One of my Favourite Novels- White Teeth , Zadie Smith

Excerpts from my thesis on the text.

White Teeth is full echoes of other texts, authors and dramatists like Shakespeare, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Salman Rushdie, Euripides, Rabindranath Tagore, E M.Forster, Robert Burns, J.D.Salinger, James Baldwin, Sophocles, etc, and singers like Bob Marley, Freddie Mercury, and Herman Hupfled, philosophers like Sartre, Nietzsche, films like Taxi Driver, Godfather, Rambo and biblical texts like Quran, Bible etc. It is characterized by ‘eclecticism’ which postmodern critic Jean-Francis Lyotard identifies as “the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong”(Ex.1,L.103 )Her characters are not only ‘always already’ embedded in their ‘unique’ contexts but are also sites of evolving new subjectivities similar to what structuralist critic Claude Levi-Strauss characterizes “as the place where something is going on”(qtd in Chandler,Ex.1.L.72). In mapping such emerging identities, Zadie Smith, a London based Anglo-Jamaican writer, falls direct in line of succession of postcolonial immigrant writers like Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monika Ali, Caryl Phillips, etc. especially in using ‘extradiegetic’ references.................

‘Multiculturalism’ as a concept is comparatively a new approach in defining the coexistence of various ‘ethnic’ communities. As Dohra Ahmed has pointed out in her review of White Teeth, the concept has been much exploited in the Liberal politics of the new ‘Cool Britannia’ slogan of the 1990s and the capitalists venture to turn “the new ‘hybrid’ nation into a product for global consumption”(Ex. ,L .6). At the same time the term seems to be a paradox in itself for it assumes a fixed preconceived notion of the existence of ‘pure’ and homogenized cultures. The capitalists venture has inadvertently overlooked the ‘difference’ within the notion of ‘ethnicity’. Zadie Smith in this novel has tried to bring out precisely the very conflict of identities that exists ‘in-between’ the domains of difference. Her work reflects the “new politics of difference and diversity” that Stuart Hall explains in his essay ‘New Ethnicities’ (259). It brings out a new version of Dickens’s London by extending the boundaries of ‘Englishness’ to include the emerging new ‘Hyphenated selves’. It reiterates what Homi Bhabha asserts in the introduction to his major book Location of Culture, “The western metro pole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of post war migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity”( 6). In White Teeth, Smith has tried to give voice to conflict between the first and subsequent generations of immigrants in trying to find a middle path between the urge to be recognized and the desire to ‘merge’ with others....

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Interesting novel...give it a try!!!