‘Footprints Are the Only Fixed Point’: The Mobilities of Postcolonial Fiction

Abstract

Mobility can be seen as a strategy specifically relevant to the particular space and time of postcolonial resistance as postcolonial. That is, whilst it is widely acknowledged that the postcolonial moment is never outside or fully beyond the colonial with any kind of definitive break, nevertheless there is a distinction to be made between pre-independence, anti-colonial strategies and those pertaining to a later, post-independence, postcolonial (and still anti-colonial) state. In these terms, mobilities can be seen to offer a specific relevance. In particular, a focus on movement can be seen as a response to more fluid states raised by the post-independence situation. Anti-colonial resistance in the pre-independence stage was quite appropriately directed towards questions of national ownership; the right to claim one’s space in this regard becomes central both on a national level, and at micro scales that simultaneously both compensate for wider disempowerment and stand for that right to settlement in synecdochical terms. In contrast, mobilities speak to a concern not for the right to space in terms of ownership, but rather to the right for access to space.

From Rushdie (1999: 268).