Narrative and the mapping of Diaspora Space: Liminalities and subjectivities in the ‘Happy Multicultural Land’ of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

Abstract

This article explores the features of narrative space in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth by drawing on the notion of diaspora space, which is based upon Avtar Brah’s theory in Cartographies of Diaspora, with a view to defining diaspora subjectivity. The analysis asks how such spaces are imbued with the multiplicity of border crossings, such as metaleptic intrusions of the heterodiegetic narrator, pluralization of perspectivism, the intermingling of the narrator’s and characters’ own spaces with the use of free indirect speech and the problematization of internal and external spaces. The narrator’s engagement with issues of diaspora, subjectivity, ethnicity, multiculturalism and roots/routes as well as their narrative manifestations are traced throughout the novel with recourse to ideas of ‘post-postcolonialism’, a concept that corresponds to the everydayness and ordinariness of migrant experience. Consequently, space proves to be a constitutive element of both the novel’s narrative and the characters’ subjectivities.