“A lie that pandered to racism and xenophobia”

LANGUAGE HAS OFTEN BEEN A CENTRAL ISSUE in Caribbean novels of migration to London, crystallizing the problems of communication and of identity - both individual and collective - that affect the West Indian newcomers and their English 'hosts'. Accent, syntax, lexicon - all contribute to giving picture of who the characters are, even if, in the case of the Caribbean protagonists, they just speak varieties of the same idiom as the local English population, for, as George Lamming reminds us, English is a West Indian language.1 Probably the best-known example of the role played by the linguistic medium in the fictionalization of postcolonial London by Caribbean writers is Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956). Written in re-created idiom akin to English-based Trinidadian Creole, both in narrative and in dialogue, this novel renders the disillusionment of its protagonists, who end up, as Susheila Nasta puts it, setting up home in city of words.2 If English, particularly English place names, have contributed to the characters' mental colonization and made them view London as new Eldorado, their own creative use of the speech of the former master becomes mark not only of otherness but also of agency, limited yet nonetheless real. For Selvon, Nasta argues, is only through [...] the reclamation of an authentic for identity that [he] can begin to rescue his [...] community from the illusory myths of the imperial centre.3More recent novels on multicultural London by writers with Jamaican roots, Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004), are no exception to this almost traditional linguistic focus in Caribbean literature, even if they testify to change in perspective.4 Indeed, for the younger writers the issue is perhaps less question of mental decolonization, which it was for Sam Selvon and other authors of the 1950s and 1960s, than question of establishing the heterogeneous character of the city and, by extension, of the nation. I would like to argue in this essay that Smith and Levy are not so much interested in West Indian identity abroad as in the meaning of Englishness. Not only do they include in their writing 'englishes' that depart from the norm: i.e. from so-called standard British English, but they also draw attention to the linguistic processes that underlie intercultural encounters and human relationships in general.In what follows, I endeavour to show how the multiplicity of tongues in White Teeth informs mongrelized speech community, which demystifies the notion of purity and therefore stands in opposition to all forms of fundamentalisms, linguistic or otherwise. Small Island, too, interweaves several voices which, as I will demonstrate, convey the variegated configuration of postwar London and epitomize not only its sometimes painful experience of cross-culturalism but also its inherent human richness. Language variety is thus central preoccupation in both novels. However, while White Teeth seems to gesture towards the hybridity that this vocal multiplicity entails - what Smith has called, in an article on Barack Obama's flexibility of voice, our collective human messiness5 - Small Island, which is set around the Second World War, tends, rather, to focus on the difficulties arising from linguistic pluralism. It indeed presents, according to Cynthia James, language [as] battleground on which British and West Indian cultures and identities clash and make accommodations.6It should be obvious to any reader that the reflection on English identity at the heart of White Teeth is underpinned by conspicuous interest in linguistic matters. Not only does serve as deftly handled representational tool for the novelist but it is also an apt metaphor for world characterized by unpredictability and teeming with diversity. An examination of Smith's treatment of the linguistic question requires brief introduction to her impressive gallery of characters. …

National identity is created through inclusions and exclusions; by who and what is included and who and what is excluded. This article examines how British identity was constructed, expressed, and re-constructed in the British press through articles about German Formula One driver Michael Schumacher in the 1990s and early 2000s. The representations of Schumacher, and the frequent invocations of the Second World War, illuminate insecurities in the British press about Britain’s role in the world and their concerns about a newly reunited Germany playing a more prominent role on the global stage.

This study analytically discusses what defines people as English in the 21st century by asking as to what creates Englishness in the milieu of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. It also presents the construction or determination of later generation immigrants’ English identities when the limitations of their origins and races are deconstructed. Most importantly, it asks (and tries to answer), whether the second-generation immigrants balance their inherited identities and the ones they choose? The study illustrates by analyzing the events in White Teeth that traditional concepts of identity and the belief that family roots and race alone create a solid base for the children’s identity, are nothing but a fallacy. The novel shows that the factors of nationality, culture, and race are fluid and that they do not provide an airtight framework for the construction of a person’s identity.

FEW FIRST NOVELS HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED TO THE ACCLAIM that accompanied Zadie Smith's White Teeth in early 2000. Smith was only twenty-four years old; first publicity photos showed pensive writer with short hair and funky glasses. She had just completed her undergraduate studies Cambridge University, and, as daughter of English father and Jamaican-born mother, she was heralded as voice of new multicultural, multiracial Britain that White Teeth chronicles. novel circles around lives of three families: Samad and Alsana Iqbal, Bangladeshi immigrants with twin sons, and Archie and Clara Jones, EnglishWest Indian family with one daughter, who are linked in friendship forged when two fathers served together in Second World War; third family, Chalfens, are white Londoners, intellectuals and writers, whose eldest son attends same state school as others' children. Through conjunctures and contradictions generated by these character groupings, White Teeth explores such wide-ranging issues as history, racism, imperialism, generations, legacies of Empire, genetic manipulation, and contemporary urban spaces. Writing in Observer shortly after novel was published, Stephanie Merritt describes it as a broad, teeming, comic novel of multiracial Britain.1 Her fellow novelist Caryl Phillips commends White Teeth for pressing significance of issues Smith tackled. The plot is rich, he writes, at times dizzyingly so, but White Teeth squares up two questions which gnaw very roots of our modern condition: Who are we? Why are we here?2 In North America novel was received with equal enthusiasm. New York Times reviewer Anthony Quinn praises Smith's ability to inhabit characters of different generations, races and mind-sets and sums up White Teeth as an eloquent, wit-struck book.3 Later commentaries offered similar assessments; in 2006, Jonathan P.A. Sell notes:In tune with Zeitgeist, novel's fusion of 'dirty realist' aesthetics and social politics of multiculturalism was laced with savvy, times rollicking humour.4Writing early retrospective assessment in 2004, Bruce King calls White Teeth the publishing sensation of 2000.5 Summing up reception of novel, Tracey L. Walters writes:critics applauded Smith's ability address multiplicity of themes - religious fundamentalism, postcolonialism, hybridity aesthetics, and multiculturalism - in single novel, complemented by touch of humor.6In anticipation of novel's North American publication, Smith was invited by New Yorker magazine, perhaps most prestigious periodical venue for writer in USA, contribute short story their December fiction issue. result was Stuart, story that revisits fluid, multicultural, multiracial, intergenerational streets and squares of public spaces in contemporary Britain, but represents subtle and overt potential for violence lurking within these familiar sites. In Postcolonial London: Rewriting Metropolis (2004) John McLeod situates the exuberance and wit of Zadie Smith's White Teeth in set of emergent writings in which London is confident, cognizant of its transcultural past, optimistic, of creative energies nurtured from conjunction of different times and places in both city and self.7 In similar way, John Clement Ball draws on urban theorists Jane Jacobs and Richard Sennett highlight potential in city streets for productive disorder and intermixture, and for stimulating imagination roam in both familiar and 'previously unthought' directions.8 In Stuart, Smith depicts different London, one that is still full of creative energies, but with telling difference - these energies bristle with potential set off contingent and unexpected violence. Stuart begins with detailed description of daily activities on crowded urban street, in ways that are sometimes evocative of dazzling opening pages of Virginia Woolf s Mrs. …

Media history is a relatively new area in media studies worldwide. In South Africa, it has not made significant inroads onto the agendas of conference programmes, academic journal articles or student syllabi. Twenty years ago, the eminent Danish scholar, Hans Fredrik Dahl (1994: 551), noted that 'the media as a historical object is far from fully understood at present'. In South African scholarship at least, not much has changed. Dahl went on to suggest that there are two main reasons for the paucity of media-historical studies. The 'endless present' and 'ubiquitous reality' of the media seem to make them 'resist historical exploration by their sheer and monotonous insistence on dealing with contemporary moments' (ibid.). The second reason is a lack of interest in the media on the part of the historical fraternity, where the most important question seems to revolve around the value and credibility of the media as source material, rather than the media per se. This means that little effort has been invested in developing a methodology appropriate to historical studies of the media. While the majority of research projects on media deal with the here and now, and the urgency of a rapidly changing structural, ethical and technological milieu in which the media are situated discourages reflective accounts of the past, there is evidence of a growing interest in media history. Both the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and the International Communication Association (ICA) have healthy sections devoted to the area. This issue of Critical Arts contributes to that interest, in what is the first of two back-to-back editions devoted to exploring the media in historical terms. Specifically, the emphasis is on Empire and media in the twentieth century. The current issue centres on broadcasting (with a nod to telecommunications), while the subsequent issue will focus on print media. To speak of 'broadcasting' before 1950 is to speak predominantly of radio, and indeed all the articles in this issue confine themselves to the medium of radio. Empire and audience In the 20th century, the concept of 'empires' appeared to be an anachronism--a leftover from a bygone era of raw exploitation and extraction. While it is true that the glory days of the late 19th century were over, the importance of the imperial project remained long after the European flags were lowered. The history of the global south is, in large measure, the history of colonisation and postcolonial endeavours. Many institutions--political, economic and cultural--bear traces of earlier arrangements. This is particularly true of the media, both broadcast and print. Empires were peopled with a variety of constituents: there were the colonial governors, acting as the direct proxies for the colonial authorities; the predominantly white communities--either 'expats' who lived in the colonies for a number of years, but whose hearts and minds remained 'at home' in the motherland, or 'settlers' who lived in the country on a permanent basis, often over several generations with no intention of returning to Europe; other white settler groups of different languages and ethnicities who shared little of the cultural, ideological or political affinities of the colonists; and, finally, the indigenous populations--always the largest by number, but inevitably the group with the smallest stake in matters such as broadcasting. The various articles in this issue all speak to the different audiences they served. In the account of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) during the Second World War, Teer-Tomaselli outlines how the tension between the long-term English-speaking settlers and their white Afrikaner counterparts was exacerbated by the former's dedication to the Commonwealth's war efforts, and the latter's quest for self-determination and independence from Britain. The broadcaster's role in this was ambiguous at first, as the animosities in the outside society spilt over into the corporation itself. …

Christophe Bataille. Absinthe. Translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Pierre Michon. Masters and Servants. Translated by Wyatt Alexander Mason. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1997. For the average English-speaking reader, the contemporary French novel has effectively disappeared from the radar screen of world literature. With the possible exception of Michel Tournier (whose novel Ogre was turned into an uninspired cinematic vehicle for John Malkovich), few French writers have managed to make an impression on the American book-buying public since the glory days of Duras, Robbe-Grillet, and the nouveau roman. Indeed, as French writers become increasingly associated with the arcana of contemporary criticism, francophones in other parts of the world (one thinks immediately of Patrick Chamoiseau in Martinique and Anne Hebert in Quebec) have become the standard bearers of imaginative literature in French. recent publication of two excellent novels-Christophe Bataille's Absinthe and Pierre Michon's Masters and Servants (in superb translations by Richard Howard and Wyatt Alexander Mason, respectively)-attests to the fact that, despite this eclipse, contemporary French letters are alive and well. Absinthe is the second novel by the young prodigy Christophe Bataille who in 1993, at the age of twenty-one, won the Prix du Premier Roman for Annam, a story of French missionaries who sail to Vietnam in the eighteenth century. Although far removed from the setting of Annam, Bataille's sophomore effort shares his first novel's austere beauty. A lovely and delicate piece, Absinthe presents the reminiscences of its narrator, who details his boyhood in Provence around the time of the First World War, and particularly his relationship with the mysterious and reclusive Jose, a distiller of absinthe. A frequent visitor to Jose's laboratory, the narrator is slowly inducted into the esoteric cult of the narcotic liqueur,, and seems poised to become the master's apprentice and heir when the French government bans the alcohol and Jos6 disappears. Years later, the narrator discovers a manuscript penned by his mother that reveals the distiller's early life and, like a Proustian madeleine, serves as the catalyst for his reflections on his own youth, and for the penning of Absinthe itself. Shrouded in the melancholy of nostalgia, Absinthe is on one level a novel about loss: of childhood, of culture, of home. It lovingly describes a cohesive community as yet undivided by the horrors of war and the unwanted instrusions of bumbling government officials, a mythic Provence before the mass death and paternalistic bureaucracy of modernity. It is a place that now exists only in memory: The region itself has changed, the narrator wistfully concludes following a visit to his parents' house after the Second World War. But Bataille's interest in themes of regional identity, memory, and modernity ultimately take a back seat to his fascination with the mysterious green liqueur itself. In concise but exquisitely crafted prose, he describes the lost culture of absinthe: the various stages of the distillation process and the bizarre tools used to accomplish it, the rituals of its consumption, and its mystical, visionary effects. Unfortunately his minute reconstruction of these vanished practices sometimes comes at the expense of characterization and the full development of the weightier themes mentioned above. While the novel is full of beautiful surfaces, in too many places motives remain obscure, relationships unexplored and undeveloped, leaving the reader with the impression of a rococo artwork-an elegant but ultimately insubstantial aesthetic object. same cannot be said for Pierre Michon's Masters and Servants, a novel as profound and powerful as it is beautiful. book consists of five separate pieces on art and artists: the first concerns Joseph Roulin, a poor postman painted by Vincent van Gogh; the second considers Goya's rise to fame from humble beginnings; the third gives us the death of Watteau; the fourth reconstructs the life of Lorentino, an almost unknown quattrocento painter, from a few lines in Vasari; and the fifth shows us Claude Lorraine as he chooses an illiterate swineherd to be his apprentice. …

This essay attempts to analyze the colonial histories depicted in Zadie Smith's White Teeth by considering them alongside Michel Foucault's lectures on biopolitics. It also aims to contextualize some of the historical threads in the text in order to highlight some of the ways that power and resistance are performed in the fictional narrative. This will uncover important themes in White Teeth that help to identify how apparatuses of power and resistance function in the narrative, linking colonial history with contemporary multiculturalism. DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00003.1

By providing the first comprehensive account of the role of the British and Indian press in war propaganda, this article makes an intervention in the global history of the First World War. The positive propaganda early in the war, intertwined with a rhetoric of loyalism, contrasted with how the conservative British press affixed blame for military defeats in Mesopotamia upon the colonial regime's failure to effectively mobilize India's resources. Using a highly emotive and enduring trope of the ‘Mesopotamia muddle’, the Northcliffe press was successful in channelling a high degree of public scrutiny onto the campaign. The effectiveness of this criticism ensured that debates about the Mesopotamian debacle became a vehicle for registering criticism of structures of colonial rule and control in India. On the one hand, this critique hastened constitutional reforms and devolution in colonial India and, on the other, it led to demands that the inadequacy of India's contribution to the war be remedied by raising war loans. Both the colonial government and its nationalist critics were briefly and paradoxically united in opposing these demands. The coercive extraction of funds for the imperial war effort as well as the British press's vituperative criticism contributed to a post-war, anti-colonial political upsurge. The procedure of creating a colonial ‘scandal’ out of a military disaster required a specific politics for assessing the regulated flows of information, which proved to be highly effective in shaping both the enquiry that followed and the politics of interwar colonial South Asia.

Black colonial people volunteered for the British Army and Royal Navy during the First World War because they regarded themselves as Britons. However, many, including those white crowds which attacked black colonial war veterans during the seaport riots of 1919, did not. Similar racist attitudes were also demonstrated in the wartime deliberations and policy making of government and the military hierarchy. Historians writing about the Second World War have demonstrated that ‘British identity’ became more sharply defined in the period 1939–45. This article suggests that the constructed hierarchy of ‘Britishness’ in which back Britons from the empire were ascribed a lesser identity was also evident in the period during and just after the First World War; as demonstrated by the outbreak of the 1919 riots and the subsequent government decision to repatriate black people to the colonies. By drawing upon detailed individual profiles of hundreds of black colonial Britons included in local Liverpool police records submitted to the Home Office to aid the process of repatriation, this article examines the role of black colonial people who enlisted in the home British armed forces during the First World War. Little has hitherto been written about black colonial people who joined the ranks of the regular British armed forces; as opposed to involvement in native regiments and labour battalions. This article redresses this imbalance using detailed Liverpool police authority information to show that more than 1 in 7 of the many hundreds of male black colonial British residents in that city served in Britain s regular armed forces in the First World War.

Reviewed by: Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press Margaret Beetham (bio) Julie Codell , ed., Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press (Cranbury, N.J., U.S.A., London UK and Mississauga, Canada, Associated University Presses, 2003), pp. 328, 24 illustrations, $57.50 cloth. The title of Julie Codell's edited collection situates it clearly in the space opened up by post-colonial studies, a space in which absolute oppositions of imperial centre and colonial subject are destabilised, if not undone. Influenced by theorists like Edward Said and Homi Bhaba, who supply the epigraphs to Codell's 'Introduction', post-colonial studies explore the complex and shifting relationships in which imperial identities were worked out. My understanding of the project of 'Co-Histories' is that it involves thinking the narratives of metropolis and colony together and addressing the possibility of hybrid identities. Julie Codell, Professor of Art History at Arizona State University, has given us a volume which makes an important addition to this growing body of scholarship. Those whose focus of research is periodical literature have long argued that the dialogic nature of serial forms gives them a particular importance in cultural history. However, in post-colonial studies, as in other more established humanities areas, periodicals are still often treated reductively. This volume is therefore particularly welcome because it brings work in periodical literature to bear on the project of post-colonial studies, focusing on national identities in the nineteenth-century British Empire. Codell's introduction gives an excellent account of the project of the book in these terms. Inevitably, the eleven individual essays vary in how far they employ the same theoretical model, but the collection works well as a whole. This is remarkable, given the range of disciplinary backgrounds from which contributors come. These include Anthropology, [End Page 104] Art History, English, and History, Media and Communications Studies and Women's Studies. The diversity of approaches marshalled within a broad framework is one of the strengths of this collection as its address to visual as well as print texts. The importance of India in the narratives of the British Empire is evident here, and six chapters deal either directly or indirectly with India. However, the range of material in the volume is much wider. Several of the articles deal with the way information was managed and transmitted across the Empire, whether by the telegraphic agencies which Alex Nalbach discusses; through the Imperial Press Conference, the subject of J. Lee Thompson's article, or through The Imperial Gazetteer, which Michael Hancher discusses. The volume as a whole relates the general argument to specific colonial histories though essays which relate to South Africa (Dorothy Helly and Helen Callaway), China (Catherine Pagani), and Australia (Toney Hughes-D'Aeth). It also brings into question the idea of Britain as a single nation through Aled Jones's subtle essay on the relationship between Welsh missionaries and India. Read as a whole, therefore, the volume posits a complex web of identities and knowledges, constructed, transmitted and resisted through a press which both stretched across the Empire and had local and particular manifestations. Imperial Co-Histories is divided into two sections: the first is headed 'Sites of Authority; Imperial Domination and Press Intervention' and the second, 'Sites of Fracture; Resistance and Autonomy in Imperial Representation'. This looks as if it reproduces the old oppositions of ruler and ruled, but it manages to escape that. Several of the essays in the first section resist a too simple model of the 'domination' implicit in the sub-heading and instead develop arguments about the way the press worked to produce complex knowledges and hybridised identities. Notable here is Deepali Dewan's account of the way The Journal of Indian Art and Industry produced an imperial account of Indian art production. However, for me, the second section of this collection is particularly strong. Articles by Catherine Pagani on images of China; Denise Quirk's excellent essay on the 'True Englishwomen' and the 'Anglo- Indian' in the Women's Press; Codell's own thoughtful exploration of the way 'Native Informants' participated in the debate about India in the British press; Tony Hughes...

‘A spectre,’ wrote The Times on 16 July, ‘has been haunting the Committee Corridor of the House of Commons each Tuesday morning for the past five weeks as the Select Committee on Defence has taken evidence on the workings of the D Notice system. The invisible presence in Committee Room 8 has been that of Bismarck, the maker of modern Germany.’ The DPBC ( Defence Press and Broadcasting, or D Notice, Committee) consists of four top civil servants and 11 representatives of the British press and broadcasting organisations. Its origins date back to the period before the First World War when, as The Times put it, ‘Bismarck's observation on the help French newspapers had given to the Prussian general staff in discovering the disposition of French troops in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 … convinced the British defence establishment of the need for a system of press censorship’. The Committee issues so-called D Notices giving details of information it does not wish published and relies on the voluntary cooperation of editors and journalists in suppressing the information. Interest in the system, in recent years largely forgotten, was reawakened in February this year by the publication in the New Statesman of a series of articles by Duncan Campbell on such topics as telephone tapping and the activities of the MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies. Admiral Ash, Secretary of the DPBC, wrote to Bruce Page, Editor of the New Statesman, to remind him of the ‘continuing validity’ of D Notices Nos 10 and 11 on the need to protect information concerning the intelligence services. In an exchange of letters with the Admiral, Bruce Page queried the validity of the D Notice system, which Duncan Campbell, writing in the New Statesman on 4 April, called ‘one of the greater mysteries of British journalism’ – misunderstood or ignored by British journalists and considered by their American and other foreign colleagues to be a typical example of ‘peculiarly British placid press complacency’. Many British journalists have, however, for some time now expressed criticism of the excessive secrecy with which the government and the civil service in this country conduct their affairs, campaigning for the abolition of Section Two of the Official Secrets Act ( see Index on Censorship 1/1978, pp 9–14) and for the introduction of Freedom of Information legislation. Prominent among them has been Harold Evans, Editor of the Sunday Times, and Bruce Page and Duncan Campbell of the New Statesman. In June and July this year a Sub-Committee on D Notices of the House of Commons Defence Committee held an enquiry into the workings of the D Notice system, with members of the DPBC, as well as other civil servants and journalists giving evidence. Some, including Richard Francis, BBC director of news and current affairs and a member of the DPBC ( see box on p 39), and Windsor Clarke, editorial consultant to the Westminster Press and vice-chairman of the Committee, spoke in favour of continuing the system. It could, said Mr Clarke, be discredited within a year if sufficient journalists criticised it, but that was most unlikely, ‘as the arrangement enjoyed wide support in the press’. In a 20- page submission to the parliamentary sub-committee, Bruce Page and Duncan Campbell argue for the system's abolition. Its inception had coincided with the ‘spectacular increase in the size and power of Britain's bureaucracy, which has continued almost without check until very recently’. The DPBC had increasingly become ‘an outpost of the Ministry of Defence’ losing rather than gaining in independence. Page and Campbell analyse the contents of the existing 12 D Notices, as well as dealing with several which have been abandoned, such as the one issued in 1967 in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent The Observer and Sunday Times from publishing the results of their investigations into the affair of the Soviet spy and former British Intelligence officer, Kim Philby. As in some other cases, the New Statesman journalists point out, the information was clearly known to the hostile power in question and would have been kept only from the British reader. Similarly, they describe D Notice No 9 as ‘virtually valueless’, as the British government itself publishes details of all major radio installations and the frequencies they use. ‘It is ludicrous that a D Notice is issued to prevent the British press discussing information which the government furnishes for publication overseas’. Below, we print an edited version of the evidence given to the House of Commons Sub-Committee on D Notices by Bruce Page and Duncan Campbell.

Reviewed by: Children's Literature and British Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation by Rebecca Knuth Vanessa Warne Children's Literature and British Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation. Rebecca Knuth. Toronto: Scarecrow, 2012. 209 p. In her new book, Children's Literature and British Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation, Library Science professor Rebecca Knuth moves away from a topic she knows well, the threatened state of libraries, to take up a very different one: the history of British children's literature. Knuth's goal is to give readers an overview of children's literature in Britain. She brings to her work enthusiasm for her subject matter and a familiarity with a wide range of texts. Taking on more than 50 authors and more than 250 years of literary history, Knuth approaches this large body of material chronologically; she begins with early works, such as John Newberry's The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), and ends off with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Different periods are broken down according to their defining themes. Her discussion of [End Page 95] nineteenth-century literature is, for example, organized by topics which include: "Socialization: Loyalty, Duty and Self-Sacrifice" and "Creating Manliness and the Boy Hero." It is important to note that this book is not aimed at audiences well versed in recent work on literature for young readers. Instead, it offers readers unfamiliar with what is now several decades of scholarship on literature for young people an introductory overview of the field. Whereas readers with knowledge of the scholarly study of literature for young people will not need to be reminded that "values and cultural rituals portrayed to children in books served ideological purposes" (11), this message may well be of interest to the reader who is new to the critical analysis of children's literature and in search of a quick moving introduction. While Knuth does demonstrate her own familiarity with important works of scholarship on children's literature, she tends to quote authorities on different authors or texts and then move on. She does not pause to engage closely with the arguments of other scholars nor does she develop and articulate readings of her own. Some of the central claims that Knuth makes in the book are less than novel. Discussing her research on children's literature, she outlines one of her major findings: "I found that children's books contribute to the development of character and, as well, to an ethos and national identity—in the case of Britain, the nebulous thing called Englishness" (vii). It's a valid point, but it is not a new one. Other points put forward by Knuth are likely to raise eyebrows. Knuth makes some sweeping claims about the historical periods she covers. She argues, for instance, that "Dickens's compelling child characters were created out of an earnest desire to counter the emotional apathy that plagued Victorian England" (33). She goes on to describe the Victorians and Edwardians as an "emotionally locked-down population" (89), a broad generalization that is neither supported nor fully elucidated by Knuth. Some of Knuth's arguments are hard to follow. As part of a discussion of children's literature written after the First World War, she proposes that, after the war, "the grip of ideology on children's literature loosened" (115)—something that informed readers of, for example, the C.S. Lewis' Narnia series are likely to balk at. It should also be noted that this is not a book for literary critics, who will find little in it by way of discussion of literary technique or of quotation of the primary texts. Knuth does offer a lot of biographical information about the many authors she treats, but she says almost nothing about the literary techniques they employ. As Knuth explains in her preface, in place of a narrow literary or historical study, she hopes to offer readers "a cosmography of the universe of British children's literature and a representation of its main features and effects as the genre has emerged over time" (viii). [End Page 96] More of a survey than a study, the book's...

Introduction: Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature I Africa and Black British Identity Ferdinand Dennis, 'Duppy Conqueror' Mike Phillips, 'The Dancing Face' Fred D'Aguiar, 'Feeding the Ghosts' II Islam and Antiracist Politics Hanif Kureishi, 'The Black Album' Nadeem Aslam, 'Maps for Lost Lovers' Monica Ali, 'Brick Lane' III Multiculturalism and Ethnicity Politics Meera Syal, 'Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee' Gautam Malkani, 'Londonstani' Zadie Smith, 'White Teeth ' Caryl Phillips, 'The Nature of Blood Notes' Bibliography Index

In reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) this essay proposes a definition of total war that illuminates the close connection between the rhetoric of war and the rhetoric of imperialism. Building on the recent scholarly accounts of how “totality” is never truly possible, this essay sees total war not as a descriptor of reality but rather as a rhetorical strategy that categorizes entire populations as ally or enemy—a binary that both emerges from and remains in tension with the binaries structuring imperialism (white/nonwhite, civilized/savage). Total war, that is, defines colonial subjects as allies with their colonizers against white, European enemies. White Teeth explores these contradictions, this essay argues, by revisiting the binary rhetoric of the Second World War. And in challenging the relationship between imperial and wartime categories, Smith’s novel resists the tendencies of both imperial and anti-imperial forms of history to represent the past in terms of just such totalizing categories. As historical fiction, White Teeth counters this totalizing tendency and, dwelling instead in ambiguity and uncertainty, suggests that a truly decolonial history depends not on reversing imperial categories but on rejecting them altogether.

In White Teeth, Zadie Smith portrays the lives of three immigrant families in Britain in the late half of twentieth century. Besides the generally celebrated theme of multiculturalism, this article argues that the novel is an exploration of the relationship between the identity of the second-generation immigrants and their fathers’ masculinity. The lack of masculinity in the fathers among the first-generation immigrants makes the second-generation immigrants cannot construct their British identity, they have to turn to other fatherly fingers for financial and social capital. Through the portrait of masculinity, the author expresses her concern of the racial discrimination against the immigrants and the importance of first-generation immigrants’ masculinity. But on the other hand, the novel’s portrait of men without masculinity intensified the stereotyped negative image of immigrants.