Janet Ridout
Dr. Ramie Tateishi
English 600
6 October 2013
The Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory of Cultural Studies in Relation to British Colonial Diaspora in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
Contemporary British fiction has had several debuts in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Novels like Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, Patrick Hamilton’s 1941 novel Hangover Square, Samuel Selvon’s 1955 novel The Lonely Londoners, and Zadie Smith’s 2000 debut in fiction White Teeth (Top 10 London Novels). According to the New Statesmen’s criticism section, Zadie Smith wrote White Teeth at the tender age of twenty-four and published it in 2000, according to the New Statesmen White Teeth “is a paean to multicultural north-west London, where she grew up. It follows the fortunes of two immigrant families, one from Bangladesh, the other from Jamaica” (Top 10 London Novels). In this study and critical analysis, I will attempt to explicate and expound on the concept of diaspora as it relates to literary theory and criticism, and more specifically to the concept of multiculturalism as a direct result of colonialism in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. By applying the Frankfurt School’s critical theory with social research on diaspora to White Teeth one is able to extract meaning and interpretation from the lessons learned by the characters in the book White Teeth by Zadie Smith, therefore gathering a didactic lesson from close engagement with both the book’s text, social milieu, and cultural context.
According to Cohn’s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India “starting in the 1770’s in Bengal, the British began to examine, through what they called ‘enquiries,’ a list of specific questions to which they sought answers about how revenue was assessed and collected” (5). From this colonization of Bengali territory in India by the British imperialist regimes were constructed. The interaction of the two countries fostered an outgrowth of immigration. This led to many Indians moving from Bengali India to Great Britain. In the book, White Teeth by Zadie Smith the character of Samad Iqbal is of Bengali origins. On page 111, Samad is talking with his twin sons music teacher in a parent-teacher conference when he says, “I’m not actually from India…with infinitely more patience than he had ever previously applied the many times he had been expected to repeat this sentence since moving to England.” Then on the next page (112) Samad and the music teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones, discuss the topic of Samad Iqbal’s transition from Bangladesh, prior to that Pakistan, and prior to that, Bengal. Finally, Samad says that while not exactly the “same sort of ball-park,” his roots are generally in the “same stadium.” This is a diaspora of the Indian into England.
In an effort to tie this cultural diaspora in White Teeth to the larger, the Frankfurt School critical theory of cultural studies, one must first define and understand the Frankfurt School’s mission and origins. According to Surber’s text Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of the Cultural Studies “the Frankfurt School of critical theory was not continuously located in Frankfurt…participants in this movement regarded themselves as aligned in some general way with the earlier, Marxist tradition of materialist social analysis, a wide range of views was not only tolerated but encouraged” (128).
According to Cohn’s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India “starting in the 1770’s in Bengal, the British began to investigate, through what they called ‘enquiries,’ a list of specific questions to which they sought answers about how revenue was assessed and collected” (5). From this colonization of Bengali territory in India by the British imperialist regimes were constructed. The interaction of the two countries fostered an outgrowth of immigration. This led to many Indians moving from Bengali India to Great Britain. In the novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith the character of Samad Iqbal is of Bengali origins. On page 111 of the primary text, Samad is speaking with his twin sons music teacher in a parent-teacher conference when he says, “I’m not actually from India…with infinitely more patience than he had ever previously employed the many times he had been required to repeat this sentence since moving to England” (Svanström). Then on the next page (Smith 112) Samad and the music teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones, discuss the subject of Samad Iqbal’s transition from Bangladesh, prior to that Pakistan, and prior to that, Bengal. Finally, Samad says that while not exactly the “same sort of ball-park,” his roots are generally in the “same stadium.”
In Douglas Kellner’s “Critical Theory and Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation” the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxists and British cultural studies are analyzed. Kellner states on page 12, http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell16.htm:
As we approach the year 2000 and enter a new social environment dramatically transformed by global media and computer technologies, we need a cultural studies that analyses the political economy of the now global cultural industries, the proliferation of new media technologies and artefacts, and their multifarious appropriations by audiences.
Kellner goes on to argue that the Frankfurt School is “extremely useful for analyzing the current forms of culture and society because of their focus on the intersections between technology, the culture industries and the economic situation in contemporary capitalist societies” (12). Kellner also states that both the Frankfurt School and British cultural studies offer a chance to transform critical social theory and cultural studies with a practical intent (13). Kellner writes on page 13 that the Frankfurt School coined the term “culture industries.” To tie this into Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, published in 2000, let us look at Mindi McMann’s article “British Black Box: A Return to Race and Science in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.”
Early in White Teeth, her opus on multiracial Britain, Zadie Smith chronicles the origins of the unlikely friendship between the indecisive Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, an anxious Bengali immigrant. Their encounter during World War II with Dr. Pierre Perret, a Nazi eugenicist, comes full circle almost fifty years later when their children help Perret’s protégé, Dr. Marcus Chalfen, unveil Futuremouse©. Chalfen insists that this genetically engineered mouse holds the key to eliminating the randomness controlling the future. Ironically, Futuremouse©’s 1992 launch—a chaotic assemblage that includes Islamic extremists, animal rights activists, Jehovah’s Witnesses proclaiming the end of days, a Jewish scientist, and a Bengali lawyer—illustrates the changing face of Britain in the wake of decolonization…. Much of the critical reception of White Teeth has understandably attempted to position the novel within a postcolonial or multiethnic context. Many critics compare Smith to Rushdie and pair the two as writers producing a new hybrid form of British literature.
In this new genre of contemporary British fiction “lies questions of identity and nationhood” writes Tracy L. Walters in “”We’re All English Now Mate Like It or Lump It’: The Black/Britishness of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth” (315). Diasporas of colonial cultures made their way from Jamaica in the Caribbean islands in the personification of the character of Clara Bowden-Jones, a Jehovah’s Witness, and her biracial daughter Irie Ambrosia Jones. Irie is the daughter of the black Clara Bowden-Jones and the much older Archibald Jones, a white British office worker, and former Olympic cyclist. The Jones family is close friends with the Muslim family of Samad and Alsana Iqbal and their identical twin sons Magid and Millat Iqbal, who are the same age as Irie. Then there is the Chalfen family, an all-white British household with Marcus Chalfen, the inventor of Futuremouse©, at the head of the group. White Teeth goes into a social commentary on British society with an especially strong focus on the modern themes of eugenics, technology, and family at its center.
According to Michele Braun’s article “The Mouseness of the Mouse: The Competing Discourses of Genetics and History in White Teeth” the extended metaphor of teeth is a signifier of “rootedness in first and second generation immigrants and their families” (221). Braun’s argument on the “genetic determinism that informs life of the Futuremouse©, as well as the lives of the second and third generation immigrants depicted in the novel and Smith’s narrative provides no easy answers to the question of whether or not one’s DNA dictates one’s place in life” (221). In relation to the diaspora of Eastern immigrants to London, England and the narrative of White Teeth Braun notes on page 222 of “The Mouseness of the Mouse: The Competing Discourses of Genetics and History in White Teeth” that “the novel’s title and chapters use a body part—the teeth—to structure the narrative, connect its multiple stories, and contemplate the relationship between the body, its genetic heritage, and the social lives of the novel’s characters.” Furthermore, on page 223, “Smith’s chapter titles, the shorthand ‘root canals’ connects the cleaning out of a diseased root in a tooth to the immigrant experience.” In the novel White Teeth, there are three chapters with the term “root canals” in the title, chapter five is “The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal” and chapter ten is “The Root Canals of Mangal Pande,” and chapter thirteen “The Root Canals of Hortense Bowden.” Alfred Archibald Jones is of British ancestry, Samad Miah Iqbal is of Eastern Indian or more specifically Bengali ancestry, and Hortense Bowden is of Caribbean or more specifically Jamaican ancestry. On page 223, Braun explains the significance of the “root canals” in “The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal,” and how their “unlikely friendship formed and then was damaged by the fate of ‘Dr. Sick,’ the geneticist who re-emerges at the end of the novel along with the genetically modified mouse” (223).
“The Root Canals of Hortense Bowden” relates how Hortense’s mother was both educated and impregnated by Captain Charlie Durham who loved her “just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly” (295-300). “The Root Canals of Mangal Pande” tell one part of that story of love, connecting the history of Pande’s role in Indian Mutiny of 1857 to Samad’s personal quest to make sense of his family’s history. In the “root” chapter, Archie suggests that some men are not capable of killing and could spare the lives of even those they despise, to which Samad relies, “A man is a man is a man. His family is threatened; his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world ending—he will kill. Make no mistake. He won’t let the new order roll over him without a struggle” (216-17), even though he impotently struggles against the new order that his sons represent in their paired embrace/rejection of Englishness (Braun 223).
In Rebecca Dyer’s “Generations of Black Londoners: Echoes of 1950’s Caribbean Migrants’ Voices in Victor Headley’s Yardie and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth:”
Fiction writers who migrated to London from the British West Indies during the immediate postwar years, such as Lamming, Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, and Meryl Gilroy, were well versed in British literature and history; as a result, they had a complicated relationship to their destination city. While the fiction that each wrote about London can be seen as a reaction to the canon of British fiction set in the same location, Caribbean-born writers’ work also provides a fictionalized record of and a tribute to the immigrant generation, who—beginning with the 1948 arrival of the SS Empire Windrush—quickly began to make the city of London their own.
To tie this migratory pattern of British colonial diaspora in with the text of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and the critical theory of cultural studies of the Frankfurt School one must first identify whom the Frankfurt School is and why they are important. According to Douglas Kellner’s “Critical Theory and Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation” the Frankfurt School is an extension of Marxism, going so far as to refer to it as neo-Marxism. Furthermore, “For some decades now, British cultural studies has tended to either disregard or caricature in a hostile manner the critique of mass culture developed by the Frankfurt School” (12). Turning to page 13 of Kellner’s article:
The Frankfurt School were one of the first neo-Marxian groups to examine the effects of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the working classes which were to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario.
They also analyzed the ways that the culture industries and consumer society were stabilizing contemporary capitalism and accordingly sought new strategies for political change, agencies of political transformation and models for political emancipation that could serve as norms of social critique and goals for political struggle. This project required rethinking the Marxian project and produced many important contributions—as well as some problematical positions.
The Frankfurt School focused intently on technology and culture, indicating how technology was becoming both a major force of production and a formative mode of social organization and control. In a 1941 article “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Herbert Marcuse argued that technology in contemporary era constitutes an entire “mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination” (1941:414). In the realm of culture, technology produced mass culture that habituated individuals to conform to the dominant patterns of thought and behavior, and thus provided powerful instruments of social control and domination.”
Victims of European fascism, the Frankfurt School experienced firsthand the ways that Nazis used the instruments of mass culture to produce submission to fascist culture and society. While in exile in the United States, the members of the Frankfurt School came to believe that American ‘popular culture’ was also highly ideological and worked to promote interests of American capitalism. Controlled by giant corporations, the culture industries organized according to the strictures of mass production, churning out mass-produced products that generated a highly commercial system of culture, which in turn sold the values, lifestyles, and institutions of American capitalism.
In retrospect, one can see the Frankfurt School work as articulating a theory of the stage of state and monopoly capitalism, which became dominant during the 1930’s (14).
All this being said about the Frankfurt School’s presumption on the matters of mass culture is on page 15 of Kellner’s article, when he states, “It is culturally the era of highly controlled network radio and television, insipid top forty pop music, glossy Hollywood films, national magazines and other mass-produced cultural artifacts.” As to the delineations of criticism and theoretical constructs, which might be distilled from the pages of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and attributed to the Frankfurt School’s perspectives on British cultural studies, we see a common thread of political rationalism. The Frankfurt School’s theory of the “culture industries” is echoed in White Teeth’s themes concerned with Futuremouse© and the proliferation of a genetically engineered and enhanced future for the diaspora immigrants and the English-British, and furthermore the entire human race. The advent of a Futuremouse© is an invention reminiscent of the Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler, with the concepts of world domination and a better society through genetic enhancement, and ultimately genocide of the perceived inferior race—namely the Jewish—immigrants from the former Holy Land of Israel. The Frankfurt School is a German school of neo-Marxist theorists concerning themselves and their work primarily with the scholarly discourse of Marx as it relates to the so-called “culture industry” and the tenets put forth by that community of intellectuals and academics.
In Nick Bentley’s article “Re-writing Englishness: Imagining the Nation in Julian Barnes’s England, England and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth” the topic of an English identity is addressed from the Mikhail Bakhtin perspective of “heteroglossic function of the novel form” (496). Bentley describes the “combination of Archie Jones’s working-class, Cockney accent, Samad’s Asian-English and Clara’s Creolized Caribbean English represent socio-linguistic deviations from Standard English as the centripetal forces of language undermining any notion of a homoglossic centre to the nation’s language and culture” (496-7). Bentley takes his theory “one stage further than Bakhtin’s model as it presents heteroglossia as the now dominant mode of language in contemporary Britain” (497). On page 181 of White Teeth Samad says: ‘Only the immigrants can speak Queen’s English these days.’” Bentley goes on to state that this “representation of varying voices also extends to the positions that are taken towards the idea of England as a multicultural nation” (497).
Bentley’s description of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is that it is “comedy, operating mainly through a form of Horatian satire picking out unavoidable foibles, hypocrisies, and moral expediencies of the main characters” (497). Bentley goes on to state, “this style serves to avoid the didacticism of political correctness, whilst maintaining an underlying serious approach to the experiences of first and second generation immigrants to Britain” (497). Bentley goes further into the novel’s characterization of the identical twins Magid and Millat Iqbal describing their relationship “with its own colonial past, but as a displacement of the legacies of colonialism that continue to impact on individuals in the present” (499). On page 500 Bentley states that “this serves to tie together in this one encounter the legacies of colonialism: the perpetual encounter between the two subjects, one resisting, the other being appropriated by colonialism—both of whom are forced to communicate through a meta-language that continues to be controlled by colonial discourse.”
Bentley says that the Magid/Millat paradox represent an impasse of sorts—one that is all about multiculturalism—and is not the only reference to multiculturalism in the text. Then in the end of the novel, a child is born to Irie Jones, Archie and Clara’s biracial/mulatto daughter, but she is unsure as to whether or not the father is Magid or Millat Iqbal. This creates tension between the two identical twins that symbolizes the allegorical metaphor of the Chalfen’s Futuremouse© genetically engineered rodent.
In Matt Thomas’s “Reading White Teeth to Improve Intercultural Communication,” he states that the novel is the story of three families: the Joneses, the Iqbals, and the Chalfens. “All have been placed into the multicultural setting of London, England where characters question their cultural practices and identities” (16). Furthermore, Thomas states, “the novel is allegorical since major characters are placed into exaggerated categories of assimilation and creolization” (16). Matt Thomas explains on page 16 of “Reading White Teeth to Improve Intercultural Communication,” “creolization is typically used as a way to explain historic cultural movements within the West Indies.” He then goes on to explain:
The Caribbean region is regarded as inherently multicultural and it is difficult to label Antillean natives with a single cultural heritage. This is largely due to the colonization of the Caribbean, starting in the fifteenth century with the arrival of Columbus who created a set of Spanish colonies. Spain was emulated between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries by England, which settled Barbados and captured Jamaica and Trinidad. Other colonizing forces included France, The Netherlands, and Denmark.
To assist in the colonization of the land, the British brought along African slaves and Indian workers (the first instance of this was a boatload of East Indian workers shipped to Trinidad in 1845), and in some rare instances Chinese workers, to exploit cheap labor. The importation of slaves and laborers from Africa and Asia became the backbone of the Caribbean economy and the essence of its population. Within a very short amount of time, these diverse cultures, stemming from numerous ethic and racial backgrounds, began to merge, and this process of cultural amalgamation is what many academics identify as creolization. It is a historical term that succinctly describes the natural multiplicity of Caribbean natives.
Thomas’s article goes on to state on page 23 that “author wrote White Teeth with the clear intent of pointing out how assimilation has instituted a type of quiet segregation in multicultural London where racism is an open secret. Thomas uses the character Magid as an example of a “lens for the reader and other characters within the text to look through,” and adds, “[Magid] only hypothesizes what creolization as a cultural reading practice can offer” (23). Furthermore, Thomas states, “this is why it is best to think of Magid as a representation of the narrator” (23).
Rebecca Dyer’s “Generations of Black Londoners: Echoes of 1950s Caribbean Migrants’ Voices in Victor Headley’s Yardie and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth” states on page 81 of Obsidian III Literature in the African Diaspora that “near the end of Zadie Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth (2000), the narrator bemoans colonialism’s continuing influence on contemporary Britain by pointing out “[t]he sheer quantity of shit that must be wiped off the slate if we are to start again as new. Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more” (Smith 391). This is an exclamation of the kinds of struggle generations of immigrants in not only London have experienced, but in other parts of the world as well. Anytime you take a collection or a diaspora of multifarious ethnicities, and congregate them into one situated area of the globe you are taking a chance at their survival as they rival against one another in order to live and prosper in the new homeland. In the case of the Zadie Smith, novel White Teeth the character of Irie is especially suited to represent this dichotomy of races, because she is a mulatto child of a white man and a black woman. The irony of Irie’s character is seen in stark contrast when placed up against the Muslim twins Magid and Millat, and she becomes pregnant with either Magid or Millat’s child—she is unsure who the father actually is—it could be either, because she slept with both men.
Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. “What is Postcolonial Literature.” The Empire Writes Back. Routledge. 1989. Web. 18 October 2013. .
Bentley, Nick. “Re-writing Englishness: Imagining the Nation in Julian Barnes’s England, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Textual Practice (2007): 483-504. Web.
Beukema, Taryn. “Men Negotiating Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Postcolonial Text IV.3 (2008): 1-15. Web. <http://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/download/929/863>.
Braun, Michele. “The Mouseness of the Mouse: The Competing Discourses of Genetics and History in White Teeth.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2013): 221-36. Web.
Dyer, Rebecca. “Generations of Black Londoners: Echoes of 1950’s Caribbean Migrants’ Voices in Victor Headley’s “Yardie” and Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”.” Obsidian III (2004): 81-102. Web.
Hawley, John C. Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. Web.
Kayisci, Burcu. “Where is Home? Where are Roots?: The Politics of Multiculturalism in Anita and Me and White Teeth.” Interactions (2010): 41-52. Web.
Kellner, Douglas. Critical Theory and Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation. PDF from ENG 600: Seminar in Literary Theory online course at National University, 2013. Web.
—. The Frankfurt School. n.d. Web. 18 October 2013. <http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/fs.htm>.
McMann, Mindi. “British Black Box: A Return to Race and Science in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Modern Fiction Studies (2012): 616-36. Web.
Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New York: Random House, 2000. Print.
“The best of cities, the worst of cities; London fiction.” The Economist (2012): 85. Web.
Thomas, Matt. “Reading White Teeth to Improve Intercultural Communication.” Journal of Caribbean Literatures (2009): 15-30. Web.
“Top 10 London Novels.” New Statesman (2012): 75. Web.
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