| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系在職專班 === 100 === Abstract
In her novel White Teeth, Zadie Smith famously writes not only about the everyday multicultural lives of the denizens in a hybridized community in Willesden, North London in 1975 but also forefronts their identity crisis in Multicultural England Drawing on the concept of hybridity in The Location of Culture by Homi K. Bhabha, the proposition of identity crisis in “The Question of Cultural Identity.” Modernity: an Introduction to Modern Societies by Stuart Hall, and the definition of Orientalism in Orientalism by Edward Said, this thesis aims to discuss the key issue, identity crisis found in White Teeth and argues that it is attributable to the racially charged colonial discourse, prevalent nationalism, the opposing strivings of the desires for ethnic authenticity and for cultural assimilation. Hence, each of the three main chapters is aimed at dealing with an individual root cause that gives rise to identity crisis.
Chapter One is dedicated to discussing how the unfading colonial discourse has contributed to antagonizing the inhabitants of Great Britain, including both the migrants and the dominant white natives as a whole. To bolster the argument, I maintain that it is racial stereotype that plays a starring role in empowering colonial discourse which, in turn, inferiorizes the non-white. Chapter Two deals with how the eclipsing nationalism in Great Britain functions to subjugate its ethnic groups and eventually alienate them from the world around them. This chapter argues that in the nationalist’s appeal to the homogeneity of the nation-state, the immigrants are ostracized as the threats to the security of the nation-state, Great Britain. Accordingly, the characters in this novel doomed to such adversities suffer from their identity crisis. Chapter Three is dedicated to discussing a paradoxical identification as the immigrants oscillate between an allegiance to ethnic authenticity and an irresistible desire for assimilation into the dominant culture. The paradox can never be solved because for a disaporic subject, the two disparate cultures are irreconcilable in nature. And it is hardly surprising that this has resulted in disorienting his or her cultural identification. Through the discussions in the three chapters, this thesis argues that some of the characters in the novel suffer from identity crisis due to their inabilities to cope with the challenges a hybridized multicultural England poses to them.
Keywords: identity, multicultural, hybridized, Englishness, racism, nationalism.
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