Abstract
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth examines the mestiza Irie Jones’s initiation from her consent to white supremacy to her resistance to the mainstream hegemony. Internalizing white supremacy and desiring to overhauling herself, Irie degenerates into a mimicking girl, performs the role social norms regulate, and loses her subjectivity. Through her mimicry and performativity, Irie transforms into a performing subject with agency, who can resist the cultural authority and who can reclaim her autonomy. Her agency reclaimed, Irie can become a cosmopolitan, which is her ultimate goal to survive and thrive in a multicultural society. Becoming a cosmopolitan relieves Irie of the quandary of hybridization and invigorates her to build a cross-cultural and cross-racial community where she can promote equal mutuality and where she can perceive that people are more alike than unlike.Chapter One analyzes Irie’s hybridity, how she sabotages ethnic and cultural absolutism and generates becoming. Occupying the in-between space, Irie contests dominant ideologies, reveals her difference, and shatters the white beauty myth. Chapter Two inspects Irie’s becomingness when she resorts to mimicry; by dint of recognizing her roots and routes, Irie becomes a cosmopolitan so that she can cross the boundaries of cultures and races and embrace the uncertain present. Besides, Chapter Three elucidates an alternative community Samad and his twin sons seek. Their purpose aims to fulfill their desire of intimacy; however, instead of cosmopolitan ones, these communities, situational and strategic, highlight their anxiety rather than security. By contrast, the alternative community Irie has embraced at the end of the novel is not based on othering but on tolerating and respecting others to promote understanding and to maneuver strife. Therefore, in my “Conclusion” I conjure up two images of the round-table equality and riding a Ferris wheel to manifest the situated differences and the multiple viewpoints of cosmopolitans; I advocate world-travelling for people to prosper in a multicultural world. Diversity revered, not reviled, the dispute of differences in the world is thereby dissolved; the pantisocracy of plurality and equality, dreamed, not dreaded.
| Date of Award | 2013 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Shuli Chang (Supervisor) |