Abstract
This chapter discusses Zadie Smith’s London trilogy, which consists of White Teeth (2000), NW (2012) and Swing Time (2016). The cityscape of the postcolonial metropolis London offers productive contestations of global and national world formations. The first part of this chapter sketches a history of postcolonial London writing, with a special focus on the city post-Windrush in order to situate Smith’s London novels in their historical, socio-political and literary context. The second part examines NW with regard to its structural, performative textual rendering of the city. These examinations are linked to the affective and relational encounters the text produces. The third part of this chapter sheds light on the intimate relationships in both NW and Smith’s latest novel Swing Time in order to examine how city and love become entangled in a new understanding of postcolonial, diasporic togetherness.
Dis great polluted space […] the music of the world is here.
—Benjamin Zephaniah, “The London Breed” (2001, 84)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Smith’s London trilogy is formed by her first novel White Teeth (2000), by NW (2012) and by her fifth novel, the London-but-not-quite-London novel Swing Time (2016). Because the middle novel, NW , deals with the postcolonial metropolis London in the most explicit way, it will constitute one of this chapter’s main focal points, but I will constantly draw parallels to its younger and older siblings.
- 2.
For an overview of the modern history of Black London writing—from Jean Rhys’ early London texts in the 1930s to the first Windrush generation writers like Selvon, Lammings, and Gilroy via Chaudhury, Ghose, or Markandaya, to Desai, Aidoo, Emecheta, Ghosh, Kureishi, Bandele, Evaristo, Syal, Adebayo and so on—see Murdoch, Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film (2012); Sandhu, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (2003); or Okokon, Black Londoners 1880–1990 (1998).
- 3.
Notting Hill in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the main areas where immigrants from the Caribbean settled and bore no resemblance to today’s posh West London panache—the only remnant of that time is the now commercialised Notting Hill Carnival, an event originally meant to celebrate difference and Caribbean culture.
- 4.
Smith herself is very conscious of the many palimpsestic historical layers that London’s architecture and monuments display; of Trafalgar Square she says in an interview for Tate: The Art Magazine: “Trafalgar Square is this wonderful tiny version of what we were. It’s so elegiac to me to stand there and see South Africa House and all these places we once owned and now we only have streets. Jamaica Street, Jewry Street—you can see that everywhere. The sun never used to set on us and it rises and sets in one day on the square. It’s so humbling. If you are facing Nelson, there’s a Henry Havelock statue on the left. You never notice him. This man was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Indian people. His most famous crime was forcing a group of people in a village to lick up a square metre of blood of their relatives he’d killed. On the back of the statue it says something about Englishmen never forgetting, but Trafalgar Square is a monument to our ability to forget everything about our history” (2000b, 41).
- 5.
Irie’s weave is the product of another interesting encounter the novel’s London spaces proffer—an encounter constituting both economical exchange and shared female solidarity . Her hairdresser sends her to a shop next door, owned by an Indian woman, who sells natural hair weaves. When Irie enters, a South Asian girl desperately attempts to sell her own hair—and Irie ends up with it, because it is the shade of dark brown/red sleek hair she desires. Again, I’d like to reference Emma Tarlo’s Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair (2016) for more context.
- 6.
I am borrowing this term from Henri Lefebvre’s work in The Production of Space, where he posits that “it is helpful to think of architectures as ‘archi-textures’, to treat each monument or building, viewed in its surroundings and context, in the populated area and associated networks in which it is set down, as part of a particular production of space” ([1974] 2003, 118).
- 7.
As Lauren Elkin points out, “significantly, this [Felix’s murder] happens at a bus stop, in an echo of the 1993 knifing of Stephen Lawrence, in South London” (2015, n. pag.), thus producing a historical connection to other black victims on London’s streets.
- 8.
As Lauren Elkin argues, “before the twentieth century, women did not have the freedom to wander idly through the streets of Paris. The only women with the freedom to circulate (and a limited freedom at that) were the streetwalkers and ragpickers; Baudelaire’s mysterious and alluring passante, immortalized in his poem ‘To a (Female) Passer-By’, is assumed to have been a woman of the night. Even the word flâneuse doesn’t technically exist in French, except, according to an 1877 dictionary entry, to designate a kind of lounge chair” (2016b, n. pag.).
- 9.
- 10.
One scholar who has examined the relationship between flânerie/flâneuserie and postcolonial, diasporic identities is Isabel Carrera Suárez in her 2015 essay “The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of Pedestrianism”—while certainly constituting an important first step towards a theorization of postcolonial flâneuserie, the article only skims the surface of this field in its exploration of texts by Simone Lazaroo, Hsu-Ming Teo and Dionne Brand. Another, more productive exploration is Jenni Ramone’s article on “Sweet-Talker, Street-Walker: Speaking Desire on the London Street in Postcolonial Diaspora Writing by Women” (2012). Cf. also Ortega, “The Black Flâneuse: Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘In the Mecca’” (2007).
- 11.
Just like there exist many online cartography projects which trace the London routes of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or James Joyce’s Ulysses through Dublin, there are also a few projects that have produced a Google Map of Natalie/Keisha’s walk (cf. Toth 2016). As we have seen above, however, these maps cannot fully grasp the emotional, affective dimension of walking through the city.
- 12.
This is the first novel Smith has written from a homodiegetic first-person point of view. Swing Time constructs a memoir-like text, which self-reflexively “channels the propulsive, addictive, discursive mode of the novel-memoir hybrid that has lately been in fashion” (Schwartz 2016, n. pag.). Through narratorial hints, it becomes clear that the text is presented as being constructed, ostensibly written as we read it: “It strikes me now that if I want to watch this same clip—as I did a few minutes ago, just before writing this—[…]” (56). This leads to an often unsettling reading experience, as the narrative oscillates between the intimacy of a first-person account and the narrator’s often cool and distanced approach to her own story.
- 13.
For an astute and engaging reading of the relationship between the narrator and her Black feminist activist mother, see Scafe 2019.
- 14.
It is important to note here that while the narrator seems to be heterosexual, she mentions men in general, and her relationships to them in particular, only very fleetingly. Her mind and her body are only ever really engaged in relation to other women, be it Aimee, Tracey, her mother or Hawa. Cf. a scene in the novel in which the narrator goes on a date with a man and they watch a West End musical play—once Tracey enters the stage, she completely ignores him, to the point where he becomes angry and aggressive and leaves (353–362): “and the longer I spoke the clearer I saw and understood […]—that only one thing had happened in London, really: I’d seen Tracey. After so many years of not seeing Tracey I had seen her” (144).
- 15.
George Stevens’ 1936 musical comedy film Swing Time, which features Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, gives the novel its title: towards the beginning of the storyline, the narrator re-watches it; her beloved childhood memory of it is jarred when she realises that Astaire dances in blackface. Swing Time the novel thus not only engages in the act of temporally and spatially swinging back and forth but also in morally swinging between multiple, antagonistic stances on blackness, racial oppression and empowerment.
- 16.
The text never names the country, but through geographical hints, the readers can trace and map the Gambia. In leaving it nameless, the novel points towards the hypocrisy of Aimee’s charity work—where African countries remain interchangeable and are only used in order to advance Aimee’s own reputation.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
———. [2004] 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ball, John Clement. 2004. Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Bartholomew Ortega, Kirsten. 2007. “The Black Flâneuse: Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘In the Mecca.’” Journal of Modern Literature 30 (4): 139–155.
Baucom, Ian. 1999. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Baudelaire, Charles. [1863] 1964. “The Painter of Modern Life.” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. Jonathan Mayne. New York: Da Capo Press.
Benjamin, Walter. [1969] 1985. “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso. 9–106.
Bennett, Louise. [1957] 2012. “Colonization in Reverse.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed, vol. 7. The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. NY: Norton.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. “A Properly Political Concept of Love: Three Approaches in Ten Pages.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 683–691.
Carrera Suárez, Isabel. 2015. “The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetic of Pedestrianism: Writing the Post-Diasporic.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 17 (6): 853–865.
D’Souza, Aruna and Tom McDonough. 2006. The Invisible Flâneuse?: Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
De Certeau, Michel. [1980] 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
DeCaires Narain, Denise. 2004. Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style. New York: Routledge.
Dreyer, Elfriede and Estelle McDowall. 2012. “Imagining the Flaneur as a Woman.” Communicatio: South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research 38 (1): 30–44.
Dyer, Rebecca. 2004. “Generations of Black Londoners: Echoes of 1950s Caribbean Migrants’ Voices in Victor Headley’s Yardie and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Obsidian 5 (2): 81–102.
Elkin, Lauren. 2015. “‘Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure’: Class Mobility and Public Transport in Zadie Smith’s NW.” Études Britanniques Contemporaines. 49. Web. December 01, 2015. http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/2679
———. 2016a. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. London: Vintage.
———. 2016b. “Radical Flâneuserie: Reimagining the Aimlessly Wandering Woman.” The Paris Review. Web. August 25, 2016. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog /2016/08/25/radical-flaneuserie/
Enright, Anne. “Mind the Gap.” The New York Times. Web. September 21, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/books/review/nw-by-zadie-smith.html
Favell, Adrian. 2001. Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain. New York: Palgrave.
Fernández Carbajal, Alberto. 2014. “On being queer and postcolonial: Reading Zadie Smith’s NW through Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 1–16.
Gibson, Lindsey Gale. 2017. “Kinetic Joy.” Dissent. 137–141.
Gikandi, Simon. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 1999. “A London sumting dis…” Critical Quarterly 41 (3): 57–69.
Greenidge, Kaitlyn. 2017. “Shaken Out of Time.” Virginia Quarterly Review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion 93 (1): 196–199.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Hill, Constance V. 2010. Tap Dancing in America: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Innes, C.L. 2002. A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Keith, Michael. 2003. “Postcolonial London and the Allure of the Cosmopolitan City.” AA Files 49: 57–67.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. “The Right to the City.” Writings on Cites. Eds./Trans. Leonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lefebvre, Henri. [1974] 2003. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Longworth, Deborah. 2015. The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2005. “Literary London: Post-, Ex-, Trans-, Neo?” ESC 32 (2–3): 293–305.
Macharia, Keguro. 2015. “Love.” Critical Ethnic Studies 1 (1): 68–75.
Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2007. World City. Cambridge: Polity.
McLeod, John. 2004. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London & New York: Routledge.
———. 2006. “Orphia in the Underground: Postcolonial London Transport.” Transport(s) in the British Empire and Commonwealth. Eds. Michèle Lurdos and Judith Misrahi-Barak. Montpellier: Publications de L’Université Paul-Valéry. 389–405.
Moor, Robert. 2017. “Tracing (and Erasing) New York’s Lines of Desire.” The New Yorker. Web. February 20, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/tracing-and-erasing-new-yorks-lines-of-desire
Murdoch, H. Adlai. 2007. “‘All Skin’ Teeth Is Not Grin’: Performing Caribbean Diasporic Identity in a Postcolonial Metropolitan Frame.” Callaloo 30 (2): 575–593.
———. 2012. Creolizing the Metropole. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Myhill, Carl. 2004. “Commercial Success by Looking for Desire Lines.” Computer Human Interaction. APCHI 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 3101. Eds. Masood Masoodian, Steve Jones and Bill Rogers. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer.
Nash, Jennifer C. 2013. “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 11 (2): 1–24.
Nasta, Susheila. 2006. “Introduction.” The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin. v–xvii.
Nichols, Grace. 1983. i is a long memoried woman. London: Caribbean Cultural International.
———. 1984. The Fat Black Woman’s Poems. London: Virago.
———. 1998. “Wherever I Hang.” Kunapipi XX (1): 3.
Okokon, Susan. 1998. Black Londoners 1880–1990. Stroud: Sutton Publis.
Ortega, Kirsten Bartholomew. 2007. “The Black Flâneuse: Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘In the Mecca.’” Journal of Modern Literature 30 (4): 139–155.
Parsons, Deborah. 2000. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perfect, Michael. 2014. Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism: Diversity and the Millennial London Novel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pike, David. 2002. “Modernist Space and the Transformation of Underground London.” Imagined Londons. Ed. Pamela K. Gilbert. Albany: State University of New York Press. 101–119.
Pirker, Eva Ulrike. 2016. “Approaching Space: Zadie Smith’s North London Fiction.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (1): 64–76.
Ramone, Jenni. 2012. “Sweet Talker, Street-Walker: Speaking Desire on the London Street in Postcolonial Diaspora Writing by Women.” Sexuality and Contemporary Literature. Eds. Joel Gwynne and Angelia Poon. Amherst: Cambria Press.
Sandhu, Sukhdev. 2003. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. London: Harper Collins.
Scafe, Suzanne. 2015. “Unsettling the Centre: Black British Fiction”. The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970–Present. Vol. 10. Ed. Mary Eagleton and Emma Parker. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 214–228.
———. 2019. “Gendered, Post-Diasporic Mobilities and the Politics of Blackness in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016).” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies: A Journal of Caribbean Perspectives on Gender and Feminism 13: 93–120.
Schwartz, Alexandra. 2016. “Zadie Smith’s Memory Tricks.” The New Yorker. Web. November 14, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/14/zadie-smiths-memory-tricks
Selvon, Samuel. [1956] 2006. The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin.
Slavin, Molly. 2015. “Nowhere and Northwest, Brent and Britain: Geographies of Elsewhere in Zadie Smith’s NW.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 48 (1): 97–119.
Smith, Zadie. 2000a. White Teeth. London: Penguin.
———. 2000b. “Capital Gains.” Interview with Philip Dodd. Tate: The Art Magazine. Tate Modern. Special Issue. 21: 36–42.
———. 2009. Changing My Mind. London: Penguin.
———. 2012. NW. London: Penguin.
———. 2016a. Swing Time. London: Hamish Hamilton.
———. 2016b. “The Pieces of Zadie Smith.” Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides. The New York Times Style Magazine. Web. October 17, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/ 2016 /10/17/ t-magazine/zadie-smith-swing-time-jeffrey-eugenides.html
Toth, Hayley. 2016. “Making Home in the City: A Spatial Analysis of Representations of London in Contemporary Fiction.” Google Maps. Web. goo.gl/Ab5Ins
Wilson, Elizabeth. 1992. “The Invisible Flâneur.” New Left Review 191: 90–110.
Wolff, Janet. 1985. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory Culture Society 2 (3): 37–46.
Wolfreys, Julian. 1998. Writing London, Volume 1: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Zephaniah, Benjamin. 2001. “The London Breed.” Too Black, Too Strong. Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Leetsch, J. (2021). London Lovers: Zadie Smith. In: Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing. Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-67753-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-67754-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)