Men negotiating identity in Zadie Smith’s white teeth

Abstract

"Masculine historical experience is repeatedly implicated in the struggle over defining masculinity in the decades marked by decolonization following the Second World War. As Robert W. Connell points out, the period of British colonization was a gendered enterprise, one that defined masculine identity by attributing to it characteristics of reason and rationality, thus legitimating patriarchal governing structures in society. The post-1945 era saw increasing geopolitical unrest and the British Empire began to crumble, taking with it the predetermined roles that men had consented to or been coerced into living up to and creating instabilities that delegitimized “normal” conceptions of masculinity (246). In contemporary postcolonial British society, these problems are amplified when the nation is unable to escape its colonial past. Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth examines the masculine experience (both migrant and English) by reflecting on the complex effects that cultural history can have on identity. The text focuses on generational analyses of masculinity and changing social codes in order to insist that there is not always a solution to the problem of constituting one’s gendered and cultural identity. Smith challenges social constructions of masculinity by dissecting the notions of cultural belonging and nationality and, in particular, by analyzing the ways in which masculinity is ruptured and distorted (both in behaviour and in practice) in the various shifting historical narratives of identity. Most significantly, the novel investigates the dialogic movement between one’s beginnings or past stabilities (roots) and the subsequent pathways that connect various points of rootedness (routes), thus underscoring the important intersections of roots/routes required to negotiate masculine identities in the new postcolonial world."(pg 1)