s career affords a fertile opportunity to chart the multiple intersections between literature and human rights. Rushdie’s fi ction has consistently investigated the troubled status of human rights, whether through Midnight’s Children’s (1981) treatment of the Bangladesh Liberation War, Shame’s (1983) indictment of the corruption affl icting the postcolonial nation-state, or The Satanic Verses’s (1988) exploration of postcolonial migrancy in the western metropolis. Indeed, the “Rushdie affair” following the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988) itself crystallizes debates over freedom of speech, which many defi ne as a core human right.1
