Author(s): Sezgi ÖZTOP HANER
In her novel White Teeth (2000), Zadie Smith explores the changing shape of late twentieth century Britain from hybrid and multi-generational viewpoints. Being aware of the pervasiveness of Thatcher’s ideological legacies in the post-Thatcher era, Smith offers an alternative discourse of Britishness that reveals the homogenizing effects of Thatcherite nationalism. Accordingly, White Teeth portrays hybrid communities in relation to Bhabha’s notion of a hybrid third space, which is extented to the Bakhtinian conception of the third space. In this sense, Smith’s hybrid world is constituted through the interpenetration of alternative and conservative discourses as well as the chronotopic interplay of multiple times and spaces, which emphasize the denaturalizing effects of her writing. Such spaces remind Bakhtin’s heteroglossic and dialogic conceptions of carnival, which suggest a reevaluation of the way that the traditional conception of Britishness is understood in the late twentieth century
The Journal of International Social Research received 8982 citations as per Google Scholar report
