DECENTRING HOMOGENEITY: TRANSMITTING CULTURAL HETEROGENEITY TO GENERATIONS IN ANDREA LEVY’S SMALL ISLAND AND ZADIE SMITH’S WHITE TEETH

Abstract

This thesis will explore the concept of cultural transfer in the first-generation and the second-generation of post-war identities in the novels of two British Caribbean women writers: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004). In this thesis, I will argue that the emergence of heterogeneous cultures through multicultural relations challenges homogeneous cultures and identities. More specifically, this thesis examines the deconstruction of monolithic cultures within the arrival of first-generation immigrants and the defeat of hierarchy in cultures and ethnicities through the complex relations of the second generation. This thesis will demonstrate that hybridity is a powerful form that not only challenges homogeneous cultures and identities but also blossoms a multicultural future in London. In this respect, Smith’s White Teeth and Levy’s Small Island conclude with a mixed-race baby as a resolution of racial and cultural tensions and the mirror of a multicultural London in the future. While Small Island portrays hybridity with the birth of Queenie’s mixed-race baby, Michael, White Teeth extends it further through the indeterminate genetics of Irie’s baby as a rejection of the significance of racial and cultural roots forever. Even though stereotypical cultural and racial formats of the past are no more than a myth for the second generation, the first generation imposes the racial and cultural prejudices arising from cultural and racial stereotypes on the second generation. However, the birth of different cultural and ethnic origins in one body defeats racial ideology for a multicultural future in London. Thus, this thesis will conclude that first-generation immigrants are imprisoned by the racial ideology of the past, while the second-generation disrupts the universalization of stereotypes based on racial ideology imposed by the first generation, with the birth of the third generation