Negotiation and Hybridization:Constructing Immigrant Identities in Zadie Smith`s White Teeth and Swing Time

• Thesis title in Czech: Negociace a hybridizace: Konstrukce přistěhovalecké identity v románech Zadie Smith White Teeth a Swing Time
• Thesis title in English: Negotiation and Hybridization:Constructing Immigrant Identities in Zadie Smith`s White Teeth and Swing Time
• Key words: negociace|hybridita|britská černošská literatura|identita|Zadie Smith
• English key words: negotiation|hybridity|black British writing|identity|Zadie Smith
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2016/2017
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: PhDr. Soňa Nováková, CSc.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 07.09.2017
• Date of assignment: 07.09.2017
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 11.09.2017
• Date and time of defence: 10.09.2019 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 18.08.2019
• Date of proceeded defence: 10.09.2019
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. Klára Kolinská, Dr., Ph.D.

Guidelines

The recent migration crisis of 2015 has shown that the issue of mass migrations and the questions of the immigrants’ identities are still immensely important for modern societies. Since the 1990s cultural studies have explored the concepts of immigrant identities, scrutinized and re-evaluated the ways in which the immigrants deal with alien environment and how they distinguish themselves in the new country. Recently the most prominent scholars of the field of cultural and postcolonial studies, namely Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy, made the term hybridity one of the main concepts in the discourse of immigrant identities. According to Bhabha hybridity refers to the way “two or more cultures … combine [while] refusing to privilege one of the constituent parts”, and long interactions between cultures unconditionally cause hybrid identities to emerge. The terms hybridity and hybrid identities became increasingly relevant for the interpretation of literature written by first- and second-generation immigrant authors.
Literature has always been a medium to “articulate immigrant experiences” and the novels written within the diasporas have become a marketing phenomenon, attracting attention and shaping the perception of the minority group by the dominant cultures. One of the most well-advertised and well-known British authors, who is a second-generation immigrant herself, is Zadie Smith. Her 2001 novel White Teeth was an immense success, placing her alongside with renowned authors such as Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie. Interestingly, Zadie was said to be an “editor`s dream”: a young good-looking lady with exotic ancestry and witty style of writing, she was heavily visually advertised. The fact that her first novel White Teeth was characterized as “the epitome of hybridity and cultural diversity" perfectly suited the advertising campaigns. The novel provided a large-scale survey of immigrant identities in the plentitude of social contexts and, most importantly, throughout two generation of immigrants in Britain. While her second novel The Autograph Man (2002) is thematically rather different, Smith returns to the topic of mixed-race families and their social stratification in her third novel On Beauty (2005), where outer and inner beauty is dealt with by two generations of immigrants again. Several years later and after publishing a rather experimental novel NW (2012), Zadie Smith returns to the topic of self-identification with her latest novel Swing Time (2016). Even though the latest novel is primarily about friendship and fame, there is definitely a subtext of immigration, race and self-identification. Hence, this MA thesis is intended to address the concept of hybrid identities in one of Britain`s best-known immigrant author Zadie Smith`s oeuvre with special attention to her best-selling novel White Teeth, and the more recent one Swing Time. It might be useful to divide characters in the books according to the first and second generation, as this method might unveil some global tendencies among the immigrants. While the first generation immigrants are concerned with the basic question "who are we?", trying to establish their place in the new environment, the children, a stronger alloy of "old" and "new", have a tendency not to question their position itself but how they feel about their position in the society. The thesis will start with a theoretical survey of the terms of hybridity and hybrid identities and their implications in literature (according to Bhabha, Hall, Gilroy, etc.). Then the thesis is going to examine the way in which the immigrants of first and second generations construct their identities in an alien environment of their new “home” country in White Teeth and Swing Time accordingly. The large scope of characters and timeframe in both novels provides a great possibility of examining the difference in identity formation based on gender, religion and origin, while some other novels, namely On Beauty, can add examples of immigrants with different intellectual backgrounds.
In the case of Zadie Smith a special accent on the hybridity of immigrants` identities with special regard to the theory of identity negotiation seems to be a rather novel approach as the previous studies of the novel were focused on other aspects, such as nationality, constructing space or constructing myths about homeplaces, while the identity negotiation and hybridization leave place for further analysis. This MA thesis will hopefully add to the discussion of hybrid identities and will reveal the tendencies inherent for identity formations of different generations of those who left home countries in order to settle down in Britain.

References

Bibliography:
Primary sources:
Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Penguin Books, 2001
---. The Autograph Man. London: Penguin Books, 2002
---. On Beauty. London: Penguin Books, 2006
---. NW. London: Penguin Books, 2013
---. Swing Time. London: Penguin Books, 2016
Secondary sources:
Alvares, Claudia. Representing Culture: Essays on Identity, Visuality and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
Arana, Victoria and Ramey, Lauri. Black British Writing. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Bentley, Nick. Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature: Contemporary British Fiction. Edinburgh, GB: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004.
Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Sabaté, Flocel. Identities / Identités / Identidades, Volume 2 : Hybrid Identities. Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2014.
Nayar, Pramod K. Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
---, Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction. London: Anchor, 2009.
---, Guides for the Perplexed: Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed (1st Edition). London: Continuum, 2010.
Schain, Martin. Immigration Policy and the Politics of Immigration: A Comparative Study. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Sicher, Efraim and Weinhouse, Linda. Under Postcolonial Eyes: Figuring the Jew in Contemporary British Writing. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
Solomos, John. Race and Racism in Britain. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Waisserová, Hana. “Transnationality in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth”. Zlín Proceedings in Humanities. Zlín: Univerzita Tomáše Bati ve Zlíně, 2012
Bc. Marta Dongresová. Immigrants in the Metropolis, master thesis. Prague: Charles University in Prague: 2015, full text available at “Repozitář závěrečných prací” https://is.cuni.cz
Bc. Helena Kostohryzová. The Immigrants’ Search for National Identity in Novels by Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith, master thesis. Brno: Masaryk University, 2007, full text available at https://is.muni.cz.