‘There is such a shelter in each other’: women looking for homes in Zadie Smith's White Teeth, On Beauty and NW

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the different ways in which home is experienced by the female characters of the diaspora in Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000), On Beauty (2006) and NW (2013). In On Beauty, one of the characters declares: ‘There is such a shelter in each other’ (93). This implies that the sense of home may not be tied to a place, but to the intimacy of relationships. In these novels, Zadie Smith portrays women whose feelings of belonging to a place are threatened, due to their geographical displacements or to their complex transcultural identities. Using Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of territorialization and reterritorialization, I’ll explore how concepts of home and diaspora are reconfigured in Smith's novels.