We Are Not Free to Choose: Class Determinism in Zadie Smith’s NW
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Hui Wang
Abstract
NW by Zadie Smith opens with a multicultural and multiracial scene and revolves around the crises in the lives of four people with longstanding connection to Northwest London. The Northwest London in NW is a besieged city, and the people therein could not see any possibility of getting out because the gate has been latched with the concept of social class. In NW, the social class is materialized as space, economic position and race. Geographically NW features the main areas of London, and considers the role of that city in shaping the consciousness of the major characters, a partly spatial configuring of identity. In addition, the major characters in NW also suffer from occupational exclusion and economic exploitation, which then lead to their lower-class position since social class is constructed in such a way that agents are distributed according to their positions in the statistical distribution based on the economic and cultural capital. Finally the racial discrimination encountered by the characters in NW shows that class relations shape the form that racial oppression takes. The racialization of class issues becomes a politically effective tool for the wealthy to divide and rule the lower classes. In NW, Smith thus has adopted a more political attitude than in her previous books, so the relatively new perspective of her fiction might be the attention she draws to the persistent obstacles to class crossing and the acknowledgment of the rigid lines that still define the social classes.
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Note
This paper is a part of the project “A Study on Contemporary Black British Novels (Grant No. 15BWW063),” supported by National Social Science Fund of China.
© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Schiff und Schrift: Zum Verhältnis zwischen Literatur und Globalisierung – Einleitung
- Epos und Periplous: Dichtung und Dokumentation in Camões’ Lusíadas
- Im Kielwasser des Verschlagenen: Odysseus’ Diskurs zwischen Schreiben und Kartografie
- Meer – Medien – Maschinen: Jules Vernes abenteuerliche Reise- und Kommunikationsformen
- „The common continent of men“? Die Pequod und ihre Crew als Verhandlungsraum von ,Welt‘ in Melvilles Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale
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- Gabriel Trop: Poetry as a Way of Life: Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015. 400 pp.
- Susannah B. Mintz: Hurt and Pain. Literature and the Suffering Body. London u. a.: Bloomsbury, 2013. 198 S.
- Jürgen Lehmann: Russische Literatur in Deutschland: Ihre Rezeption durch deutschsprachige Schriftsteller vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2015. 417 S.
- Schamma Schahadat und Štěpán Zbytovský, Hgg.: Übersetzungslandschaften. Themen und Akteure der Literaturübersetzung in Ost- und Mitteleuropa. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. (Interkulturalität. Studien zu Sprache, Literatur und Gesellschaft, Bd. 9) 285 S.
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- Brendan Moran and Carlo Salzani, eds.: Towards the Critique of Violence: Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. 251 pp.
- Andreas Huyssen: Miniature Metropolis. Literature in an Age of Photography and Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015. 368 pp.
- Nicolas Pethes: Literarische Fallgeschichten. Zur Poetik einer epistemischen Schreibweise. Konstanz: Konstanz UP, 2016. 240 S.
- Markus Polzer und Philipp Vanscheidt, Hgg.: Fontes Litterarum. Typographische Gestaltung und literarischer Ausdruck. Hildesheim, Zürich und New York: Olms, 2014. 480 S.
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