Zadie Smith: Critical Essays

by Tracey L. Walters (Editor)

Overview

Zadie Smith: Critical Essays is a timely collection of critical articles examining how Zadie Smith’s novels and short stories interrogate race, postcolonialism, and identity. Essays explore the various ways Smith approaches issues of race, either by deconstructing notions of race or interrogating the complexity of biracial identity; and how Smith takes on contemporary debates concerning notions of Britishness, Englishness, and Black Britishness. Some essays also consider the shifting identities adopted by those who identify with both British and West Indian, South Asian, or East Asian ancestry. Other essays explore Smith’s contemporary postcolonial approach to Britain’s colonial legacy, and the difference between how immigrants and first-generation British-born children deal with cultural alienation and displacement. This thought-provoking collection is a much-needed critical tool for students and researchers in both contemporary British literature and Diasporic literature and culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820488066
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	03/05/2008
Pages:	221
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

The Editor: Tracey L. Walters is Associate Professor of Literature at Stony Brook University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Howard University. She has published a number of essays on Black British literature and culture and has also published essays on Zadie Smith. Her first book, Writing the Classics Black: The Poetic and Political Function of Classical Revision in African American Women’s Writing, was published in 2007.

Table of Contents

Contents: Tracey L. Walters: Introduction – Matthew Paproth: The Flipping Coin: The Modernist and Postmodernist Zadie Smith – Ulka Anjaria: On Beauty and Being Postcolonial: Aesthetics and Form in Zadie Smith – Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: The Impossible Self and the Poetics of the Urban Hyperreal in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man – Maeve Tynan: «Only Connect»: Intertextuality and Identity in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty – Raphael Dalleo: Colonization in Reverse: White Teeth as Caribbean Novel – Susan Alice Fischer: «Gimme Shelter»: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty – Tracey L. Walters: Still Mammies and Hos: Stereotypical Images of Black Women in Zadie Smith’s Novels – Sharon Raynor: From the Dispossessed to the Decolonized: From Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners to Zadie Smith’s «Hanwell in Hell» – Lexi Stuckey: Red and Yellow, Black and White: Color-Blindness as Disillusionment in Zadie Smith’s «Hanwell in Hell» – Kris Knauer: The Root Canals of Zadie Smith: London’s Intergenerational Adaptation – Z. Esra Mirze: Fundamental Differences in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – Katarzyna Jakubiak: Simulated Optimism: The International Marketing of White Teeth.