Zadie Smith’s Nonhuman turns

Abstract

ABSTRACT An ecopolitical thread runs throughout Zadie Smith’s fiction and non-fiction, problematising the author’s self-described ‘sentimental humanism’. In this article, I reflect on Smith’s narrative and essayistic treatment of animals in the context of insights drawn from the recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in critical theory and literary criticism. I argue that Smith’s work exhibits a fidelity to the existence of nonhuman alterity at the limits of human experience. In her narrative and essays, Smith threads a needle between understanding the human’s nonhuman origins and the inevitable self-referentiality of human signifying systems. I begin by examining how strategies of ‘soft representation’ across Smith’s writing deconstruct everyday anthropocentrism; I then analyse how her 2012 novel NW depicts British neoliberal ideology entangling urban foxes in human anxieties about race and class; finally, I discuss this novel’s search for potential solidarities among urban animals, human and nonhuman, who are marginalised under twenty-first-century neoliberal policies.