The Issue Of Cultural Identity In Zadie Smith's Swing Time

Zadie Smith,one of the well-known female writers among contemporary British novelists,gained popularity for her first novel White Teeth and her delicate depiction of post-colonial world.Her works focus on the living conditions and cultural identities of immigrants and their descendants from the third world.In her fifth novel Swing Time,she uses the first-person point of view for the first time and integrates many of her personal experiences and features of identity while putting an emphasis on the issue of cultural identity.Swing Time is a collection of childhood and youth memories of a nameless biracial girl.Her father is British and her mother is Jamaican.This novel depicts the stories of this girl and her friend Tracy,her mother and her boss,a famous pop singer Aimee.Based on the theory of cultural identity and diaspora formulated by Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha's enunciation of Third Space,this thesis is to analyze the construction of hybrid identities of the main characters in the context of Presence Africaine,Presence Europeene and “Third Space” under the impact of multiculturalism by exploring the commonness that ties them together and the differences that distinguish them from others.This thesis is composed of three parts: Introduction,Main body made up of three chapters and Conclusion.The introduction reviews the present research on Zadie Smith and her works,with emphasis on the contents of Swing Time.Chapter One focuses on the shared ancestry and history that the narrator and her siblings have in common and bond them together.Chapter Two points out that identities as the other race,class and gender make the characters feel confused and lost on the road of pursuing cultural identity.Chapter Three discusses how protagonists construct hybrid identities in “Third Space”.Protagonists in Swing Time face identity dilemmas such as incomplete women's emancipation and innate Caribbeanness and superficial Englishness.In a multicultural community greatly influenced by globalization,as diasporas,the cultural identities of protagonists are represented and manifested in different ways.In the Conclusion part,this thesis summarizes the transformation process of cultural identities of protagonists in Swing Time.Based on the above analysis,it is not difficult to see that despite the great influence of Presence Africaine and Presence Europeene on their cultural identities,globalization and multiculturalism provide them with the right attitude towards the issue of cultural identity,that is to construct and accept their hybrid identities in “Third Space”.