The Identity Construction Of The Colored People In Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

White Teeth, the debut of a young brilliant British Jamaican writer, humorously and satirically depicts a grand picture of how colored immigrants struggle to identify themselves in post-war Britain. Race seems not to the major concern of the novel but to be an unavoidable and innate component of the multicultural London scene painted by long years’ colorful immigration history. In multicultural and multiracial Britain, the ideology of a single-rooted identity has been challenged and every immigrant seems to have several identities with the past, present and future combined together. This is when the boundaries of race and nationality would be seen as broken. This meaning the novel reveals makes the novel extremely significant in contemporary Britain. By means of careful reading of this novel, the paper tries to make a study of identity construction of the two generations after WWII as well as in the contemporary time of multiculturalism.Chapter one is a brief introduction about the author and the novel. Then, there will be a summary of the literature review from home and abroad to present the novel’s artistic and literary values. What this paper tries to do and achieve will be talked about in the last part of this chapter. Chapter two focuses on the first generation. Their living condition will be first illustrated. They fail in identifying themselves because they stick to their tradition while at the same time cannot resist the influence of the white culture. They cannot deal with the relationship between their tradition and the surrounding white culture. Chapter three is about the identity construction of the second generation. They are different from their parents in several ways. When they are aware of their rootlessness, a painful development of identity searching begins. During the process, there is a split between the younger generations. Some choose total westernization while others turn to their tradition for comfort. With opposite performances, both two sides are actually seeking a pure identity. However, in a multicultural context, the boundaries between cultures and races blur and a pure identity cannot be realized. On the contrary, the cultural hybridity gives birth to a hybrid identity. Chapter four offers a possible solution to identity searching for colored immigrants. A hybrid identity may be what they are looking for and they should accept their hybrid identities. The fact that the colored immigrants accept every part of themselves brings some significant changes in the white people. The ideology of Englishness is being re-established. Then comes a conclusion of this paper of chapter five. In the last chapter, apart from emphasizing the ideology of hybrid identities raised in the former chapter, the author’s intention and hope of creating this novel will be mentioned to show that the future for colored immigrants is perfect. In the post-colonial and multicultural context, the colored immigrants can eventually find their belongings in Britain.