Pop life: Images and popular culture in the works of Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith

This dissertation argues that Hanif Kureishi's and Zadie Smith's works reflect the postmodern obsession with the image in a number of ways. First, the Western emphasis on style and popular culture reveals the surface markers that the postmodern subject conceives of and reflects his or her identity. Second, both Kureishi and Smith are of English and minority backgrounds (South Asian and Afro-Caribbean, respectively), and their hybrid subject positions are manifest in their treatment of minority cultures and mainstream British culture. Both heavily rely on popular culture, which is itself hybrid, to parallel their characters' negotiations with changing contemporary British culture. Smith and Kureishi reflect the tension between representation as expressed and representation as (mis)understood by others.