The Aliens In The Postcolonial London

Zadie Smith has written the issue of cultural identity that the minority groups are confronted with in London through a different perspective to manifest the rupture and disorder in the cultural identity of them. The author holds a negative attitude towards the binary opposition as a production of Orientalism discourse. Smith attempts to coordinate the contradiction between heterogeneous cultures and establish a discourse field for the negotiation of cultural identity in the postcolonial context. The ethnic difference and the quality of Englishness as an essentialist production of the western discourse becomes the basis for the construction of white superiority. The ambivalence of the immigrants towards the colonizer results in their split identity. The ignorance of the ambiguity in the postcolonial London makes Samad and the twin brothers switch to the binary construction of identity respectively under the influence of essentialist views. Through Irie’s construction of the hybrid identity in the third space the author takes a critic view on the essentialism construction of identity including assimilation and exclusion. In the postcolonial London, it is impossible to achieve the construction of pure cultural identity, which is not an essentialist existence of transcending history, place, and culture, but something of fluxility within a process of constant change.