A far cry from her hoary predecessors. Vittorio Zunino Celotto / Getty for RFF
In 2023, the formerly edgy became the new canonical. At least that’s what the LRB thought of Zadie Smith’s last book. But was the darling of the Anglo-American literary establishment even edgy to begin with? Surely her debut White Teeth (2000) was always going to be part of the canon. Not because it’s necessarily her best novel, but because it is a literary monument — to a multicultural Britain shorn of its empire and to the heady days of Blairism when faith was mistakenly placed in this project.
Mainly set in the ethnically diverse working-class area of Willesden, Smith’s multigenerational saga traces over 30 years the intertwined lives of three families: the Anglo-Jamaican Jones’, the Bengali Muslim Iqbals, and the secular Jewish Chafens. The novel mainly explores the ambiguities and anxieties of the immigrant experience, but what is particularly striking is the sanguineness throughout — a sense of possibility that seems quixotic in a post-Rochdale, post-BLM and post-Southport Britain. Even if it wasn’t wholly emblematic of contemporary Britain at the time, the book seemed to reflect what Britain could become. Reading White Teeth today feels like discovering an artefact of what the late social theorist Mark Fisher called a “lost future”.
Like any good post-modern novel, White Teeth is anarchic. The search for a pure, uncontaminated identity is flung aside and so is the past — “what is past is prologue”, writes Smith in homage to Shakespeare. As Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi had already tested, the immigrant experience in multicultural Britain with all its contradictions was the right subject for the post-modern novelist. But by White Teeth, cultural hybridity is not only normal but almost mundane. The O’Connell pub where Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones regularly meet is owned by an Arab Muslim immigrant. Children have names such as Danny Rahman and Quang O’Rourke, while the dialogue incorporates Creole and Bengali.
Around halfway through the novel, the narrator declares “this has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white”. A far cry from the high days of empire when the vexed questions of pluralism and difference were relegated “over there” in the colonies. Now those questions were coming to the metropole itself via migration, and transforming it. As Stuart Hall put it: “One day the world is going to wake up and discover that whole areas of life in Britain, in spite of Conservatism and Little Englandism, have been transformed… a kind of hybridisation is happening to the English, whether they like it or not.”
White Teeth did at least acknowledge the cost of this cultural hybridisation for both the native majority and the immigrant communities themselves, the latter of whom fear “dissolution, disappearance”. But the book should be read above all as the literary apotheosis of Blair-era multiculturalism. It was written in that brief age of innocence after the “End of History” and before “the age of horrorism” inaugurated by 9/11. In this narrow window, neoliberal globalisation seemed triumphant and irrefragable, propped up in the academe by Homi Bhabha’s notion of “cultural hybridity” and the Blair government’s transformative immigration policies. This was an occasion to be celebrated.
Britain was steadily redefining its identity and national narrative to take into account its changing demographics. It was recast as a “nation of immigrants”, with white Britons transformed from longer the universal subject of the nation to one ethno-racial group among a host of others. “Britishness” evolved from an imperial identity tainted with racism to a civic national badge that, like Americanism, could accommodate hyphenated identities. The HMS Windrush was reimagined as a Mayflower-like ship, founding the “new” multicultural Britain. In the same year as White Teeth came the Parekh report. Commissioned by Runnymede Trust, it called for Britain to officially declare itself as a multicultural nation composed of a “community of communities”. This notion of multiculturalism went beyond a descriptor of pluralism in British society and was turned into an ideological principle and political creed to manage this plurality. For Runnymede, multiculturalism proclaimed to provide a broad framework of a new common belonging where “all citizens are treated with rigorous and uncompromising equality and social justice”, but “cultural diversity is celebrated and cherished”.
What better figurehead for this exuberant age than Zadie Smith whose debut unleashed genuine hysteria upon release? Growing up on a council estate and ascending to Cambridge University, she was the perfect example of the “multicultural writer” fit for modern Britain. Unlike her saggy-faced, hoary predecessors, the then 24-year-old mixed-race Smith was culturally versatile, writing as splendidly on Dostoyevsky and E. M Forster as on hip-hop and Game of Thrones. It’s easy to see why The Telegraph dubbed her “the George Eliot of multiculturalism”.
And herein lay the appeal. For all of its multicultural reputation, White Teeth comfortably fits within the tradition of the English novel — how reassuringly English it feels at every step. Like generations of refined English authors before her, Zadie Smith had read her Eliot, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Her humour, too, is mordantly English — the proletarian wit of her North London background tempered by Oxbridge bookish irony. Some assumed that White Teeth was subverting the traditional English novel, through themes of race, gender and colonialism which expressed a new multicultural subjectivity, creating a sense that Smith was possibly radical and edgy. But for anyone who dares to set aside her ethnic origins, it’s clear that Smith’s cultural context is as establishment as it gets. She became a fellow at Harvard while still in her 20s.
Smith has long been a privileged transatlantic liberal. So much is clear from the positions she takes whenever she wades into politics. She publicly supported Obama, the political apogee of what she had been writing for years in fiction. She then opposed Brexit, scolding Corbyn for his Eurosceptism. But perhaps the illusion was finally shattered last year when her New Yorker essay went viral. Writing about the pro-Palestine campus protests in America, she called the protesters “cynical” and “unworthy” for not considering that Jewish students may find their actions threatening and for promiscuously labelling their enemies Zionist “as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith”. Her long-standing admirers accused her of rationalising genocide and being a “liberal both-sider”, with novelist Michael Magee summing up the mood: “we lost Zadie.” A mixed-race author of novels that meditated on the post-colonial condition turned out to be insufficiently anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine. In other words, they discovered she was just another liberal — but she always had been.
This is why, at the turn of the millennium, White Teeth was comforting for British liberals anxious about this unprecedented epoch in British history. A novel that both hypothesised, and by its own existence seemed to prove, that not only could multiculturalism truly succeed, but that it could succeed without making Britain any less recognisably British. The collision of different peoples and cultures once separated by geography and history but drawn together by imperialism and globalisation would, so the story went, bring about something new yet familiar. But 25 years later, such hopes seem misplaced. Multiculturalism is now “dead”, no longer seen as a source of freedom and unity but as a harbinger for ethnic conflict and sectarianism. Like a shrine to Jupiter in the decadent years of Imperial Rome, multiculturalism appears now as a relic of a civic religion that virtually everyone has ceased to believe in.
Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.
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SubscribeThe problem that the UK (among other places) now has with immigration, and is giving multiculturalism a bad name, is not that British people can’t or don’t want to live and work with people who have different cultures and traditions which they want to retain, even as they move country.
It’s that the State (politicians and civil service) has gone about the whole thing with rank incompetence. As a result of which it doesn’t even know how many people are in the UK. It took a water company to make educated guesses about how many are living in London. But the people in charge of the borders don’t know. They literally don’t check to see whether people have left or not.
Neither is the State able to prevent people from just arriving whenever they like, nor removing them when they do.
The point of an immigration system is surely to vet arrivals, check they at least weren’t violent criminals, jihadis or mentally ill, and ideally also establish that they had paid employment or would otherwise be a beneficial presence, and at the very least keep count. A competent State would then take steps to ensure that there were enough houses, hospitals and whatnot for the increase in population.
Instead of which it can’t stop people coming in, doesn’t know who’s here and isn’t bothering to check if they’ve left. You couldn’t run a car park on that basis, let alone a functioning modern democracy.
It’s not multiculturalism that has failed, it’s the State.
Generally correct, but you missed the other significant factor, which is state sanctioned vilification of anyone who made even those perfectly reasonable demands.
The British have never conclusively decided, in the first place, whether they want an assimilationist policy or one that supports meaningful and stable distinctions between constituencies within the shared Briish Polity.
This is a carry over from Imperial policy which, equally, never conclusively decided whether the objective was a Macaulayite Imperial citizenry, native “in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” or a patchwork polity of local custom and rule as favoured by Disraeli and Sir Frederick Lugard.
This only overlies an even more atavistic rift in the English political imagination between Whig ‘Progress’ and conservative tradition. Do we want a nation of biddable Benthamites or do we want a nation of devolved and independent communities?
One can’t seriously blame immigrant groups for not assimilating when we cant decide in the first place whether we want them to assimilate and what we would like them to assimilate to.
‘The British have never conclusively decided’ … in fact, the British are not a monolith, they disagree about things? I’m shocked!
I can’t have expressed myself properly, please accept my apologies.
My central point is that much of what passes for ‘common cause’ in the ‘assimilation’ programme is actually a cultural land-grab by liberal Progressives. And patriotic Britons fall for it because they think it is drawn up by ‘people like us’.
The classic sleight of hand practised upon credulous patriotism by the authoritarian state is to offer peace in exchange for liberty.
The Bond-Staff that has kept our febrile, inventive, argumentative, factious, fiery and furious land together has never been what they now call ‘common values’ – it has been common loyalty. Fox and Pitt, Byron and Wilberforce, Bevin and Churchill – these men had very different values but, at the last, they had common loyalty.
When the new Triers and Ejectors in Whitehall start talking about ‘British Values’ they are not thinking of the Roast Beef of old England, sister.
Loyalty is what this land demands, not conformity.
You make a good point but miss the much bigger one. American immigration was for a very long time carried out by people who enthusiastically wanted to be Americans and gave that identity primacy over any prior one. In short, they were proud of being American.
What we now have both in the US and UK and much of Europe is a left liberal even progressive set of institutions which assume that racism is at work everywhere and that the white indigenous majority should essentially be forced to accept huge changes to its society, including what they are allowed to say; in fact I have no meaningful say over this whatsoever. Of course this is given rise to a whole host of race grifters who do nothing else except see grievance at every turn.
What you call ‘Identity’ I would call, in the British context, Loyalty, and I think the distinction is important.
Britain is a Union of four nations who were ancestral and historical enemies of the most unimaginable viciousness. Before Post-Colonial immigration there were also at least three major, doctrinally irreconcileable and non-communicant forms of Christian religion. Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism and Dissent. “Unity in diversity”, so called, was achieved – but not through enforced cultural conformity. It was through a common loyalty.
The Crown gave up on demanding conformity between 1688 and 1829. What His Majesty has ever demanded is loyalty, just simple loyalty.
His burden is light, his yoke is easy. But it is the least we ask.
Since the cultural revolution we have two generations of political leaders who have been existentially uncomfortable with the idea of a shared loyalty. That so many Progressive Members baulk at the Parliamentary Oath of Allegiance is highly instructive.
And so the talk has returned to ‘values’ – that great moveable feast, that stalking horse for the new Progressive Puritanism.
When our contemporary Puritan Choir so uncharacteristically and robustly demand ‘assimilation’ to ‘British Values’ I’m afraid I doubt very much that they have Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights in mind but rather The Race Relations and Equality Acts.
Don’t be fooled.
Both really-the State has encouraged mass immigration as a matter of policy -and unfortunatel doesn’t have the ability to manage its policy.I’m not entirely convinced by is not that British people can’t or don’t want to live and work with people who have different cultures and traditions which they want to retain, even as they move country.
Personally I’m not a fan of a lot of the “cultures and traditions which they want to retain”
I read White Teeth,half of it,it’s so long. I could tell it was good writing and the picture of the white guy and his wife the black lady from the Caribbean where they had the earthquake was vivid and true. I think that was based on her parents. However my point id like to make here, having just made it in another place,is that the trope of inter racial/cultural romances is no longer in the public discourse. I mean novels,films,plays etc. We are being told by our politicians/media that the new people here are all here to work,once they are allowed. They may resemble humans but they have no aspirations or desire for romance. They are going to do all those dirty unpleasant jobs for us then go back to there cubicles in the migrant workhouse. As most of them are Muslim they’re not in for Saturday Night Fever style dates with local English girls. Unlike the 1960s Caribbean good looking,fun,black lads. No one now is writing novels about a tender romance between an English working class girl and an Albanian asylum seeker. Unless it’s the one entitled ‘Taxi Driver”. Unlike in the 1960s I’m not hearing all those liberal media voices advocating brit girls get kissy-kissy with Igor from Ruritania whose Azov granddad was the axe murderers that Igor looks like he might be. Also striking in the book the two little brothers walking to school and their game of maxing desirable things,like swanky cars,you had to spot it first,the more high value things you had,the “better” you were, materialistic little gets,Muslims are like that. They love STUFF. V.sensible. And one of the brothers can get all the girls,drugs etc and he turns into the most strictest ISIS type. Maybe some of the new migrants are in a relationship with an English girl but it’s not “made a thing of” not presented as “Romeo and Juliet” or even Blue Mink Melting Pot. What is so desirable about everyone being coffee coloured anyway. I find it interesting to see the narrative being changed before our eyes.
The greater calumny is that under no circumstances could a Pakistani Muslim young woman be allowed to engage in romance with a white non-Muslim man.
She’d be risking her life to do so. In that one simple fact, multiculturalism also dies.
The sadness is that most of us believed multiculturalism would work. Global Britain. All cultures are equal. Diversity is our strength.
The reality is… well it’s a mess.
We invite the world into our home and we expect what!? Have we seen the world? Cultures and religions have been at each others throats for centuries. We thought just by mixing them altogether. Getting them to live alongside one another they will all get along?
What we’ve done is staggeringly stupid or wilfully naive. Take your pick.
I’ve never read Zadie’s book. I suspect I never will. Multiculturalism is dead. We now have to decide how we humanely deal with it’s aftermath.
There’s a huge weight riding on that word, “humane”. It has become weaponised against the hard-won culture of common freedoms established over centuries.
It’s deemed “humane” to escort flimsy dinghies to shore across the Channel, when by definition, those aboard are seeking to break the law simply by setting out from France, where they’re perfectly safe from whatever it is they claim to be escaping from.
They’re being exploited, but whilst seeking to exploit. Until that stops, and we’re once more in control of our borders, our problems will only get worse. At some point, the concept of “humane” will become broken.
I’m not suggesting i know the answer to what is a very complex process of human migration, simply pointing up that our concept of “humane” is unlikely to survive under the burden.
We didn’t invite the world into our home. They invited themselves.
Not a day passes now without new irrefutable, undeniable evidence proving beyond doubt that,
Diversity Is N0T Our Strength.
What she described worked in London, and Birmingham (despite what certain bad actors may say about ‘no-go’ areas) but not really anywhere else. But if there isn’t enough investment in local communities, and not enough money to go round, people are going to become tribalised again.
I lived in Birmingham for 33 years and still work here. Decades ago, shortly after I first came, I was walking thru an area with a majority Muslim population with some friends. A group of locals was walking in the other direction so we rearranged ourselves into single file so that we could all pass on the pavement. One of the Muslims deliberately bumped into me and started shouting at me (in his own language). I was nonplussed, as I found his behaviour inexplicable. One of my group, who worked in central Brum, commented that he had expected us to step off the pavement to let them pass. I thought he was exaggerating, but I’ve since discovered that the Koran tells Muslims to force the rest of us out of the way. I’ve since experienced similar behaviour elsewhere, even in a hospital corridor.
There is a struggle for power between different immigrant groups in some parts of Brum. They compete to buy up houses in a particular road, so that it can become a “Muslim road” or belong to another group. In the first decade of this century there was a riot with dozens of casualties in Handsworth between “Asians” and “Blacks”, we were told by a participant that the cause had been a dispute over which community a road “belonged to”.
But the most disturbing experience was in the aftermath of Southport, when the police surrendered control of some streets to Muslim vigilantes armed with sticks and knives. For the first time I was afraid to walk on the streets.
Multiculturalism had been the rule since I was a small child, but the reality is that it’s a failure. It must be abandoned as a policy.
The Prophet and Classicist Enoch Powell Esq warned of this ‘many moons ago’ and was reviled.
I should read White Teeth again. I think I must have read it in 2002 or so and remember enjoying it. The TV adaptation was dreadful.
We find ourselves in the position of a man waking up after a 3 day bender. His Mrs has left him, the house is destroyed and the kids look at him like a piece of dirt. Thank you Multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism was “dead in the water” fifty years ago.
When the Commission for Racial Equality was established by the 1976 Race Relations Act, it was blatantly obvious that ‘we’ were to be coerced and bullied in this matter.
If there is one thing Englishman cannot abide it is being told ‘how to think’ by some pompous political muppet.
I wonder what tale will next be served up to placate “our angry and defrauded young”?
The amazing thing is that anyone ever thought it would work
There were plenty at the time who said it wouldn’t, but they were ignored for political expediency!
Off course then many had had ‘considerable ‘Colonial’ experience.
I think the globalist dreamers thought they could just cross their fingers, suppress and demonise as racist oppositional voices, and hope for the best. So long as the goal of the end of a despised homogenous national identity was achieved they could eventually celebrate the end of the nation state and eventually the success of globalisation with rule by unelected supranational bodies. Seems to me though that globalisation is very like imperialism and colonisation just with a different wrapper. Those of the settled population eventually want to reject it.
Apart from being undemocratically imposed, multiculturalism struggles because it wasn’t managed in any way. There was an implicity Thatcherite idea that some sort of ‘hidden hand’ would produce a beautiful society out of a randomly assembled patchwork of people from different backgrounds.
There are examples of multicultural societies that hold together and even prosper. Unfortunately they have always needed a degree of authoritarian government.
If Thatcher had something similar in mind, she would have used the Scottish Economist Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ as a metaphor, within a culture common to all, because that is all either would have experienced.
And since the elevated levels of immigration occurred with Blair, we know that went along with rubbing the Right’s nose in multiculturalism, which is hardly a conservative (with a small ‘c’) idea.
I suspect once immigration was ramped up five fold by New Labour (without consent), a new approach was needed. Instead of assimilation and integration by new arrivals, the existing population was expected to accept and adapt without complaint, to simply acquiesce.
Could be argued that they weren’t merely expected to acquiesce but were bullied just as Imperialist colonisers once bullied other indigenous populations into submission. They just used different means to the same end.
For the first ten years they thought that maybe we wouldn’t notice.
And then ramped up five fold AGAIN by the appalling Boris Johnson!
The UnHerd comment section can decide and declare that “multi-culturalism is dead”. But the demographics say differently. Too late, my friends.
Then you misunderstand the term. Multiculturalism is essentially a progressive outlook whereby different communities co-exist peacefully whilst retaining key aspects of their own identities. It’s the “co-exist peacefully” element that’s dead.
Immigrants can acculturate and even assimilate while ‘retaining key aspects of their own identities’ like music, food, and speaking the ancestral language in the home, if only for first-generation arrivals.
A different problem arises when minimal effort is made to learn the new language, in this case English, or adapt to the basic culture of the new land. Slowing the influx of new arrivals and expecting some effort and willingness to assimilate is reasonable, and achievable in this political moment. Declaring that peaceful coexistence—always aspirational rather than secure—is dead, is premature, and a mistake, even when the pulse is faint. You still have to live among most of those who have already arrived, and ramping up mutual hostility—or targeted rage—won’t help anyone, at least not long term.
{For an American parallel, in New York City Hasidic Jews are very often fluent in Yiddish and Hebrew, but not in English. After several generations. Whereas most US Jews are ‘as American as anybody’ in their collective propensity to live and work just about anywhere, assimilate to a great degree, write popular entertainment, and like ‘baseball, mom, and apple pie’.
In California where I live—pity me not I like the challenge, on most days—there are too many Mexican immigrants who never learn English well and whose children don’t really either. Yet I wouldn’t say that’s the majority of the huge Latino-immigrant population here. And there are also families who have been here longer than Anglos, since before the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.
They talk English as good as the next guy, and don’t have no group aversion to voting for Trump neither. Even some newly-minted Americans of the “sorry my English not so good” sort have gone MAGA. That’s largely because of how many people have been let in from the south, and how fast. Aside from the “woke and broke” factor. Since of course Latinos are more likely to be laborers or lower-middle-income earners, and more culturally conservative, in general.}
Without falling into a paralysis of self-analysis or native-born guilt, we can also take a hard look at our core culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Are we treating each other well and aiming for things that matter, except for the pesky outsiders and newcomers anyway? The economies and open societies of both the UK and US attract many, too many, to our shores. But there isn’t much unity or agreement among the native-born population, be they never so pale (as I am, for a Californian). People are angry and alienated on both sides of any divide you might highlight, not always for the reasons they may claim to be. Or for any good reason at all.
A very astute article – I would only add that whereas multiculturalism may be ‘dead’ DEI is the new kid on the block and is very much alive and kicking in the form of its progeny.
Commissioned by Runnymede Trust, it called for Britain to officially declare itself as a multicultural nation composed of a “community of communities”.
Like the Austro-Hungarian Empire!
And look what happened to that.
Now, which one of Britain’s literary luminaries will take on Rotherham in their next novel? Ow that would be actually brave
Which publisher would publish it?
You would have to pay me to read her books 🙂
“Smith’s multigenerational saga traces over 30 years the intertwined lives of three families: the Anglo-Jamaican Jones’, the Bengali Muslim Iqbals, and the secular Jewish Chafens.”
And indigenous white, anglo-saxon English? Of course not.
“Multiculturalism”? Bah, humbug! Surrender and unending retreat more like! As Prof. Matt Goodwin has pointed out, the country is being “hollowed out” by mass immigration as the native population retreats “to the periphery of the country”.
As a resident of Slough for the past 50 years I have seen this “hollowing out” for myself as the white British population of the Borough has fallen from 80 % to 25% and the villages around – such as Stoke Poges, Burnham and Gerrard’s Cross fall from 100% to 65% ( and that was before the “Boriswave”)
Now I, with a sense of sadness and regret, am becoming part of the “hollowing out” as I sell my house (to an Asian of course) and retire to the periphery.
“The HMS Windrush was reimagined as a Mayflower-like ship, founding the “new” multicultural Britain.” Very true.
It may have the same effect on the natives.
How was multiculturalism and multiracialism, and the diversity it boasted, not always unworkable ? Artificial colonial frontiers were condemned, rightly, for creating unhelpful and unstable demographic diversity in new countries. And ethnic diversity is a major cause of conflict just about anywhere, so why import it ? Because the economic right wanted the cheap labour and the cultural left wanted to feel progressive and to hell with the Somewheres or White Van Man. Further there was the foolish arrogance that if diversity was a problem elsewhere Britain could cope. Really? In the event might it not have been a good idea to get a democratic mandate for England being turned into Multiracial-land? There was no referendum or any party putting it into its manifesto, so there was no vote on it. Shouldn’t that be a problem? Now people are getting rightly angry at our delinquent political class. It is interesting that multiculturalism affirms the ethnic identities of the ethnic minorities but liquifies the national identity of the ethnic majority. How is that not reverse racism? Even if it has been encouraged by the white trash liberals in charge.
Socio-cultural competition versus social-cultural cooperation.
The social monoculturalism of DEI and its oppression of the free exchange of ideas has put paid to the idea of a British multiculturalism where “all citizens are treated with rigorous and uncompromising equality and social justice”, but “cultural diversity is celebrated and cherished”.
This happened when DEI became the political pursuit of unequal treatment in relation to selected cultural and biological characteristics.
So rather than cultural diversity being equally celebrated and cherished, cultural diversity became unequally denigrated and criticized.
And rather than all citizens being treated equally in accordance with social justice multicultural norms, all citizens became treated unequally in accordance with social justice monocultural norms.
Multiculturalism was always a euphemism for something more sinister. The leftist desire to “rub their noses in diversity” is much closer to its true meaning. It was always a project driven by either anti-white hate or short term greed.
Multi culturalism is a race for in-group dominance and the control of maximum resources. When the national pie is declining in real and nominal terms, the race gets tighter and more vicious. We are in the land of evolutionary biology not some shroom-led nirvana.
She is an attractive woman who finally came out for the right political side. Her novel “On Beauty” isn’t bad at all as far as modern liberal fiction goes, though it benefits from taking a clear template from EM Forster.