Postcolonial London : The Metropolis in Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth'

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Marburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Postmodern and/or Postcolonial:Contemporary Writing from Britain and the Commonwealth, language: English, abstract: Zadie Smith's novel "White Teeth" deals with families and generations from diverse ethnic backgrounds; and in the four main chapters Archie 1974, 1945, Samad 1984, 1857, Irie 1990, 1907, and Magid, Millat and Marcus 1992, 1999, she approaches them from several angles. As a result, there has been a discussion on who is to be treated as the central character in this novel. One possible answer to this is offered by Nina Shen Rastogi: The main character in White Teeth isn't a character in any traditional sense - it's the city of London itself. Smith's goal is less to paint a portrait of any particular character than it is to create a large-scale character sketch of a particular place and a particular time. White Teeth is about the foibles of a community of near-strangers and almost-friends as it collectively stumbles towards an uncertain future. The paper will investigate this approach by dealing with London as it is depicted in this postcolonial novel. After a working definition on the diversely discussed notion of postcolonialism (I.1), there will be a closer look on London, both as a physical location (I.2.a) and a literary region (I.2.b). The main issues will be the history of immigration, facts about multiculturalism today, and a brief look on how the colonial legacy has been depicted in postcolonial literature in London. A conclusion (I.3) will summarize the results and present some main questions for the analysis of White Teeth (II).Here, the paper will take a look on the role of the characters interacting with each other and on how they compromise between their cultural legacy and London's society (