{"id":43757,"date":"2015-11-05T02:20:21","date_gmt":"2015-11-05T02:20:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=43757"},"modified":"2015-11-12T04:28:16","modified_gmt":"2015-11-12T04:28:16","slug":"my-life-has-gotten-white-zadie-smiths-erotics-and-ethics-of-upward-mobility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=43757","title":{"rendered":"\u201cMy life has gotten white\u201d: Zadie Smith\u2019s Erotics and Ethics of Upward Mobility"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cMy life has gotten white\u201d: Zadie Smith\u2019s Erotics and Ethics of Upward Mobility<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

C21 Seminar Series 2015-16<\/a>
\nCentre for Research in Twenty-first Century Writings<\/a>
\nUniversity of Brighton<\/a>
\nFalmer Campus<\/a>
\n101 Mayfield House
\nBrighton, United Kingdom
\n2015-11-09, 17:00-18:30Z<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sarah Brophy<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of English and Cultural Studies
\nMcMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada<\/em><\/p>\n

In a 2011 Guardian article \u201cWhere are Britain\u2019s black authors?<\/a>,\u201d novelist Catherine Johnson<\/a> discusses the boom in white-authored stories about \u201cother races and cultures,\u201d suggesting that \u201cthe words of a white author are a comfortable buffer, a reassurance that nothing in the story will be too shocking, too hard to understand; the author is like you, and you can trust him or her to tell you this story in familiar terms.\u201d Conspicuously absent from Johnson\u2019s discussion is Zadie Smith<\/a>, the young mixed race author from North London<\/a> who burst on to the literary scene with a historic advance contract for the manuscript of the acclaimed White Teeth<\/a><\/em> (2000). How does the case of Smith potentially reroute Johnson\u2019s critique? Building on Zadie Smith\u2019s comments in a publicity interview for her latest novel NW<\/a><\/em> (2012) that \u201cmy life has gotten white compared to the life I grew up with. Because of the world I work in\u2014it\u2019s white,\u201d this paper considers the dilemmas of upward mobility and whiteness as they have come to bear on Smith, who articulates and negotiates these pressures in a range of life writing modes (especially personal essays and autobiographical fiction)…<\/p>\n

For more information, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cMy life has gotten white\u201d: Zadie Smith\u2019s Erotics and Ethics of Upward Mobility C21 Seminar Series 2015-16 Centre for Research in Twenty-first Century Writings University of Brighton Falmer Campus 101 Mayfield House Brighton, United Kingdom 2015-11-09, 17:00-18:30Z Sarah Brophy, Professor of English and Cultural Studies McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada In a 2011 Guardian article […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1196,13,8,10],"tags":[21765,21768,21767,21766,1344],"class_list":["post-43757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-criticism","category-liveevents","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-c21","tag-catherine-johnson","tag-centre-for-research-in-twenty-first-century-writings","tag-sarah-brophy","tag-zadie-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43757"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43758,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43757\/revisions\/43758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}