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Contemporary British Fiction and the Marketing of Mixed Race

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Contemporary British Fiction and the Marketing of Mixed Race CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION AND THE MARKETING OF MIXED RACE by Shantel Edwards A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English Literature School of English, Drama and Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham April 2019 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis argues that contemporary mixed-race authors, such as Zadie Smith, are central cultural figures through which narratives of British mixed race have been constructed and circulated post-2000. This thesis argues that the discourses of race constructed and disseminated to the wider British public by external agents, such as journalists, publishers, reveal the persistence of limiting narratives of mixed race in Britain today. Taking a case study approach, this thesis analyses ideas of mixedness that are established through the media coverage surrounding their work, alongside the modes of mixedness made available through their work, arguing that their texts provide a crucial intervention into narratives of mixed race, and race more broadly, in contemporary Britain. Alongside this analysis of external representations of mixedness, this thesis also examines the representation of mixed-race identity made available through the work of the authors themselves, arguing that these insider-led explorations of mixedness speak to, and against, mainstream narratives of mixedness and offer new representations and interpretations of mixedness. This thesis takes within its scope the ways in which ideas about mixed race have peaked throughout the twenty-first century, from the release of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in 2000 through to the present day. The authors I focus on are Zadie Smith (White Teeth, 2000, Swing Time, 2016 and Feel Free, 2018), Hari Kunzru (The Impressionist, 2002 and White Tears, 2017), Monica Ali (Brick Lane, 2003) and Diana Evans (26a, 2005 and Ordinary People, 2018). ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to take this opportunity to thank the AHRC Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership for funding this research, as well as the invaluable research trips and conferences that helped develop my ideas and made this thesis possible. My heartfelt thanks and gratitude to my supervisors, Dr Danielle Fuller, Dr Dave Gunning and Dr Jenni Ramone, for their support, invaluable critique and never-ending supply of patience. Thanks, as always to my Mom and Dad, friends and family, for getting me through these last three years and still speaking to me. Thanks most of all to Sean Donnelly, without whom I would have lost my mind a long time ago. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………1 1. MIXED-RACE MULTICULTURALISM: ZADIE SMITH…………………………………...43 2. MIXED-RACE DISRUPTION: HARI KUNZRU…………………………………………...84 3. MIXED-RACE AUTHENTICITY: MONICA ALI………………………………………...127 4. MIXED RACE AS ORDINARY: DIANA EVANS………………………………………...164 5. MIXED RACE IN 2018: ZADIE SMITH………………………………………………...209 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………...252 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………263 INTRODUCTION In November 2018, the stage adaptation of Zadie Smith’s seminal 2000 novel White Teeth opened at the Kiln Theatre in London. Adapted by playwright Stephen Sharkey, the play opens twenty-five years after Smith’s novel closes on the eve of 1993, introducing the audience to Irie Jones’ grown up, dentist daughter Rosie Jones. The play is structured in a series of flashbacks that reveal to Rosie the story of her mother and her two potential fathers, following the characters, and the local area of Kilburn, through the last three decades of the twentieth century, bringing it up to the contemporary moment through the additional storyline of Irie’s adult daughter Rosie. Unlike the novel which follows the different generations of the Iqbal and Jones families, the play’s primary focus is on the narrative of mixed-race character Irie Jones and her multi hyphenate, white British-Jamaican-Bangladeshi daughter Rosie Jones. The play includes musical numbers and a polyphony of accents, creating a sense of a vibrant and celebratory atmosphere of cultural diversity: the inclusion of stereotypical Indian and Jamaican accents seeming to reflect ‘a desire to represent a happy multicultural society with inclusive laughter as its aim’.1 Whilst this atmosphere of celebratory diversity makes sense in the context of Smith’s work and reception in 2000, though problematic even then, it reverberates uncomfortably in 2018’s increasingly fractured, right wing, post-Brexit vote British landscape. This contradiction is deliberately invoked in the stage play by the decision to bring the novel into the contemporary moment through the inclusion of Irie’s adult daughter, knowingly re- invoking those early noughties discourses of multiculturalism in the here and now. Reviews of the play, however, have not been as celebratory and echo my own uncomfortable feelings 1 Sarah Ilott, New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p.172. 1 about the production. The New York Times review, whilst praising Sharkey’s attempt at a ‘corrective’ inclusionism in the face of an increasingly divided nation, called the play ‘inchoate and piecemeal’2 and the review in The Guardian proclaims the tone of the play one of ‘desperate conviviality’, at odds with the increasingly hostile social landscape of the UK.3 The stage adaptation of White Teeth provides a useful synthesis of some of the key ideas, questions and interests of this thesis. What is the significance of the mixed-race figure to discourses of British multiculturalism? How does fiction centred on mixed-race protagonists contribute to discourses of mixed race? How important are mixed-race authors, such as Zadie Smith, to social understanding and attitudes towards mixedness? The continued reliance on Smith within British culture to disseminate and articulate ideas about race in Britain, despite her long-term residence in the US, identifies her work as an important conduit for thinking about discourses of mixed race. In acknowledgement of this, this thesis is bookended by a consideration of Smith’s work and cultural prominence, from the publication of White Teeth in 2000 to the publication of Swing Time (2016) and Feel Free (2018). The play’s re-invocation of the discourses of mixed race and multiculturalism that defined the original publication of the novel, illustrate that the mixed-race figure remains a significant medium through which ideas about the nation, mixedness, multiculturalism and race relations are communicated. The decision to adapt the novel, and the ability to secure funding for its stage adaptation in 2018, reflects the continued importance of mixed-race authors to the articulation of mixed race, as well as to wider narratives about multiculturalism 2 Matt Wolf, ‘‘White Teeth’ Makes a Big-Hearted, but Bumpy, Transition to the Stage’, The New York Times, 9 November 2018 < https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/theater/white- teeth-london-play-kiln.html> [accessed 2 January 2019]. 3 Susannah Clapp, ‘The week in theatre: White Teeth; Dealing with Clair – review’, The Guardian, 11 November 2018 < https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/nov/11/white- teeth-kiln-review-zadie-smith-dealing-with-clair-orange-tree-martin-crimp> [accessed 2 January 2019]. 2 and diversity in Britain. As this thesis will argue, Smith’s debut novel instigated a trend for mixed-race fiction – both in relation to the racial identity of the protagonists and their authors – and marked an epochal moment in which the figure of the mixed-race author became a vehicle for the task of renegotiating Britishness and presenting a vision of a multicultural, tolerant nation. This thesis argues that this narrative of multiculturalism is entwined with discourses of mixed race in a process aligned with what Omi and Winant describe as a ‘racial project’, a ‘sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed’, in accordance with the socio-political requirements of the governing order.4 Building upon Omi and Winant’s notion of the racial project, this thesis examines the ways in which mixed-race authors, and the image of the mixed-race figure, have become embroiled in the socio-political discourses of the twenty-first century. The aim of this thesis is to examine the ways in which representations of mixed race are put to socio- political use and the ways in which the authors implicated within this mixed-race racial project resist this positioning and ‘transform’ ideas about mixed race, national identity and multiculturalism. In doing so, this thesis represents the first in-depth examination of dialogues of mixed race in contemporary British fiction and the ways in which the figure of the mixed-race author functions more widely in publishing and media discourse. In their study of the representation of mixed race in the twentieth century, Caballero and Aspinall argue that cultural interest in mixed race ‘ebbs and flows’, taking on different meanings and significance in different time periods and socio-political contexts.5 Identifying the publication of White Teeth as an epochal moment, this thesis argues that social interest in mixed race was rising at the turn of the twenty-first century, emblematised by the popularity 4 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), p.55. 5 Chamion Caballero and Peter J. Aspinall, Mixed Race Britain in The Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p.482. 3 and hype surrounding the publication of Smith’s novel.
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