Rosa Barker  (Michigan State University)
Liberal "tolerance" and "Other" fetishes; White Teeth and the discourse of multiculturalism

Zadie Smith's debut novel, White Teeth (2000), has received widespread acclaim for its portrayal of multicultural London. Judges of the Whitbread prize described the book as a "landmark novel for multicultural Britain". This paper explores, from a critical perspective, the relationship between White Teeth and the discourse of multiculturalism in the UK. Working with the insights of Kenan Malik, Slavoj Zizek, Paul Gilroy and Himani Bannerji, I will point to the ways in which an official discourse of "tolerance, diversity, and equal opportunity", which began to enter mainstream British political discourse in the 1960s, far from heralding in an era of "cosmopolitan conviviality" has served as a "mask of legitimation" which conceals a new and virulent form of "postmodern" racism. I will argue that the success of White Teeth must be understood within the context of this official strategy of management and containment. By examining both the text's content as well as its marketing and reception I will illustrate the ways in which this "postcolonial" novel, while seemingly working to disrupt the logic of white supremacy, in fact can be seen to support the very discourses which sustain it. This paper will explore the ways in which, notwithstanding Smith's apparent attempts to destabilize racial determinism, the two-dimensional quality of many members of Smith's multicultural cast can be understood as symptomatic of the multiculturalist construction of ethnic "others" as the fetishized caricatures of "diversity." Focusing specifically on the function of the Second World War in Smith's text, I will illustrate the ways in which the novel conveys a vision of multicultural Britain waging a 'just war' against the spectre of Nazism. This vision, while usefully undermining the fiction of a racially homogenous past, does little to disrupt the binary thinking upon which current racist imperialism depends. In fact, such depictions of Britain's "wholesome militarism" so prevalent within current popular and political discourse work to circumvent British responsibility for its own racial imperialism. This emphasis on the novel's complicity with 'liberal' constructions of Britain's cultural identity/ies will, in this paper, be supplemented by an exploration of the overdetermined construction of Smith's text by the cultural industry through which it was catapulted to fame. Thus, I will argue that, despite (or, indeed, precisely because of) the heteroglossic nature of Smith's text it tends - as a result of the interplay between its content and the particular frames of reference which have conditioned its reception - to work towards the consolidation of a regressive and ultimately racist multiculturalism that itself serves to consolidate and sanction the hegemony of normative, white British identity.