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Abstract
In studies of the Black-British Bildungsroman, “race” and/or gender tend to take the front seat, even if class rarely goes unmentioned as yet another obstacle in the narrated formation of upwardly mobile subjectivities of post-migration. However, there is no critical consensus about the political and affective concerns that drive these appropriations of the Bildungsroman genre for imagining post-migrant experiences of (de)marginalisation. While Mark Stein has influentially emphasised the symbolic agency represented in and exerted by such “novels of transformation”, others have noted the ambiguities that resonate in narratives of post-migrant upward mobility. Intervening in this debate with a sustained focus on class, I reread two texts rarely discussed in these generic terms – Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012) – against the backdrop of neoliberal meritocracy and its cruel optimism. Both novels stage post-migrant achievement against all intersectional odds in politically conflicted and literarily productive ways that challenge the good-life fantasy of upward mobility conventionalised in the Black-British Bildungsroman as a demarginalising, socially transformative genre. I argue that Smith’s novels unmake the cruel optimism of post-migrant success stories by remaking the Bildungsroman as most contradictory of modern symbolic forms.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kai Wiegandt for compiling this special issue and for his insightful comments and thorough editorial work on this essay. In addition, I am grateful to the reviewers for their helpful feedback. As always, special thanks are due to Phillip Becher.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 For literary texts, the citational references add the original date of publication in square brackets.
2 The Bildungsroman has of course long functioned as a productive model for the study of postcolonial literatures and continues to attract scholarly attention in that field. For a recent overview of scholarship, and a particular focus on African literature, see Hoagland (Citation2019).
3 Jeffrey L. Sammons (Citation1983) appears to have introduced this line of argument.
4 These terms of course also conjure a history of ideas central to a French republicanism rooted in the Enlightenment and the 1789 Revolution, a set of ideas that is controversially discussed by postcolonial and Marxist historians of colonialism, imperialism and anti-colonial struggles. Robert J. C. Young (Citation2016) notes that the “non-European anti-colonialists were quick to assimilate the idea of global, universal human rights and to assert them against the political and economic practices of colonialism” (82). However, his postcolonial historiography foregrounds the “paradoxical” use of this set of ideas as the ideological basis for France’s revitalised colonial rule and imperial project since the late nineteenth century (29–32). Young observes that “in its distortion into a civilizing mission, the revolutionary notion of universal human equality was turned into an oppressive form of cultural imperialism” (89). By contrast, Manfred Kossok’s Marxist account (Citation1990) centres on the political pressure exerted by those rebelling in France’s colonies after 1789 as they effectively laid concrete claim to the promise of universalism proclaimed but undermined in the colonial centre. C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1989) even considers the Haitian Revolution as a direct legacy of Enlightenment thought and the revolutionary rupture of 1789 as “[t]he blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism begun by the French Revolution” (198). In his long poem My Song Is For All Men, the communist Caribbean poet Peter Blackman invokes Toussaint Louverture, a prominent leader of the Haitian Revolution, as the one “who taught France there was no limit to liberty” (Citation1952, 11). In a similar vein, C. L. R. James (Citation1989, 198) had argued that “liberty and equality, the slogans of the revolution, meant far more” for the Haitian revolutionary than to the “masters of the spoken and the written word” to which he turned for inspiration. Unlike “Diderot, Rousseau, and Raynal, or Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Danton”, who “owing to the class complications of their society, too often had to pause, to hesitate, to qualify”, Toussaint Louverture “could defend the freedom of the blacks without reservation” (James Citation1989, 198). This nod to the problem of class in the revolutionary colonial centre is reminiscent of Kossok’s use of the distinction between citoyen and bourgeois (Citation1990, 483) to elaborate how an extension of the French Revolution’s universalism to France’s colonies collided with economic interests (485, 489), how, in short, the French bourgeois undermined the citoyen with regard to the colonial question. A similar argument could be made about the “distorted” revolutionary universalism used to justify France’s imperialism since the late nineteenth century as elaborated by Young.
5 The term “voyage out” is taken from Moore; the respective passage in Rita Felski (Citation1989, 127) refers to a “moving outward into the public realm of social engagement and activity”.
6 This is most apparent in his analysis of an episode in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me ([Citation1996] Citation2004, 313–314). Stein reads the protagonist’s claim of “superiority” over a white working-class peer as a strategy of black empowerment that reverses that peer’s racist othering; that strategy appears to capitalise on an emerging symbolic class distinction in Stein’s reading – the socially mobile protagonist “seizes on” her former peer’s “pariah status” as “social outcast […] in the society that has rejected him” (Stein Citation2004, 51). Sara Upstone (Citation2010, 122–128) provides a reading of Syal’s novel that counters its “celebratory” reception (122), in particular Stein’s emphasis on its socially transformative potential as to racism. Retaining the generic label Bildungsroman, Upstone argues that the novel imagines “a more traditional formation of [the narrating protagonist’s] adult self with an awareness of society’s prejudices and limitations” (127).
7 Central for the critical re- and unmaking of Stein’s theorisation of the Black-British Bildungsroman are Andrea Levy’s Every Light in the House Burning ([Citation1994] Citation2017a) and Never Far From Nowhere ([Citation1996] Citation2017b).
8 In the following, I will use WT and NW when referring to Smith’s novels in in-text citations.
9 See Michael Meyer (Citation2017) for a thorough overview of the novel’s contexts, main thematic concerns and formal strategies, as well as a rich documentation of the novel’s reception and critical readings. Generally speaking, gender and “race” have been privileged over class in the scholarly study of the novel, even if the characters’ overdetermined class identities rarely go unmentioned. Two recent readings (Faragher Citation2018; Bağlama Citation2019) add a sustained focus on the representation of black working-class subjectivities, focusing more or less exclusively on the male characters Magid and Millat. Stein (Citation2004) uses an extract from White Teeth to open his study of the Black-British novel of transformation (xi–xii), but only comes back to the text in his conclusion, when discussing the marketing and commodification of Black-British fiction (see esp. 180–183).
10 As Merle Tönnies notes, both auto-diegetic narration and hetero-diegetic narration with sustained internal focalisation may occur in Bildungsromane, the “prototypical” function being “strong reader involvement” (Citation2021, 236). As for White Teeth, I would argue that Irie is the one character for which the novel’s “balance between empathy and commentary” (Squires as cited in Meyer Citation2017, 492) is most strongly inclined towards empathy.
11 These details refer to Irie’s father Archie and his dreams and disappointments.
12 Sarah Ilott (Citation2020) discusses some of the passages analysed here but reads Smith’s comic realism as a critique of multiculturalism mapped onto middle-class characters.
13 My wording here also draws on Caroline Edwards’s notion of “[n]etworked novels [that] knit together a disparate set of temporal […] locations […] at the level of narrative structure […] pulling into contiguity characters that are dotted throughout historical time” (Citation2019, 15), even though the temporal locations of NW are less disparate than those of Edwards’s examples.