Zadie Smith's white teeth: the interpellation of the colonial subject in Multicultural Britain

Abstract

White Teeth (2000) fictionalises the realities that immigrants experience and reveals how they find themselves caught in a chaotic, fragmented and alienated world and seek to actualise themselves through similar escape mechanisms. Through a close reading of the novel, this article, suggesting that a literary text subjectively mediates actual, imagined or reimagined histories in a given period and manifests specific historical contexts through an aesthetic individualisation of the socio-historical totality, attempts to theorise the concept of double alienation from a Marxist perspective and to justify its arguments in response to recent intellectual and political histories and theoretical interventions.