2 The story begins in early 1990s Los Angeles with the assassination of the American counterterrorism chief, Max Ophuls, who is murdered by his Muslim driver Noman Sher Noman, nicknamed ‘Shalimar the clown’. Published in 2005, Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie’s ninth novel and one of the finalists for the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award, depicts a world full of terror and the transformation of a Muslim clown into a terrorist. In the same way, the aesthetics of the uncanny in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, which opens with the epigraph I quoted, provides a way to respond to and to reflect on the terror of several global and local wars and of the terrorist attacks over the past few decades. Indeed, as Vidler has noted, after both 19, the uncanny has re-emerged ‘as an aesthetic sensibility’ to rethink the two post-war periods. Citing examples from the modernist avantgardes’ use of defamiliarization, Vidler states, ‘Estrangement and unhomeliness have emerged as the intellectual watchwords of our century, given periodic material and political force by the resurgence of homelessness itself, a homelessness generated sometimes by war, sometimes by the unequal distribution of wealth’ (9). In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler suggests the significance of the uncanny as a psychoanalytical and aesthetic response to violence and trauma.
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