Narrative Strategies of Representing Multiculturalism in Zadie Smith’s Fiction

Norbayeva Nasiba Sodiqjon qizi

doi:10.51699/cajlpc.v7i2.1449

Authors

Norbayeva Nasiba Sodiqjon qizi Independent researcher at the Uzbekistan State World Languages University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51699/cajlpc.v7i2.1449

Keywords:

Narrative Strategies, Multiculturalism, Zadie Smith, Hybridity, Polyphony, Postcolonial Fiction, Identity, Intertextuality

Abstract

A central thematic and aesthetic concern of contemporary British literature, multiculturalism also embodies socio-historical realities that witness a significant postcolonial transformation, a high speed of migration and a spectre of globalization. Zadie Smith’s fiction, most prominently White Tooth, On Beauty, and Swing Time, takes an important space in giving a voice to these complexities via innovative narrative structures that emphasize of hybridity, dialogism, and cultural negotiation. Although Smith criticism has dealt richly with race, identity and diaspora in her novels, it has comparatively given less credit to the narrative strategies by which multicultural experience is elaborately shaped and troubled. In this study, I seek to examine the functional intertextuality of narrative techniques like polyphonic narration, intertextual hybridity, spatial-temporal plurality, and metafictional self-reflexivity as structural procedures for the representation of multiculturalism in Smith's key novels. The results show that Smith consecrates multiculturalism in the foundation of narrative form, decentralizing power from the center, contrasting the one-identity model, creating dialogic spaces where multi-culture, multi-identity coexist in tension and negotiation. The study proposes a unified narratological and postcolonial methodology that treats formal experimentation as an encompassing practice of cultural critique instead of an incidental stylistic quality. The implications of these findings are two-fold: firstly, that any consideration of literary multiculturalism must be located within a structural as well as thematic frame, and second that it should open a conversation relating to wider debates about the function of narrative form in the performative representation of identity, power and transnational experience in contemporary fiction.

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