Majumdar (English, Whitman College) examines the work of three very different postcolonial artists: writers James Joyce and Salmon Rushdie and filmmaker Satyajit Ray. He looks at them in terms
of an anti-colonial aesthetics in which traditional forms are bent or shattered. As a standard from which to deviate, Majumdar selects John Ruskin, the nineteenth century arbiter of artistic
taste. Ruskin's belief in a modulated unity in art along with refined British sensibility being the pinnacle of aesthetics is a perfect foil for the iconoclasm of Majumdar's subjects. Joyce is
seen as an example of indecorous partiality and unsanctioned language. Rushdie demonstrates a "non-narcissistic gesture" and the "shock of the grotesque". The films by Ray show a "figural
wandering". All of these redefine the aesthetic into something not bound by national strictures, a truly migrant form. Annotation 穢2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
