Beyond Black British? The Novels of David Dabydeen, Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, and Hanif Kureishi

My dissertation examines a series of novels written over the last twenty years by writers who are customarily identified as second-generation black British, including David Dabydeen's The Intended (1991), Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003), Zadie Smith's On Beauty (2005), and Hanif Kureishi's The Body (2002). I ask the following critical questions: How useful is the category of black British writing and the label black British to Dabydeen, Kureishi, Ali, and Smith? How do these writers respond to the institutionalization of black British studies through their fiction?;I argue that Dabydeen, Ali, Smith, and Kureishi convey varying degrees of ambivalence towards the broad category of black British literature and the term black British, and in doing so, they problematize scholars' attempts to position them and their novels within these categories. In particular, these four authors challenge the category of black British writing, the term black British, and the expectation that they will adopt the task of speaking for other black and Asian Britons by 'writing back' to a multiplicity of sources. In chapter one, I claim that although Dabydeen questions the essentialist and heterosexist notion of black British identity prevalent during the 1970s by rewriting Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), he also stresses the usefulness of the label and the category of writing. In chapter two, I affirm that Ali interrogates first-generation black British male writers' portrayal of the flâneur by emphasizing the protagonist's identity as a British Asian flâneuse and translator of London. At the same time, Ali engages with some of the typical concerns of black British literature by redefining the London represented in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925). Chapter three assesses how Smith moves past E.M. Forster's privileging of the notion of 'place,' as well as the central role that place plays in black British fiction, by distancing On Beauty from his novel Howards End (1910) and her first novel White Teeth (2000). Finally, chapter four investigates how Kureishi repudiates the fundamental premises of black British literature by 'writing back' to his own canon of fiction and by paying homage to Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde.