Strangers in Strange Lands: The Immigrants and Ideology in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

Xiaotao WANG

Abstract


In White Teeth, Zadie Smith portrays the multicultural and multiethnic Britain from the 1970s to the 1990s through the lives of three families. Contrary to most criticism which celebrates the hybridity of immigrants in White Teeth, this paper challenges the hybridity of the immigrants’ identity and studies the ideologies in the novel. This paper first examines the unhomeliness of the immigrants and then analyzes how British ideological state apparatuses successfully assimilate some of the immigrants while failing to assimilate the others and the role that school and families play in the assimilation process.

 


Keywords


White Teeth; Immigrates; Unhomeliness; Ideological state apparatuses

Full Text:

PDF

References


Althusser, L. (2001). From ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In V. B. Leitch (Eds.), The norton anthology of theory and criticism. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge.

Fernández, I. P. (2009). Representing third spaces, fluid identities and contested spaces in contemporary British literature. Atlantis. (2), 143-160.

Gray, J. B. (2004). The escape of the sea: Ideology and the awakening. The Southern Literary Journal, 37(1), 53-73.

King, B. (2007). The internationalization of English literature. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

McMann, M. (2012). British black box: A return to race and science in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 58(3), 616-636.

Sicher, E., & Weinhouse, L. (2013). Under postcolonial eyes: Figuring the “Jew” in contemporary British writing. Lincoln NE: U. of Nebraska Press.

Smith, Z. (2000). White teeth. London: Penguin Books.

Tan, C. (2018). Colonialism, power and resistance in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. SOCRATES, 6(1), 22-43.

Trimm, R. (2015). After the century of strangers: Hospitality and crashing in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Contemporary Literature, 56(1), 145-172.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/11412

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2019 Xiaotao Wang

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Share us to:   


 

Online Submissionhttp://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard


Reminder

How to do online submission to another Journal?

If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.


We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mailoffice@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com

Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture