White Teeth, Zadie Smith, 2000

 White Teeth was the debut novel by Zadie Smith, and it is a very strong debut. In my reading, Smith’s greatest strength is her character creation. I felt that the personal plots of each character, insofar as they reveal more about them, were excellent. The family history of Clara Bowden in particular. 

While I’m sure it is not the only way to categorize it, White Teeth represents one important example of a subgenre including books such as Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. These are very intelligent books, considered “serious literary” novels but imbued with a lot of humor. This humor couples with a touch of added absurdism to create head-scratching plot points that range from unique to ridiculous. In White Teeth some examples include the fact that story of Samad’s son, Millad, joining a militant Islamist group called Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation or KEVIN; the plot role played by a genetically engineered mouse called FutureMouse

One of the major themes in White Teeth is multiculturalism. To some extent, the late 1990s period was a high water mark for intellectual appraisals of globalism and multiculturalism. While some commentators thought that the end of the ideological Cold War meant that cultural differences would become the dominant source of global conflict, others thought that global economic integration would provide a glide path to the eventual end of cultural animosities or even differences.

Since the publication of White Teeth in 2000, there have been headwinds and tailwinds to multiculturalism. Just one year after the novel’s publication, the events of September 11, 2001 yielded a sharp increase in cultural awareness of Middle Eastern and Muslim culture in the West, but accompanied by sharp increases in Islamophobia. The large Indian, Muslim and Hindu, and Pakistani immigrant populations, as well as other Muslim groups in the UK were recast in this light and were subjected to discrimination and abuse. There was a similar story in the United States. The experience of Samad Iqbal and other Bangladeshis in White Teeth would have been different a few years later. A similar phenomenon has occurred against East Asian people in the West after the 2020 covid pandemic. The pandemic also accelerated rhetoric questioning globalism as an economic model, in the context of growing economic competition and protectionism between large nations.  And the Black Lives Matter movement has revealed that narratives around progress on racial discrimination were either incorrect or overestimated. At the same time, positive racial attitudes, demographic diversity, and positive day-to-day interactions between cultural groups in the UK and US have greatly increased at the same time.

While White Teeth is by a British author and refers to the UK, my thoughts mostly concentrated on the United States. There are however some noteworthy differences between the diversity seen in the two places.

White Teeth captures and proposes a vibrant kind of multiculturalism. As many countries in the Western world continue to increase in demographic diversity, it seems there have been at least two distinct but not mutually exclusive forms of multiculturalism over time. In both of these forms, diversity and variety is celebrated and people of all backgrounds are in close contact.

The first kind is one in the “melting pot” model. This refers to the traditional American aspiration for the various ethnic- or other subcultures living side by side to gradually assimilate or integrate into the overall collective American culture, bringing with them their unique and distinctive elements and contributing them to the whole. The end product is a more homogenous combination of cultures shared by all people. Necessarily, this implies people from each subgroup taking on customs or other cultural elements from all other groups. Additionally, the goal is there is no more cultural friction between separate groups. 

Another form is one in the “salad bowl” model. In contrast to the “melting pot”, this model advocates for each subculture to retain its distinctive or separate identity while integrating into the overall culture. The groups would live side by side and collaborate. Taken as a whole collection, there is an emergent overall culture where each constituent piece is identifiable as its own unit and as part of the whole. 

These two models are not totally mutually exclusive but each does have a different focus. It would seem that both can persist at the same time in the same place to varying degrees. In White Teeth, there is evidence of both. The life of Englishman Archie Jones may exemplify the melting pot model, where that of Samad Iqbal exemplifies the salad bowl - but each is not completely one or the other. Samad struggles with assimilation throughout his life. He 

The plot of the novel itself can either be taken as a melting pot or salad bowl, with such a diverse array of characters whose subplots weave in and out of each other.