This chapter discusses Rushdie’s work in the context of processes of migration, the crossing of borders, and the question of identity formation. These themes are central to Rushdie’s work, which reflects his own journeys. His novels have featured prominently national and transnational migrants. Indeed, Saleem Sinai’s journeys in Midnight’s Children traverse the entire subcontinent. Focusing specifically on Shalimar the Clown and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and with reference to The Satanic Verses, Shame, and a selection of short stories and essays from Imaginary Homelands, this chapter explores how Rushdie has approached the question of migration, identity formation, and the position of being in diaspora. The representations of community, home, and belonging and of the diaspora condition emerge in his works through border crossings, liminal spaces, and the sensory and somatic disorientation of the migrant.

Salman Rushdie has a long-standing relationship with cinema and cinematic storytelling. Foundational to many deliberations is the film version of The Wizard of Oz. His novels are deeply invested in an aesthetic that is shaped by European art-house cinema, including auteur filmmakers such as Fellini, Godard, and Buñuel. Increasingly his relationship with Indian popular cinema and Bollywood has been explored, but the cinematic imagination continues to preoccupy Rushdie, not least in his novel The Golden House, where the central narrator is a film scriptwriter who imagines large elements of the plot as a film script. This chapter considers the wider context of cinematic production in relation to Rushdie’s fictional work to uncover the contexts of his cinematic influences and to consider how a cinematic style of storytelling is reformulated throughout his career for an increasingly cine-literate reading public.

This chapter argues that questions over what kinds of money Americans should use, often assumed to be settled by the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, persisted throughout the twentieth century and in ongoing debates about who should be allowed what kinds of credit. It narrates the cultural forms of this history by combining critical accounts of the key transitions in the credit economy with new readings of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The first section argues that Frank Baum’s 1900 novella is better read through the emergence of retail credit than through the bimetal debates that have dominated its critical reception. The second section reads Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz through the debates about the ending of the depression and the shape of New Deal credit and argues that the film’s celebration of this credit obscured its political implications. The final section reads Sidney Lumet’s 1975 The Wiz through the crisis in the New Deal, and the subsequent emergence of neoliberal governance, that the New York financial crisis of the mid-1970s signalled.