Rushdie’s work has been described as belonging to both postcolonial and postmodern categories of fiction.  Therefore in approaching Rushdie’s story, “The Prophet’s Hair,” you should review the central concepts of Postmodernism described in the PowerPoint presentation on the Twentieth Century.
	His sense of the fragmented nature of cultural experience in the postcolonial world has caused Rushdie to turn to postmodern forms and techniques for expression, including parody, satire, and the postmodern notion of the world as a simulacrum, a simulation or combination of multiple realities.  The multiculturalism arising from postcolonial heritage creates that postmodern sense of no fixed truths, no set realities, so the human experience becomes a  wild conglomeration of cultural signs from many societies and historical eras.  Rushdie responds to this dilemma of confusion in the postmodern way—with humor—parody and satire that flourish on incongruence.  Thus, he cheerfully embraces the confusion and multiplicity of the postmodern/postcolonial environment as rejuvenating forces and “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs” (Rushdie qtd. in The Norton Anthology, p. 2842).
	In defending his novel The Satanic Verses (please read his defense on p. 2842—it encapsulates his artistic theory), Rushdie claims that Muslim fundamentalists who objected to the novel believe that “intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own.”  But Rushdie points out that his novel “rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure” as leading to cultural stagnation and sterility.  On the contrary, “Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.”  Creating this “newness” by cultural change and a mixing of cultures is, according to Rushdie, “the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it” (p. 2842).  Thus, the migratory nature of the postcolonial experience is not necessarily culturally debilitating, but can be creative and renewing, leading to the development of new worlds.  In his novel Shame, Rushdie attests, “Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places” (NewYork: Aventura/Vintage, 1984, p. 90).  If we cling blindly to our cultural roots and resist change, we resist the potential for enrichment, Rushdie argues.
	However, Rushdie’s fiction also deals with the negative consequences of denying our cultural roots.  While celebrating the limitless possibilities afforded by cultural change, he warns against the effects of letting one’s cultural traditions be entirely eclipsed by new cultures.  Coming from a divided nation and an immigrant existence, Rushdie asserts: “What is the best thing about migrant peoples and seceded nations? I think it is their hopefulness. . . . And what's the worst thing? It is the emptiness of one's luggage. I'm speaking of invisible suitcases, not the physical, perhaps cardboard, variety containing a few meaning-drained mementoes: we have come unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from history from memory, from Time."   Totally denying one’s cultural history in the face of postmodern “newness” leads to historical dislocation.  And the loss or repression of a cultural history can be profoundly damaging, as we see in the fable of “The Prophet’s Hair.”  Repressing one’s native traditions in an attempt to replace them entirely with a new culture can result in the past returning with a vengeance, as Rushdie’s short story suggests.
	Rushdie’s fiction implies that the most rewarding cultural experience comes instead from accepting our cultural past and integrating it with the new worlds we encounter.
	Thus, for Rushdie, the heritage of colonialism, the clash of cultures which demands the integration of old and new, can give rise to dangerous cultural conflicts, but can also create a world of infinite possibilities.