On being queer and postcolonial: Reading Zadie Smith’sNWthrough Virginia Woolf’sMrs Dalloway

Abstract

This article explores the legacies of Virginia Woolf’s modernist lens in Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW through a joint queer and postcolonial reading. Although critics have so far pointed out the connections between Smith’s fiction and modernist and postmodernist precursors, this article examines the unexplored relationship between NW and Mrs Dalloway. It argues that Woolf’s novel provides NW with a model of queer modernist dissidence that NW enacts in the equally frustrated relationship between two of its main characters, Leah and Natalie, whose dissatisfaction with the binaries of heteronormative patriarchy are intertwined with issues of class and ethnicity. Yet the article also proposes that what remains at the heart of Smith’s enterprise is the frustrated connection between queer sensibilities, which belies larger issues of British national identity and of diasporic subjects’ forging a sense of belonging and place in the postcolonial nation.