Roots and Routes: Exploring Identity and Multiculturalism in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

In White Teeth, Zadie Smith has attempted to present multicultural London mainly through the detailed portrayal of three families – the Joneses, the Iqbals and the Chalfens which brings forth different ethnicities, like the white English, Asian, Caribbean and Jewish. The first generation of these immigrant families spends their time brooding over their past and their culture, but the problem arises with the second generation of these immigrant families. When they look back to their distorted past, it becomes more difficult for them to step forward without solving the dilemmas of their minds and without asserting their individual identity. As Wan-long Hong has said, a stable multicultural society must have a core culture surrounded by various satellite cultures, the aim of this paper is to discuss what happens when both the majority and the minority of a core culture thrive from a sense of instability and take on their journey towards identity and how these quests tie the characters from different ethnic backgrounds in a common bond. Though multiculturalism has been much criticised in recent times for promoting differences and for supporting hegemonic practices, Zadie Smith has demonstrated a totally different concept of multiculturism where the differences turn out to be the basis of a common chord among these characters. This paper also undertakes to advance the idea of whether root always confers an identity which is related to it and also how Zadie Smith’s characters have, on the one hand, complemented and, on the other hand, contradicted Gayatri Spivak’s disapproval of root.