Mixed Race Studies

Hybridity gets fashionable

Andréia Azevedo Soares

LabLit.com: the culture of science fiction & fact
2009-10-24

The novel White Teeth offers a different perspective on science

Even if you haven’t read the novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith, you probably remember it—unless you were lying comatose at the beginning of this century. White Teeth was considered to be the literary find even before it was fully written and, immediately after its release, rapturous reviews popped in the media like wild rabbits. Critics praised the “multi” issues cleverly addressed in this multi-layered, multicultural and multiethnic story—but overlooked much of the science that lies in it. Yes, although you may not clearly recall it, there is a scientist in White Teeth.

As a fictional character, Marcus Chalfen seems to represent this century’s emerging group of biotechnology researchers. It is his wife, Joyce Chalfen, who introduces him to the readers. Joyce portrays her husband as a geneticist deeply focused on both social and scientific progress. Promoting the chimeric fusion of embryos, it was possible to generate “mice whose very bodies did exactly what Marcus told them”. Dr. Chalfen believes that he controls every single cell of the Future Mouse^©, his ultimate genetically engineered creation.

…White Teeth is a story about many things. Zadie Smith knits together, in a tragicomic epic, a variety of tantalizing themes such as gender, race, class, eugenics and religion embedded in a saga of three multicultural families in North London. One of them are the Chalfens (who have Jewish ancestry), and the two others are the Joneses and the Iqbals. The patriarchs of the latter families, the British Archie and Indian Samad, happen to be close friends who met by chance during the Second World War and who cherished ever since a mutual and sincere friendship. Samad is married to an Indian woman and is a father of twins, Magid and Millat. His sons share the same genetic material, but each one responds to the environment in uneven ways. Archie is married to a Jamaican woman and is the father of Irie. He considers life to be a matter of chance. Every time Archie must to make a decision, he tosses a coin. His daughter, Irie, also believes in accidents but feels herself a victim of “genetic fate”. Like Zadie Smith herself, Irie Jones carries in her veins a double ancestry: “Irie believed she had been dealt the dodgy cards: mountainous curves, buck teeth and thick metal retainer, impossible Afro hair.”

In White Teeth, we should understand hybridity in its broader cultural meanings—and these meanings are not necessarily correct in scientific terms. Here, hybridity can be a chimera produced in a lab but also racial or cultural mixing. In that sense, it is possible to say that London is, due its multicultural or multiethnic condition, a sort of capital of hybridism. Different ingredients are combined in the same pot and the result can be both fun and tragic, as Zadie Smith shows. The author’s attitude towards her characters and plotline is also a hybrid one—and, if we consider that the tragicomic is also a mixture of genres, this is also quite telling.

People are enduringly enthralled with hybridity. In the past, naturalists believed that species, when intercrossed, were doomed to be infertile “in order to prevent the confusion of all organic forms”, as Darwin wrote in his The Origin of Species. In fact, sterility turned out to be associated with close interbreeding rather than hybridity. Now there is a relatively fresh idea that people who have different racial or cultural backgrounds are tailored to be more tolerant, cosmopolitan, creative and so forth. Or even more successful—like Barack Obama or Zadie Smith herself…

Read the entire essay here.

Mixed-Race Celebrities on Race, in their Own Words

Time Magazine: Healthland
2011-02-15

Meredith Melnick, Reporter and Producer

Who Are You?

If biracial and multiracial celebrities have anything in common, it is that they are often asked to explain themselves. That may sound familiar to any person of mixed ancestry for whom questions like “What are you?” and the slightly more delicate “Where are your parents from?” are the norm.

“Historically, racism is equated with segregation, separating people,” says Marcia Alesan Dawkins, a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. “In turn, we think racial progress is racial mixing. But the problem is, [that progress is] still based on appearance.”

People who embody racial diversity can’t be expected to explain the concept to everybody else, but their thoughts on the matter are often illuminating. As Dawkins said, “It’s still important to bring issues of multiracial identity to the public’s attention.”…

Read the entire article here.

The beauty of difference

In The Fray
2005-12-04

Nicole Marie Pezold

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, “On Beauty”, is many things. Chief among them: an homage to differences.

For those of mixed heritage — who straddle more than one race, nationality, faith, class, or whatever else — uncovering a coherent identity can be a complicated emotional journey. There are multiple, potentially conflicting, avenues and models, and choosing one or melding several is difficult business. This may be part of why Zadie Smith—herself the product of an English father and Jamaican mother—returns to this endlessly rich topic in her third novel, On Beauty, which was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. As with her acclaimed debut novel, White Teeth, published when she was a mere 23 years old, and her less stunning second book, The Autograph Man, Smith ambitiously mines the cultural morass of mixed worlds. Now, with her latest work, she paints her most vivid portrait of the challenges and ecstasies of multiculturalism…

Read the entire article here.

Zadie Smith: Critical Essays

Peter Lang Publishing Group
March 2008
221 pages
Paparback ISBN: 9978-0-8204-8806-6

Edited by:

Tracey L. Walters, Associate Professor of Literature
Stony Brook University

Zadie Smith: Critical Essays is a timely collection of critical articles examining how Zadie Smith‘s novels and short stories interrogate race, postcolonialism, and identity. Essays explore the various ways Smith approaches issues of race, either by deconstructing notions of race or interrogating the complexity of biracial identity; and how Smith takes on contemporary debates concerning notions of Britishness, Englishness, and Black Britishness. Some essays also consider the shifting identities adopted by those who identify with both British and West Indian, South Asian, or East Asian ancestry. Other essays explore Smith’s contemporary postcolonial approach to Britain’s colonial legacy, and the difference between how immigrants and first-generation British-born children deal with cultural alienation and displacement. This thought-provoking collection is a much-needed critical tool for students and researchers in both contemporary British literature and Diasporic literature and culture.

Table of Contents

• Tracey L. Walters: Introduction
• Matthew Paproth: The Flipping Coin: The Modernist and Postmodernist Zadie Smith
• Ulka Anjaria: On Beauty and Being Postcolonial: Aesthetics and Form in Zadie Smith
• Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: The Impossible Self and the Poetics of the Urban Hyperreal in Zadie Smith’s “The Autograph Man”
• Maeve Tynan: “Only Connect”: Intertextuality and Identity in Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”
• Raphael Dalleo: Colonization in Reverse: “White Teeth” as Caribbean Novel
• Susan Alice Fischer: “Gimme Shelter”: Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”
• Tracey L. Walters: Still Mammies and Hos: Stereotypical Images of Black Women in Zadie Smith’s Novels
• Sharon Raynor: From the Dispossessed to the Decolonized: From Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners to Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell in Hell”
• Lexi Stuckey: Red and Yellow, Black and White: Color-Blindness as Disillusionment in Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell in Hell”
• Kris Knauer: The Root Canals of Zadie Smith: London’s Intergenerational Adaptation
• Z. Esra Mirze: Fundamental Differences in Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”
• Katarzyna Jakubiak: Simulated Optimism: The International Marketing of “White Teeth”

Race Card: Corinne Bailey Rae and Zadie Smith Navigate Race and Art

Bitch Magazine
2010-01-21

Nadra Kareem

Works by two mixed-race Brits—musician Corinne Bailey Rae and writer Zadie Smith—have recently been profiled in the New York Times. Both women navigate their collective white and Caribbean ancestry by embracing hybridity instead of relegating themselves to one group. Their doing so challenges entrenched American notions of race that say that multiracial people must choose one ethnicity or another, not all.

The English-Jamaican Smith, who rose to fame upon the publication of her 2000 bestselling book White Teeth, regards Zora Neale Hurston and Barack Obama as her sister and brother in arms. In her new book of essays, Changing My Mind, Smith praises Hurston for making “‘black woman-ness’ appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals.”…

…For singer Corinne Bailey Rae, whose mother is white and father is from the West Indian island of St. Kitts, being mixed-race had a direct impact on her music. Now, 30, Bailey Rae gravitated towards grunge in her teens…

Read the entire article here.

The politics of everyday hybridity: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

Wasafiri: The Magazine Of International Contemporary Writing
Volume 18, Issue 39
Summer 2003
pages 11-17
DOI: 10.1080/02690050308589837

Laura Moss, Associate Professor of English
University of British Columbia

Read the entire article here.

White Teeth: A Novel

Vintage an imprint of Random House
2001-06-12
464 pages
ISBN: 978-0-375-70386-7 (0-375-70386-1)

Zadie Smith

On New Year’s morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie–working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt–is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie’s car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel.

Epic and intimate, hilarious and poignant, White Teeth is the story of two North London families–one headed by Archie, the other by Archie’s best friend, a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, Archie and Samad are a decidedly unlikely pair. Plodding Archie is typical in every way until he marries Clara, a beautiful, toothless Jamaican woman half his age, and the couple have a daughter named Irie (the Jamaican word for “no problem”). Samad–devoutly Muslim, hopelessly “foreign”–weds the feisty and always suspicious Alsana in a prearranged union. They have twin sons named Millat and Magid, one a pot-smoking punk-cum-militant Muslim and the other an insufferable science nerd. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire’s worth of cultural identity, history, and hope.

Zadie Smith’s dazzling first novel plays out its bounding, vibrant course in a Jamaican hair salon in North London, an Indian restaurant in Leicester Square, an Irish poolroom turned immigrant café, a liberal public school, a sleek science institute. A winning debut in every respect, White Teeth marks the arrival of a wondrously talented writer who takes on the big themes–faith, race, gender, history, and culture–and triumphs.

‘Toubab La!’ Literary Representations of Mixed-Race Characters in the African Diaspora

Cambridge Scholars Publishing
July 2007
453 pages
ISBN13: 9781847182319
ISBN: 1-84718-231-3

Ginette Curry, Professor of English
Florida International University

The book is an examination of mixed-race characters from writers in the United States, The French and British Caribbean islands (Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia and Jamaica), Europe (France and England) and Africa (Burkina Faso, South Africa, Botswana and Senegal). The objective of this study is to capture a realistic view of the literature of the African diaspora as it pertains to biracial and multiracial people. For example, the expression “Toubab La!” as used in the title, is from the Wolof ethnic group in Senegal, West Africa. It means “This is a white person” or “This is a black person who looks or acts white.” It is used as a metaphor to illustrate multiethnic people’s plight in many areas of the African diaspora and how it has evolved. The analysis addresses the different ways multiracial characters look at the world and how the world looks at them. These characters experience historical, economic, sociological and emotional realities in various environments from either white or black people. Their lineage as both white and black determines a new self, making them constantly search for their identity. Each section of the manuscript provides an in-depth analysis of specific authors’ novels that is a window into their true experiences.

The first section is a study of mixed race characters in three acclaimed contemporary novels from the United States. James McBride’s The Color of Water (1996), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998) and Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish (2001) reveal the conflicting dynamics of being biracial in today’s American society. The second section is an examination of mixed-race characters in the following French Caribbean novels: Mayotte Capécia’s I Am a Martinican Woman (1948), Michèle Lacrosil’s Cajou (1961) and Ravines du Devant-Jour (1993) by Raphaël Confiant. Section three is about their literary representations in Derek Walcott’s What the Twilight Says (1970), Another Life (1973), Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) and Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1995) from the British Caribbean islands. Section four is an in-depth analysis of their plight in novels written by contemporary mulatto writers from Europe such as Marie N’Diaye’s Among Family (1997), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara (1997). Finally, the last section of the book is a study of novels from West African and South African writers. The analysis of Monique Ilboudo’s Le Mal de Peau (2001), Bessie Head’s A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990) and Abdoulaye Sadji’s Nini, Mulâtresse du Sénégal (1947) concludes this literary journey that takes the readers through several continents at different points in time.

Overall, this comprehensive study of mixed-race characters in the literature of the African diaspora reveals not only the old but also the new ways they decline, contest and refuse racial clichés. Likewise, the book unveils how these characters resist, create, reappropriate and revise fixed forms of identity in the African diaspora of the 20th and 21st century. Most importantly, it is also an examination of how the authors themselves deal with the complex reality of a multiracial identity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I. THE UNITED STATES
  • Chapter 1: James McBride’s The Color of Water (1996): A Journey Beyond Black and White
  • Chapter 2: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998): The Surviving Canary
  • Chapter 3: Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001): The Chameleon Experience
• PART II. THE FRENCH CARIBBEAN ISLANDS
  • Chapter 4: Mayotte Capécia’s I am a Martinican Woman (1948): “My father is Black, My Mother is Brown, and I, Am I White?” (Martinican Riddle)
  • Chapter 5: Michèle Lacrosil’s Cajou (1961): The Anti-Narcissus
  • Chapter 6: Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du Devant-Jour (1993): Ethnostereotypes in Martinique
• PART III. THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN ISLANDS
  • Chapter 7: The Racial Paradox of Derek Walcott in What the Twilight Says (1970), Derek Walcott: Another life (1973) and Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967)
  • Chapter 8: Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1995): A Near-White Jamaican Woman’s Quest for Identity
• PART IV. EUROPE
  • Chapter 9: Marie N’Diaye’s Among Family (1997): A Desperate Search for Caucasian Identity
  • Chapter 10: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000): The Concept of Englishness in the 21st Century
  • Chapter 11: Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara (1997): Transculturality in England: Oyinbo, Whitey, Morena, Nig Nog, Nigra!
• PART V. AFRICA
  • Chapter 12: Monique Ilboudo’s Le Mal de peau (2001): Colonization and Forced Hybridity
  • Chapter 13: Bessie Head’s A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990): White-on-Black and Black-on-Black Racial Oppression in Southern Africa
  • Chapter 14: Abdoulaye Sadji’s Nini, Mulâtresse du Sénégal (1947): “Toubab La!”
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Primary Sources
• Critical Sources
• Index

Read a preview  here.