| Zadie Smith(1975-)is a British female immigrant writer with Jamaican pedigrees.Her novels mostly focus on the life of minority immigrants who live in western countries,in the East-West cultural collision.White Teeth(2000),the feature-length debut of Zadie Smith,has provoked a stir in the world of literature upon its publication.However,most critics focus on Smith’s postmodernity,but pay little attention to the concept of space in this fiction.Some critics attempt to analyse its spatial problem either in a textual or extratextual manner,failing to build relationships between special locations and migrants’ spatial status.To a great degree,critics fail to understand Smith’s narrative strategy to narrate diasporic experiences through the construction of space.This dissertation intends to deal with the issue of identity construction in White Teeth from three spatial perspectives: the quest for identity in the space of history;the struggle for identity in the space of power;and the choices of identity in the Thirdspace.Firstly,that the inescapability of history has influenced the lives of pre-colonial immigrants and their descendants,which arouses them to quest for their ethnic identification will be investigated.Secondly,the space of power reveals migrants’ memory for colonialism and they are also suffering from contemporary cultural hegemony.Thirdly,the dissertation illustrates the possible/available mode of identity choice for the new generation of migrants who were born in Britain to reveal that it should reject the binary cultural purity,constituting third space of identity choice.The basic ideas of spatial theories proposed by Henri Lefebvre,Michel Foucault and Edward Soja,combined with the postcolonial and disporatic studies of McLeod,will be employed in this dissertation to address migrants’ questions of identity and their nationhood by examining the spatial configuration from spatio-temporal and socio-spatial perspectives.The novel primarily conveys the message that the present,being,and belonging “here” are certainly more important than dwelling on the past.Therefore,this argument about the space in White Teeth entails practical significance as the space not only constitutes the background,but also functions as a productive place to claim identity and spatial equality,which may enrich the contemporary spatial theories. |
