This chapter discusses the ways in which Rushdie and his work can be understood in the context of the aesthetics and ideologies of postmodernism. Rushdie’s novels deploy postmodern fictional devices, such as intertextuality and metafictional interruptions, to explore questions of politics, epistemology, and ontology. In his early work, Rushdie provides an instance of both the potential for postmodern techniques to craft original political perspectives commensurate with the aims of postcolonialism, and the limitations of a western theoretical perspective sceptical of those grand narratives of history and subjectivity over which postcolonial subjects were only now gaining purchase. His status as literary spokesperson for immigrant communities in Britain was revised after the Satanic Verses affair, and subsequent novels are sometimes found to lack the radical critique offered by the early work. This chapter argues that the development of Rushdie’s writing – particularly in recent volumes – shows evidence of a move away from the deconstructive application of postmodern strategies in particular postcolonial contexts to challenge political master-narratives, and towards a more general exploration of classical humanist themes such as love, good and evil, life and death. This chapter ends with illustrative readings of two recent Rushdie novels, The Golden House and Quichotte.

In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Vasco Miranda describes the artist Aurora da Gama Zogoiby’s work as ‘“Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art” in which the unifying principle was “Technicolor-Story-Line”’. This also seems like a fitting description for Salman Rushdie’s visual style of storytelling. This chapter maps the broader context of the writer’s engagement with visual art and culture. It begins by examining the playful and political mobilization of visual intertexts in The Moor’s Last Sigh through the links between the character Aurora Zogoiby and the Hungarian Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil. It then juxtaposes the visual interweaving in the 1995 novel with The Golden House by considering the visually established connection between the DC Comics supervillain Joker and the then soon-to-be elected president of the United States, Donald Trump. Beyond this engagement with the visual on a narrative level, Rushdie has collaborated with artists such as Anish Kapoor and Tom Phillips. Many others have created visual artworks based on Rushdie himself and his fictional work. The last section of the chapter analyses Rushdie and Kapoor’s collaboration, Blood Relations, a project that attempts a convergence of verbal and visual media, linking debates around visual representation, political engagement, and aesthetic autonomy in the face of violence.