“So few rainbows anymore”? Cinema, nostalgia and the concept of “home” in Salman Rushdie’s fiction

Abstract

This article explores the ambivalent representation of “home” in two texts in which Salman Rushdie responds to the film, The Wizard of Oz: his1992 monograph, The Wizard of Oz, and the short story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” (1992). Rushdie’s monograph disputes the film’s conclusion that “there’s no place like home”, suggesting instead that “home” is an imaginative construct, an enabling migrant fantasy founded upon distancing oneself from notions of “origins”. The story’s narrativization of “home” juxtaposes nostalgia for older discourses of “home”, centred on the ruby slippers of the title with a range of contemporary diasporicalternatives.