The Impossibility of Hybridity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

초록

For the past three decades or so, hybridity has been the key rhetorical framework in discussing what diasporic, multicultural, or postcolonial subjectivity may look like. In White Teeth, Smith concretizes this concept as lived experiences, showing how hybrid metropolis and hybrid subjectivities create a contemporary multicultural London. Smith maximizes positivity projected onto hybridity by depicting hybridization as a necessity for growth, flourishing, and open future. This essay argues, however, that Smith’s investment in the political potential of hybridity does not lead to the empowerment of hybridized subjects, because its espousal of radical uncertainties makes it impossible for the characters to understand the nature of their social reality and their place in the world. A closer examination reveals that the characters do not really experience themselves as constituents of communities. Each to themselves, the characters depicted as the living embodiment of hybridity vacillate, roam, and wander. The fluidity and openness throw the characters into the state that undermines the importance of belonging to a place with citizenship, rights, and responsibilities. The novel thus reveals the impossibility of hybridity as a condition to dwell and live in.

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