Rhythmic Impersonality: The Legacy of Modernist Racialism in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time

Abstract

ABSTRACT Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016) explores rhythmic performance across a wide span of history and culture, from 1930s dance film, to West-African ceremonial rites, to international pop music. Smith’s unnamed narrator responds to the alluring universality of rhythm with a curious interpretive posture that severely partitions the physical embodiment of rhythm from the personality and cultural contingencies of the performer. To access the motivations of this interpretive method, this article recounts the legacy of rhythmic impersonality: the social deportment of modernist rhythm science that inspired corresponding interpretive and performative methods in the arts. Smith’s novel facilitates this historicizing by presenting nostalgia for rhythmic impersonality in the most compelling light, while retaining the lingering pernicious effects of rhythm’s racialization in contemporary culture. As this article argues, the mode of spectatorship vivified in Smith’s novel separates rhythm from cultural heritage, often as a means of sidelining the social constraints of the Black performer, but it also opens the door to new and optimistic modes of cross-cultural engagement. More broadly, this line of inquiry advances the contemporary novel as a means of studying and lamenting cultural critical apathy, as well as the historical precedents that sustain it.