Cultural Purity And Cultural Hybridity

With the help of theories of Post-colonialism, the paper aims at probing into the ways the non-white and second-generation immigrants deal with their cultural dilemmas in a multi-cultural society presented in White Teeth by Zadie Smith.Zadie Smith is a half-British and half-Jamaican young writer. Her first novel White Teeth has been a great success in the English literary field and has earned the writer many literary awards such as 2000 Guardian First Book Award and Whitbread Award, etc. The novel's popularity does not lie so much in its literariness or language but in its prediction of the advent of a tolerant and hybrid era to the human world.Chapter One is a brief introduction to Zadie Smith, White Teeth and the cultural backgrounds of the novel. The cultural backgrounds mainly entail the historical and theoretical backgrounds of the novel. Through the cultural background readers can better understand the novel and its theme.In Chapter Two, the paper deals with the cultural dilemmas in the novel. Most non-white young immigrants grow up in the mainstream society but they are still regarded as "aliens" just because they are not white. Being influenced by the western culture and excluded from the mainstream discourse, they tend to fall into a cultural dilemma, confused about their self-identities.Then Chapter Three explores one of the common ways to deal with the cultural dilemmas by the non-white immigrants. That is to seek cultural purity, including to seek a purely white culture and to return to one's parental traditional cultures. The causes and possible consequences of this way are also analyzed to show that seeking cultural purity tends to be too extreme in the context of multiculturalism.In Chapter Four the paper moves to cultural hybridity. The formation of cultural hybridity and the representative figure of cultural hybridity in the novel are expounded in detail. Cultural hybridity does not simply refer to the state in which different cultures and races can exist harmoniously. What is more significant and greatly advocated by many scholars is a double perspective represented by cultural hybridity. The concluding section of the paper re-emphasizes the possibility and significance of cultural hybridity as a potential solution to racial issues in a multi-cultural world.