Abstract
This article seeks to demonstrate that Zadie Smith’s fourth novel, NW (2012), deviates away from celebratory multiculturalism in Britain, interrogating the struggle between critical cosmopolitanism and melancholia in a twenty-first century urban environment. It will be argued that Smith’s limited geographical focus (on an area in which she was born and continues to reside) intimates that the social constructs of the family and local community are more conducive to developing cosmopolitan empathy and meaningful relations. Through an analysis of the ethical values of hospitality and openness, it will be suggested that NW reflects a rise in transnational relations and the construction of a cultural model of cosmopolitan communication haunted by national identity and the difficulties of negotiating cultural diversity. The article will then conclude by examining how NW exposes the racial inequalities and socio-economic disparities continuing to reside at the heart of British urban life.
Highlights
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Through an analysis of the ethical values of hospitality and openness, it will be suggested that NW reflects a rise in transnational relations and the construction of a cultural model of cosmopolitan communication haunted by national identity and the difficulties of negotiating cultural diversity
With the publication of her debut novel White Teeth in January 2000, Zadie Smith was heralded as the new voice of British literature, her writing initially perceived as a celebratory examination of multicultural relations
Summary
This article seeks to demonstrate that Zadie Smith’s fourth novel, NW (2012), deviates away from celebratory multiculturalism in Britain, interrogating the struggle between critical cosmopolitanism and melancholia in a twenty-first century urban environment. Leah and Felix reside in the London suburb of Willesden (heralding a return to the bio-geographical spaces of White Teeth), an area in which Smith was born and to which she feels a great sense of affiliation Their interdependent lives reveal the unspoken symmetry and synergy between parochial and cross-cultural life, fusing the cosmopolitan with the quotidian, allowing Smith to interrogate the ways by which ethnicity, class and identity play a role in the construction of urban communities. By exploring how positive social relations and attachments begin at the most parochial level, the narrative demonstrates how lived experience in a contemporary urban cityscape is increasingly informed and shaped by more global processes of movement in general This concentration on the locally relational spaces of Willesden does not herald an escape from global issues but rather a direct confrontation with the transnational realities of London life, rejecting the idea that cosmopolitan theory is reliant on transnational mobilities or that cosmopolitanism itself necessarily supercedes the nation-state. Leah’s initial act of empathy has directly led to a less cosmopolitan approach to her local community, indicating the delicate balance of racial and sociocultural tensions governing the capital’s urban spaces
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