Infrastructural Cosmopolitanism and Metamodern Aesthetic in Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House : From Public Engagement to Retreat

Although Rushdie’s early novels are often cited as exemplary cosmopolitan narratives, his post-millennial work is seldom included in key books on literary cosmopolitanism. To address this gap, this article examines The Golden House (2017) as a profoundly cosmopolitan narrative that explores the crisis of humanist ethics in post-truth-era New York. I use the term infrastructural cosmopolitanism to refer to performative cosmopolitan dispositions predicated on the socio-economic conditions of the global city, as well as to a more ambiguous, artistic alternative that takes shape through the narrative form of the novel. My reading demonstrates that in Rushdie’s novel, post-truth rhetoric fosters a grand, theatrical, and emotionally detached mode of performative cosmopolitanism. This disposition reflects the city’s infrastructures and expresses a metamodern aesthetic through the rearticulation of Rushdie’s major tropes, including conquest, play and haunting. Treating literary narrative as a form of infrastructure, I argue that an alternative artistic cosmopolitanism emerges at the novel’s narrative level, paradoxically, oriented toward the private sphere. My study compares this privately oriented cosmopolitanism with the dispositions articulated in Rushdie’s early writings to show that The Golden House marks a shift away from the public engagement that was central to the cosmopolitan ethos of Midnight’s Children and indicates a retreat into the private domain.