| Zadle Smith is a well celebrated English/British author and her works have been a the literary acclaim of critics and readers alike, due to her focus on various themes, along with her innovative literary style and deep thought. Zadie Smith herself being a child of black Jamaican immigrants, she delves into the themes of second generation children of third-world parents and their struggle with survival and questions of identity. Many of her full-length novel’s setting are set in multi-cultural post World War II England. Through her narration of both the characters and their children’s living situation, she gives precedence to the hurt that their multi-cultural background, cultural displacement and misidentity that they run into while trying to make a living within English society.With a theoretical emphasis on post-colonial literary theory, Zadie Smith’s three novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty will be referenced in this thesis. In using post-colonial literary theory as the main approach, when deciphering and analyzing her works, based on this comprehensive theoretical context, this work will try to show non-white ethnicities social acceptance into the greater Anglo-Saxon social sphere. In becoming accepted into the greater English society, we’ll delve into that process and what comes of that process in their coming to terms with their own cultural identity, in light of the social complications and cultural dilemma that they have to face.This paper has three parts; introduction, main text and the final conclusion. First of this paper’s introduction mainly introduces Zadie Smith’s works and herself, and also summarizes the significance of choosing this topic and the research method of this paper.The first chapter of this text will analyze England’s diverse cultural setting and the implications this has on the immigrants’own self identity, this will be done in three parts. The first point that will be talked about will be racism, cultural conflict and the effect it has on the immigrants’lives when it comes to them existing in an uncomfortable situation and when they are dealt with unfairly. Another point is the way that immigrants deal with their own cultural identity within the context of Anglo-Saxon English society, while struggling between their own culture and the local culture, they have to deal with conflicting ideals and eventually are faced with their own conscious choice in cultural identity. The last point looks at what is ’Englishness’amongst the background of multiple cultural identities living amongst one another and how this changes what the concept of being English is. The second chapter explores the causes of that shaping of fluid and composite cultural identity amongst those immigrants, including the history of British colonialism’s influence on society and being British’s subtle influence on those immigrant communities. In the third chapter, in dissecting the image and categorization of the feminine in her novels, there will be a concentrated effort in analyzing the female’s way out of her complex situation, based on the context of a post-colonial and a multi-cultural society. Within this context of immigrant females having to bear both racism and misogynous prejudices that exist, and within that setting how females in rejecting the false and deceptive expectations males have in females, how they can be set firmly in their femininityIn the Conclusion, it’s going to be argued that Zadie Smith isn’t just focused on race and feminism as an author, but her works go beyond those boundaries in exploring the Orient and Occidental’s cultural clashes, and through her work, she also gives a more tolerant and open attitude in her views on race, sexism and cultural clashes. There is also precedence to the overall theme of unity in humanity as a whole over race and culture. This theme is the focal point of her works, working towards a harmonious and tolerant society, amongst a plethora of cultural identities within a multi-cultural society. |
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