Emulation as Mimicry: Reading the Salman Rushdie Digital Archive
When the Salman Rushdie collection opened in 2011 at Emory University, it drew attention not only for its famous author, but also for the innovative creation of a virtualized representation of the author’s computer, known as an “emulation.” While technically impressive, Rushdie’s emulated computer also carries with it a set of ideological assumptions about what digital literary archives should be and how such archives should be made available to researchers. In this article, I place the Rushdie digital literary archive into dialog with the legacy of colonial and postcolonial archives. Specifically, I demonstrate that emulation-as-access can and should be read in the context of colonial mimicry, as described by Homi K. Bhabha. As with colonial mimicry, emulation is an ambivalent term/technique that aspires to a form of authenticity that is undermined by its own constructedness. Using a number of examples drawn directly from the Rushdie digital archive, I demonstrate that the “slippage” (to use Bhabha’s term) between Rushdie’s actual computers and the (re)presentation of them through emulation, gives us insight into news spaces of reading that illuminate the author, his work, and the possibilities and dangers of the postcolonial digital literary archive writ large.