The Unpeopled People: Reading History in the Hybrid World of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth - ‘What’s Past Is Prologue’ (The Tempest, II, I)

Abstract

This essay reads Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in hybrid society and exhumes the lurking strategy Smith uses regarding how the meaning of history acts upon its doubleness: forward looking and backward glance. The former is to do with young generations who are not told enough about their root, which hinders their adjusted selfhood when they want to find their feet in the multi-cultural world and the latter is on older generations who are passively taking what has happened and what will happen in history. This essay takes the act of history as stimuli for the raceless and rootless world by which the author attempts to present ideas that race issues are not to be anymore talked about because an undefinable race is to come about in her fictitious world.