Zadie Smith and Multiculturalism after BrexitPosted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United Kingdom on 2017-04-11 20:08Z by Steven |
Zadie Smith and Multiculturalism after Brexit
Black Perspectives
2017-04-11
Merve Fejzula
University of Cambridge
Perhaps more than other forms of criticism, outsiders often imagine literary criticism to be free from the vagaries of the present moment. American President Donald Trump and British politician Nigel Farage, the former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, may intrude on other aspects of life, but surely we can still enjoy the beauty of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in relative peace. Yet aesthetic appreciation is as subject to Hamlet’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as anything else, and nowhere does this pliable relationship to literature assert itself more than in the critical reception of authors of color . An illustrative example of this dynamic might be charted through the work of Zadie Smith, presented by the literary world as the “mixed-raced” poster child for the cosmopolitan axis of London–Brooklyn…
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