Voyage Out, Voyage Up?

Abstract

In studies of the Black-British Bildungsroman, “race” and/or gender tend to take the front seat, even if class rarely goes unmentioned as yet another obstacle in the narrated formation of upwardly mobile subjectivities of post-migration. However, there is no critical consensus about the political and affective concerns that drive these appropriations of the Bildungsroman genre for imagining post-migrant experiences of (de)marginalisation. While Mark Stein has influentially emphasised the symbolic agency represented in and exerted by such “novels of transformation”, others have noted the ambiguities that resonate in narratives of post-migrant upward mobility. Intervening in this debate with a sustained focus on class, I reread two texts rarely discussed in these generic terms – Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012) – against the backdrop of neoliberal meritocracy and its cruel optimism. Both novels stage post-migrant achievement against all intersectional odds in politically conflicted and literarily productive ways that challenge the good-life fantasy of upward mobility conventionalised in the Black-British Bildungsroman as a demarginalising, socially transformative genre. I argue that Smith’s novels unmake the cruel optimism of post-migrant success stories by remaking the Bildungsroman as most contradictory of modern symbolic forms.