Identidad, ideología y resistencia en las novelas de Zadie Smith

Abstract

The publication of Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth (2000) was a great success in the British literary panorama. Immediately, most critics tried to trace parallelisms between the young writer and some of the most relevant of the so-called post-colonial authors such as Salman Rushdie or Hanif Kureishi. Born in Britain in 1974 to an English father and a Jamaican mother, Smith was made into a symbol of the then optimistic multicultural Britain, ruled at the time by the “New Labour” of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, with its initial emphasis on the implementation of politics addressed at favoring a multiracial nation and the promotion of ethnic minorities. Most analyses of White Teeth were concerned with debating the depiction that Smith made of interethnic relationships in contemporary London, paying attention to the importance the novelist gave to historical factors and how they influenced on present matters. Some of these works defended that Smith’s vision was essentially positive, interested in emphasising the possibilities offered by the multicultural Zeitgeist. Others, however, considered Smith’s representation as realistic and still attached to analysing the negative effects of colonialism and historical traumas in present life. The aim of this thesis is to discuss Zadie Smith’s work in relation to the contemporary debates that have surrounded her work. I have analysed how she has deconstructed and parodied some of the narratives and ideological discourses that have been built by modernity, colonialism and some of the revisionary perspectives held by neocolonial practices. But the fact of parodying and deconstructing does not necessarily mean the end of problematic forms of oppression. As I have tried to show, in Smith’s work her protagonists fight a terrible struggle to find their own place in a world conditioned by the harshness of contemporary capitalism, the resilience of racism and part of the exoticism also promoted by liberal and apparently progressivist views. But Zadie Smith is much more than a multicultural writer or a writer that only deals with multiculturalism. For her, multiculturalism is a fact, rather than a motif for discussion. And there are also many other concerns in her works which bring forth ethical debates and vindicate the value of compromise in the contemporary world. As I have argued in this thesis, her second work, The Autograph Man (2002), which the critics so severely criticized, shows the path initiated by the writer to investigate the problematics and weaknesses of postmodern thought and what is, for some critics, its supposed temptation to escape from everyday reality and harshness and to substitute it instead with the recreation of fragmentation and randomness. It is probably in her latest novel, On Beauty (2005) where she best develops her ethical concerns, which she has also debated in some of the essays of her book Changing My Mind (2008), that I have extensively cited in some parts of this work. My main conclusions are that Smith’s ideas and characters show that she is trying to convey a work that promotes new approaches to reality. In doing so, she is attempting to find non-coercitive truths addressed to social and human transformation, more based on true emotional alliances than on rhetorical discourses of everyday ideological politics.