Rhetorical devices

Direct Address

There are many instances when Salman Rushdie addresses the audience directly in his essay “The New Empire within Britain”. Several times he makes it clear that the text is addressed to white people. For example: 

British racism, of course, is not our problem. It’s yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your problem. And until, you, the whites, see that the issue is not integration, or harmony, or multiculturalism, or immigration, but simply the business of facing up to and eradication the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new, and last, Empire will be obligated to struggle against you. (ll. 387-395)

The use of direct address is meant to make white people aware that they should take action against racism. Here is another example of Rushdie’s direct address that is intended to make people contemplate:

So now I’d like to ask you to think about this word ‘immigrant’, because it seems to me to demonstrate the extent to which racist concepts have been allowed to seize the central ground, and to shape the whole nature of the debate ...