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摘 要

二战后，由于劳动力缺乏，英国对移民敞开了大门。然而，大量的移民导致了不同种族移民与本土居民之间的冲突，并使移民陷入深重的身份危机之中。移民一方面经受着英国本土文化的强烈影响，另一方面承受着前所未有的边缘化，由此产生了文化危机与身份认同危机。本文试图探索移民在多元文化的英国社会中保留民族性，建构混杂身份的过程。

基于斯图亚特·霍尔的流散理论以及罗伯特·杨的混杂理论，本文对扎迪·史密斯的小说《白牙》进行了详细分析，探讨了小说人物混杂身份的形成背景、建构过程以及表现形式。本文首先从移民与本土居民两个角度介绍了混杂身份形成的历史背景，即第二次世界大战与殖民主义，接着分析了在此背景下混杂身份的建构过程，最后以两位主人公阿奇·琼斯与艾丽·琼斯为例，探究了混杂身份的具体表现形式。

本文最终得出的结论是文化身份并非是一成不变的或者具有排他性的，而是始终处于不断的变化之中，以适应不同的文化政治状况。因此，在保留民族性的同时，建构混杂文化身份是融入多元文化社会的可行之道。

关键词：《白牙》；移民； 混杂身份；多元文化主义

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments i

Abstract ii

摘要 iii

Table of Contents 1

Introduction 1

Zadie Smith and White Teeth 1

Literature Review 2

Theoretical Framework and Thesis Structure 4

Chapter One The Context of Hybrid Identity 7

1.1 World War II and the Newly-Defined “British” in English World 7

1.2 Colonialism and Enforced Migration in Non-English World 8

Chapter Two Construction of Hybrid Identity 11

2.1 Querying Englishness 11

2.2 Resorting to Tradition 12

2.3 Constructing Hybrid Identity 13

Chapter Three Manifestation of Hybrid Identity 16

3.1 Archie Jones: Indulging in “the Past” 16

3.2 Irie Jones: Understanding “the Past” Dialectically 17

Conclusion 19

Works Cited 21

Introduction

Zadie Smith and White Teeth

After World War II, immigration was encouraged in Britain to deal with the shortage of labor force. Zadie Smith’s mother was one of the millions of immigrants in that period. She emigrated from Jamaica to England in 1969 and gave birth to a hybrid called Zadie Smith in north-west London in 1975. Under the multicultural and postcolonial circumstances, Zadie Smith grew up and ended up as a successful English essayist, novelist and short-story writer in the literature world.

In 1997, her debut novel, White Teeth, has aroused great concern in the publishing world even before it was completed. Zadie Smith finished it during her final years at Cambridge. When published in 2000, it immediately became a best-seller and brought Zadie Smith under the spotlight. It was widely acclaimed and awarded, among which were the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, and etc. In both 2003 and 2006, she was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction after the publication of The Autograph Man (2002) and On Beauty (2005). In recent years, Zadie Smith maintains her tremendous influence on the literature world with NW (2012), Swing Time (2016) and Feel Free (2018), almost all of which are based on hybrid races and cultures. As a mixed-race writer, she has her unique perspective and approach to portray the postwar Britain. Her characters from former British colonies suffer from severe cultural dilemmas and identity crisis and are desperate to find a way out. They query the Englishness, trace back to the tradition and try to wriggle out of the contradictions between these two different nationalities. Constructing a completely new immigrant identity successfully or not is mostly the ending, also the theme, of Zadie Smith’s novels. And White Teeth, as Zadie Smith’s first novel, is no doubt the most vibrant portrait of postcolonial Britain.

White Teeth deals with the conflicts and connections among three families with totally different cultural backgrounds. Archie Jones, an English man, marries Clara who has a Jamaican background and gives birth to a multiracial girl, Irie. His comrade in arms, Samad Iqbal, is a Bangladeshi Muslim from the former colonized territory. And the appearance of a Jewish scientist’s family breaks up the former balance between the other two families and triggers off debates on religion, ethnicity, etc.

The novel is all about how these three families deal with cultural conflicts and how they interact with each other and try to figure out their identity in a multicultural society. Those who undergo waywardness of life in White Teeth mostly resort to religion for asylum. Samad works as a Muslim, Millat a fundamentalist. Animal rights activists advocate rights for experimental animals. Jehovah's Witnesses proclaim the end of days. All the above characters finally assemble at a news conference on a scientific breakthrough where conflicts erupt. Zadie Smith explores such identity conflicts against science and religion and finally traces back to the diaspora problem. For one thing, the native residents endure deep culture shock along with immigration. They figure out some defense methods to face and cope with it. Meanwhile, the Englishness is overturned in adjustment to foreign cultures. For another, the immigrants confront extreme fear of decline and distinction of tradition. They suffer from racial discrimination and segregation and look for a standing point in multicultural Britain. At the same time, they feel powerless to avoid being inundated by the mainstream culture, let alone their offspring.

Literature Review

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) is often cited as the representative literary works of multicultural Britain. The issue of the novel is how Englishness gets entangled with other nationalities and how Archie and Irie become the only two protagonists who successfully identify themselves in a cultural melting pot. Smith puts it, “it feels like there is no precedent for the person you are and the experience that you have” (O’Grady 108). This sentiment articulates the problem of how constructing a cultural identity based on race and religion becomes increasingly difficult in a multicultural world. Accordingly, researches on this novel mainly focus on post-colonialism, debating on topics like hybridity, cultural identity.

In the West, with the specific setting of postcolonial Britain, which is multi-ethnic and multicultural, post-colonialism becomes a very popular viewpoint to analyze this novel. The first perspective is hybridity. Laura Moss, a professor at the University of British Columbia, concludes that the interpretation of hybridity in White Teeth is the daily routine that people in multicultural London follow. And Elaine Childs, a professor at the University of Tennessee, writes that hybridity arouses great anxiety in the inner world of characters who construct their personal identity in a particular culture. Because it is often the case that chaos and crisis of identity could happen if confronting totally different cultures in a multicultural society.

The second perspective is cultural and racial identity. Firat, a scholar at Gaziantep University, puts it that the colonial period has a certain impact on the formation of the multiracialism in Britain and forces different races into a confrontation. And Jeremy Scott, a professor at the University of Kent, proposes that the novel provides a vibrant depiction of multicultural London and a unique perspective to respond to the debate on cultural identity.

In China, the studies on White Teeth also focus on post-colonialism, including discussions on multi-culture and diaspora. With respect to multi-culture, Qian Chen, a professor at Nanjing Normal University, analyzes the novel from the perspective of the ethnic relationship and racial identity and concludes that Zadie Smith provides a feasible approach to the co-existence of different cultures. And Li Qiong, a scholar at Xiamen University, argues that in Britain, the immigrants’ identity is no longer recognized as a product of imitating the Englishness but a compound of both their original ethnicity and the English ethnicity. Moreover, Wang Hui, a professor at Dalian University of Foreign Languages, states that Zadie Smith proposes a new version of Englishness in modern times and challenges the concern that Englishness and multi-culture are mutually antagonistic. As for diaspora, Ma Hongqi, a professor at Nankai University, points out diaspora’s problems such as the influence of the community on the construction of identity are inevitable in both the social and political era.

Theoretical Framework and Thesis Structure

After looking into the existing researches on White Teeth, we can see that although there are many studies on identity, no thorough investigation into the overall construction process of hybrid identity has been done. Thus this thesis will take advantage of both the formerly international and domestic researches and further on. And to make this thesis well-founded, the postcolonial theory of diaspora and hybridity will be utilized. Here this thesis tries to give a systematic introduction to Stuart Hall’s diaspora theory and Robert Young’s hybridity theory.

Diaspora refers to involuntary mass dispersions of a population from its indigenous territories. Modern diaspora theory centers on ethnicity and cultural identity. Hall’s analysis of the diaspora is profoundly dynamic, always taking into account the changing circumstances in Britain where “Black Britons” form different ethnical identities. Hall divides post-war black experience in Britain into two clearly discernible phases. During the first phase, Hall’s essay stated the following:

the term ‘black’ was coined as a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain and came to provide the organizing category of a new politics of resistance, among groups and communities with, in fact, very different histories, traditions and ethnical identities. (442)

The cultural identity constructed from black experience at this time is a singular and unifying framework based on ethnical and cultural differences. The black community is an unspoken and invisible object in the white aesthetic discourses. They are forced to accept the specified and marginalized role in the English world.

When shifting to the second phrase, “‘black’ is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed transcultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in nature.”(Hall 444) What this phrase brings into play is the recognition of the immense diversity and differentiation of the historical and cultural experiences of the blacks. And by this time, they can guarantee that the cultural practice works effectively with their own aesthetic value. They can no longer be depicted by a simple set of reversals as an inferior object in the white discourse. They are now essentially the good black subject.

In a word, Hall argues that to disavow the reality of racism and repression along with the Englishness, the concept of ethnicity shifts from suppression and coercion to diversity and difference. Actually, such a shift is an effect brought by hybridity on cultural events. Hybridity is characterized by the contact, intrusion, and fusion between different cultural communities. According to Robert Young, “hybridity is…itself a hybrid concept.” (19) Hybridity is, in fact, a dialectical model for cultural interaction:

organic hybridity, which will tend towards fusion, in conflict with intentional hybridity, which enables a contestatory activity, a politicized setting of cultural differences against each other dialogically. (Young 20)

The intentional hybridity and the organic hybridity operate dialogically together, in a double-voiced, hybridized form of cultural politics. The former brings about contestations because it is represented in terms of centeredness or homogeneity. It denies the reasonable existence of different cultures but only advocates the mainstream culture. The latter realizes such cultural hegemony in a more unconscious way. It superficially admits the existence of differences but actually tries to assimilate one cultural community into another.

This thesis will be divided into five parts. Except for the two parts of Introduction and Conclusion, the main body of the thesis is composed of three chapters. Chapter one will introduce the historical background from both the native residents’ and immigrants’ perspective. Chapter two will focus on the construction process of a hybrid identity. Chapter three will introduce the manifestations of hybrid identity, analyzing Archie Jones and Irie Jones respectively.

Chapter One The Context of Hybrid Identity

1.1 World War II and the Newly-Defined “British” in English World

After the Second World War, immigration was put on the agenda in English World to cope with the shortage of labor force. A large number of immigrants from the formerly colonized territories such as Bangladesh, Jamaica, were attracted by the beneficial immigrant policies. They flocked into Britain after the collapse of the British Empire and filled in the vacuum in the workforce. However, in the meantime, more and more immigrants entered Britain and sharpened the rivalry between the native residents and immigrants.

At the very beginning, although the immigrants are included as “British” according to the immigration policies, they are actually segregated from the British mainstream culture. The immigrants were positioned as the unspoken and invisible “other” of predominantly white aesthetic and cultural discourses. They were trapped in the fixed role that the residents wanted them to play and had no choice but to submit to the cultural hegemony. Millat, who is a descendant of a Bangladesh immigrant, is thrown into inexplicable anger when hearing the Satanic Verses (i.e. a blasphemous book insulting the Muslim).

He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelt of curry; had no sexual identity;…that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the country. (Smith 234)

There was only one thing by which the immigrants like Millat can be measured, that is the aesthetic and cultural value of the white. In the white’s eye, Millat was one of the invaders from the formerly colonized territories, who wore dark skin, acted rudely and stole jobs from the natives. The white decided the measurement and evaluation standards. Hence it was impossible for any immigrant individuals to fulfill personal values because they were indiscriminately categorized as the inferior homogeneous “blacks” by the white.

The Englishness, at that time, was bound to grow robustly through displacing and dismissing other ethnicities. Such a kind of cultural hegemony also brought about the intentional hybridity as mentioned above, which worked in a way of intervening as a form of subversion and transformation. Millat’s father Samad is a “black” victim of this exclusive and regressive Englishness. He tries through the course of the novel to balance his Bengali and British selves but fails. Because it is impossible for him to find a place in late twentieth-century Great Britain unless he voluntarily gives up his traditional religious values and assimilates into the mainstream white culture.

However, in the 1980s, there came some “blacks” who held on to their traditions and never wanted to give up them. As a result, contestations from the oppressed and marginalized “blacks” exploded. Subsequently, a newly-defined Englishness came into being. Differing from the past Englishness, which imposed the “British” on the non-English, it acknowledged the place of the “black” history and culture in the construction of their identity. It engaged rather than suppressed differences between the native residents and the immigrants. It depended on the cultural and historical diversities to construct different identities. “British” was then a non-coercive identity whereby groups were modified through intercultural exchange and socialization with other groups.

1.2 Colonialism and Enforced Migration in Non-English World

As mentioned above, the intentional hybridity conducted by the colonizer aroused contestations from the colonized on the past exclusive and regressive Englishness. Consequently, the colonizer resorted to a more covert and fraudulent way in the pursuit of maximum benefits. And the organic hybridity therewith appeared. There would be mixture and fusion, “but in such situations the mixture remains mute and opaque, never making use of conscious contrasts and oppositions”. (Young 20)

The colonizer, for one thing, guided the colonized to indiscriminately imitate the living modes and cultural customs in the English world. For another, they intentionally cultivated the youth of noble birth in English way. Superficially, the white English tried their best to eliminate racial discrimination and realize national fusion. Actually, they considered the nationality that differed from them as detrimental to their own national purity. The non-English were placed, positioned at the margins and their unique ethnicity was gradually weakened and even destroyed.

In White Teeth, Samad is a well-educated middle-class Bangladeshi and meanwhile a British soldier who claims to be a descendant of the Indian revolutionary Mangal Pande. He is proud of his cultural and historical links to England. He is a product of colonial exploitation which inculcates Englishness in his mind instead of his traditional one. Samad arrives in England, “a middle-aged man seeking a new life with his twenty-year-old new bride” (Smith 12). However, as he struggles as a waiter in an Indian restaurant, he finds that he is never accepted as an English man, despite that he was familiar with English cultural values. He is regarded as an outsider, marginalized within the community to which he assumes he belongs to. Even his wife sneers at his behaving like a colonial subject.

Just like Samad, the first generation of immigrants was mostly preoccupied with the questions of settlement. They attempted to realize the social status and economic opportunities they had been promised but failed due to the widespread racism in reality. They were cheated, to some extent, by the great expectations that the English colonizer vividly depicted for them. This, of course, was not the case with the following generations of black Britons. From their parents’ experiences, they realized that race was a modality on which the social status depended. They learned a lesson from the implicit or explicit racism in England and accepted their multi-race identities but they didn’t understand why their parents indulged in the past instead of dealing with the present. They didn’t understand the expectations put on them, establishing a hybrid identity, that is, preserving traditional ethnicity and at the same time embracing Englishness.

This was “the century of the great immigrant experiment” (Smith 326). In this century, “it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance.”(Smith 327) The immigrants were trapped in the fear of the disappearance of their original ethnicity, of being assimilated into the white community but actually never accepted by the white residents. They tried to fight against Englishness but failed because their own nationality was unconsciously hybridized under the influence of organic hybridity. They were drawn away from traditional culture since they had become emigrants from their homeland. They were marginalized in Britain for they were immigrants from the formerly colonized territories, inferior and incompetent. Hence they can only put expectations on their offspring to retain their traditional nationality in harmony with the Englishness. Fortunately, a feasible mode of constructing a hybrid identity was figured out in the end.

Chapter Two Construction of Hybrid Identity

2.1 Querying Englishness

“Ethnicity, in the form of a culturally constructed sense of Englishness and a particularly closed, exclusive and regressive form of English national identity, is one of the core characteristics of British racism today.” (Hall 447) However, as the black experience shifts, the term ethnicity is no longer defined or commanded by the past Englishness but depends on history, culture, and politics. And the compelling incentive to the shift is, in fact, the query about racism in the name of Englishness.

In White Teeth, the concept of color plays a significant role. It is apparent that the “white” in the title of the novel refers to the bright white teeth of the non-white. In Chapter 7, Mr. Hamilton, once a soldier, narrates his war memory about the peril of owning the white teeth to Magid, Millat, and Irie. “Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth…” (Smith 171) When the dark skin provides a chance for concealment, the white teeth function the opposite. In this way, Mr. Hamilton divulges his racism even if he is talking to a girl with a multi-race and two Bengali boys.

Such obtrusive manners offend the kids who feel responsible for justifying their rightful existence in England. Millat argues for his father’s participation in the war on behalf of the English army but is only to be refuted by Mr. Hamilton, “I’m afraid you must be mistaken….There were certainly no wogs as I remember.” (Smith 172) Here the use of the word “wogs” to refer to dark-skinned races is again racially offensive. It is striking that Mr. Hamilton performs as a cruel racist in a genteel manner as ever. He declines the other races’ contribution to England and treats them as invisible and inferior communities. He actually conforms to the past Englishness, hegemonic and exclusive.

Unfortunately, the recognition from the others can have significant effect on the construction process of one’s identity. A person or a group of people can suffer from mental distortion even breakdown if their neighbors, colleagues, and etc. depict them as demeaning figures. This kind of confining and contemptible non-recognition inflicts harm on the non-white and triggers off dissatisfaction from them. It is tormenting to find that they’re still marginalized even if they have emigrated from their homeland and tried their best to merge in the native mainstream culture. And they gradually query the facticity and feasibility of the Englishness. Some actions are taken to fight against racism and fight for cultural identity.

2.2 Resorting to Tradition

Racism, under the cover of Englishness, is not a peripheral minority affair. It is a crisis of the whole culture. The British mass media purposefully controls the non-white images to live up to the past narrow expectations from the white natives. Britain is in a hostile atmosphere when confronting the underprivileged immigrants. Violence is not unusual to those black immigrants. Owing to a lack of a sense of belonging in the Englishness-dominant society, the immigrants or their descendants tend to resort to the ethnical tradition. The tie of blood is no doubt more intimate than any other postnatal relationship. To return to one’s homeland culture will help one to find the root and a mode of reconstructing self-identity. In White Teeth, Zadie Smith creates a multi-race character, Irie, who succeeds in absorbing the quintessence in ethnical culture and balancing her British and Jamaican identities.

After failing to imitate the British appearance and temperament, Irie is bewildered about who she really is. At this moment, she accidentally finds that her mother’s beautiful and white teeth are false, leaving her into deep perplexity about those untruths and secret histories. Hence she turns to her grandmother, Hortense Bowden, for help and begins to read lots of historical materials about the colonial period of West Indies from which her mother originates. In Irie’s imagination, her past homeland is an Idealist Eden where everything is new, with “no fictions, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs” (Smith 402). She is inspired by knowing that she is also blessed with such an admirable homeland. Through tracing back to colonial history, Irie better understands where she originates from and what her past consists of. All of these bring her great confidence to accept what she is now rather than blindly imitating the white.

However, such a return to homeland culture to find shelter can be a double-edged sword. To escape the displacement imposed on his life by Englishness, Millat also looks for asylum from the past. His rebellion is somewhat different from Irie’s, following a pattern that transforms him from a street thug to a member of Muslim fundamentalists. He is too superficial and naïve to get rid of the cultural hegemony befalling on him. He blindly excludes the western culture and adheres to the so-called tradition. What he does is to smear the white natives to earn some distorted comfort and confidence in a hostile atmosphere. But in fact, he never breaks up with the western culture especially Hollywood films. It is his dream to become a gangster in real world like a Hollywood star, eliminating inequality in the English-hegemonic world. That’s why his eyes fill with tears when his cherished albums and books are burnt due to his arrogant behaviors. And that’s why he never understands what Islam really means but still serves as a fundamentalist.

Resorting to tradition, on one hand, offers the non-white a different approach to constructing a hybrid identity, but on the other, throws them to myths about who they are. How to find a balance between the past and present is the crux of the matter.

2.3 Constructing Hybrid Identity

Hybrid identity is a product of the process of intentional hybridity and the unconscious organic hybridity. As mentioned in the introduction, the past Englishness is exclusive and regressive, along with racism and repression. To create new ethnicity and build the cultural identity, the non-white community undergoes a long phrase of struggles. In the face of racial discrimination in the English world, they find themselves totally displaced and query if they have any Englishness. They trace back to motherland history to retrieve the sense of belonging. Unfortunately, some of them unconsciously fall into a fixed divide between the white and non-white. While some of them, like Irie in White Teeth, find a balance between different races and therefore construct the hybrid identity.

To construct a hybrid identity, one must first understand that there is little or nothing in the world that is fixed and settled. Not only diaspora experience but also ethnicity or cultural identity is shifting along with the change of cultural and political environment. As Hall stated:

If the black subject and black experience are not stabilized by Nature or by some other essential guarantee, then it must be the case that they are constructed historically, culturally, politically—and the concept which refers to this is ‘ethnicity’. The term ethnicity acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact that all discourse is placed, positioned, situated, and all knowledge is contextual. (447)

As is in White Teeth, Hortense, a typical Jamaican woman, immigrates to Britain in her 60s. She is a religious extremist, waiting for the judgment day throughout her life in Britain. Her religion instructs her to wait rather than to fight for a day when the oppressed ethnicity will revive and prosper. Religion, in Hortense’s case, is actually a kind of illusion that brings about transient comforts. However, as for Irie’s generation, religion never serves as a guarantee of realizing one’s self-identity. They choose the way how they construct their cultural identities, either through hybridizing or purifying. The different choices they make depend on the ever-changing cultural, political and historical contexts.

Moreover, one should be open-minded enough to accept the other ethnicity with a difference. Difference is, in fact, a dialectical concept. “There is the ‘difference’ which makes a radical and unbridgeable separation: and there is a ‘difference’ which is positional, conditional and conjunctural” (Hall 448). No matter how adverse two communities are, like the white and the non-white, they are ethnically located and their ethnic identities partly lie on their subjective sense of who they are. The originally fixed opposition can be broken up and double perspectives can be developed to look at the world. That’s why Archie Jones in White Teeth, as a native white man, can marry a Jamaican and remain life-long friends with a Bangladeshi.

There is no ethnicity which is doomed to survive, as the past Englishness was, only through displacing and dismissing other ethnicities. The endurance of one ethnicity is predicated on accepting different and diverse ethnicities. Two divergent ethnical communities, like the white and non-white can co-exist peacefully and robustly in cultural hybridity.

Chapter Three Manifestation of Hybrid Identity

3.1 Archie Jones: Indulging in “the Past”

For Samad’s generation of immigrants, it’s difficult to sever all emotional and cultural connections with their past no matter how long they have immigrated to Britain. They are reluctant to discard the tradition because tradition is no doubt included in culture. If they abandon their tradition, their culture will fall apart and they will, in turn, have nothing to rely on. In White Teeth, it is Archie Jones, a White English man, who can serve as a role model for the immigrants at the same age to survive in multicultural Britain. He, like his peers, deals with “the past” of his own or the others’ in his whole life. What’s different is that he is always kind and open-minded to accept differences, and thus successfully constructs a hybrid identity in the face of cultural shock.

After divorce, Archie quickly marries Clara, a Jamaican girl, because “Clara was not that kind of black” (Smith 54). He has his own criterion of getting along with what kind of person, not affected by the traditional Englishness. He and Samad, a Bengali, have remained life-long friends since the Second World War. When the other soldiers make fun of Samad, Archie understands and accepts him as a friend. Similarly, in Archie’s mind, “Samad and Alsana Iqbal…were not those kinds of Indians” (Smith 54). It is clear that Archie chooses either a wife or a friend according to his own judgments rather than races. He is so open-minded that he could intimately get along with different immigrant groups.

Moreover, Archie “always wanted advice, he was a huge fan of second opinions.” (Smith 25) But in fact, most of his decisions are direct results from the past experience. When Samad is confused about the relationship between identity and tradition, Archie does not treat it as a problem because he thinks that “people should just live together … in peace or harmony or something.” (Smith 155) It is no wonder that at the end of the story, he saves the life of a Germanic genetic scientist without hesitation whom he once saved in the Second World War. Archie attaches little importance to cultural identity and treats others with complete kindness. Hence both the white and non-white communities accept him as a companion.

All in all, Archie Jones shares the habit of indulging in “the past” with his peers like Samad. But he is not trapped in the past but cherishes the past that shapes his values and moralities. And it is his open-mindedness to differences and his carelessness towards the identity that helps him construct a hybrid identity.

3.2 Irie Jones: Understanding “the Past” Dialectically

Different from the first-generation immigrants, the later generation of immigrants’ confusion is caused by not knowing their past. They have no ideas about where they originate from and who they actually are. When their parents are trapped in the myth of the past, they are totally bewildered and perplexed about what on earth the past is. In White Teeth, Irie is the only positive representative of her generation who succeeds in understanding the “past” dialectically and constructing a hybrid identity.

At the very beginning, Irie believes that she is “pure” English, although both her appearance and temperament reflect her Jamaican background. “There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger land.” (Smith 266) She feels disappointed and frustrated to change her appearances and internality to be more English, that is, Irie wants to justify her identity as “pure” English. Then, at a night, Irie accidentally finds the family secret that her mother Clara’s beautiful white teeth are false. She realizes that what she already knows and believes in her family may also be false. And at the same time, her believes about the “past” completely collapse.

Confusedly, Irie turns to her grandmother for help, trying to find out an explanation for her deep doubt about her pure Englishness. Through reading books about Jamaica, her knowledge about it becomes totally refreshed. For her, Jamaica is a dream land where everything is new, with “no fictions, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs” (Smith 402). She enjoys its lovely scenery and admires its centuries-old history. And therefore she begins to establish a fresh understanding of her identity as a mixed-race immigrant rather than a “pure” white resident. She accepts her past and starts her life again.

Through looking for her past, Irie finds that the “past” should serve as a starting point for immigrants so that they can get rid of the ambiguity of their identity and step into the present cherished life. That’s why she tells the struggling adults not to indulge in the past but to take proper attitudes towards it and then to embrace the present.

Conclusion

White Teeth explores the complex issues of racial relationships and cultural identities that emerged when England faced the challenges after the Second World War. The marginalized immigrants undergo a long time of confusion and struggle in ethnical conflicts. When they realize that they’re marginalized in the white society, they gradually develop a query about the past Englishness, exclusive and regressive. Then they turn to traditional culture for help, hoping to retrieve a sense of belonging. During this process, some of them successfully establish a hybrid identity, preserving the traditional ethnicity and embracing differences in multicultural Britain at the same time.

This thesis takes advantage of Stuart Hall’s Diaspora Theory and Robert Young’s Hybridity Theory as a theoretical base. Researches on diaspora concentrate on the theme of ethnicity and cultural identity. In Hall’s view, ethnicity engages rather than suppresses differences and depends on the changing cultural and political constructions. Hence the establishment of the black ethnicity undergoes two phrases and the shifting between these two phrases is caused by hybridity. Hybridity can be divided into intentional hybridity and unconscious organic hybridity. Organic hybridity is more fraudulent than intentional hybridity without bringing about contestations. In fact, it is due to the hybridity of English and non-English ethnicities that happened in the English world that the hybrid cultural identity is brought into play.

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