Cosmopolitan Identity and Narration in Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House: The Move Toward Vernacular Cosmopolitanism

At the center of this chapter is the engagement with cosmopolitan identity and narration, which will be explored in Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House (2017), where identity is a matter of choice, so is the act of narration. This has certain implications for the emergence of new cosmopolitan narrative devices, which contribute to the level of world-engagement in the novel by demonstrating an awareness of the current global issues, economic situation, and a direct response to them. Revolving around the central cosmopolitan, Nero Golden, and his three sons, The Golden House departs from universalist cosmopolitanism, which can be observed in the treatment of contemporary events and matters with the employment of narrative immediacy and political hyper-awareness, devices that are highly definitive of twenty-first-century cosmopolitan fiction.