Hot Wax Criticism

In Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, much of the action occurs amongst the migrant clientele of the Hot Wax Club. The club is decorated with waxworks of England’s notable but unacknowledged migrant ancestors: Mary Seacole, Ignatius Sancho and Grace Jones, among others. As Leela Gandhi points out in her discussion of Rushdie’s novel, we are encouraged to read the Hot Wax clubbers as historians disinterring the nation’s past to reveal a secret history of immigration, a past which is used strategically to reshape understandings of contemporary Britain. The project of this book is similar. What happens when we examine representations of England and Englishness by writers who are travellers, émigrés and immigrants from its diaspora?