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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2012
This essay considers how place matters in Zadie Smith's most recent novel, On Beauty (2005). I focus on the ways the presence of Haitian immigrants in her fictional “Wellington” reflect an urge to make meaning out of social relations in the city that inspired the novel. I argue that even her most clichéd Haitian characters should not be read as casual insertions that merely introduce dramatic irony. More than any of the local details, Haitians authenticate Smith's imagined geography. They establish both the (historical) time and place (or context) of her novel and enable On Beauty to illuminate important features of contemporary urban inequality, complex black diasporan relations, and the ironies of America's celebrated post-racial society. I conclude that – although many of her Haitian characters are stereotypical and her representation of Boston is partial – imaginative ethnographies such as Smith's challenge scholarly claims to privileged readings of the city.
1 Smith, Zadie, On Beauty (New York and London: Penguin Press), 2005Google Scholar, 194. All references from the book come from the hardcover edition and are given in parentheses in the text.
2 The concept of “placelessness” was coined by Edward Relph. If we understand place as an expression of what is specific and local (somewhere), placelessness corresponds to what is general and mass produced (anywhere). See Relph, Edward, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion), 1976Google Scholar.
3 In 1976, the National Endowment for the Humanities Learning Library Program offered a course called Images of Boston: Writers’ Views of the City, where participants explored themes such as: How is Boston represented in fiction and other creative writing? How do various authors depict Boston's physical environment? The life experience of successive immigrant groups? Boston childhoods? What have been the major images and metaphors used in writing about Boston? How has their popularity shifted over time? How can we account for these changes? What is the essence of Boston values and traditions – about individualism, morality, religion, and political forms? What can we learn from literature about the significance and the sources of these values and traditions? What ideas about the potentialities and limitations of Boston and life in Boston are expressed in literature? How? This essay aims to position Zadie Smith's On Beauty on the long list of texts that speak to the issues raised in Images of Boston. See Hollister, Robert M., Images of Boston: Writers’ Views of the City (Boston, MA: The Boston Public Library), 1977Google Scholar.
4 See Tracey L. Walters, “Introduction,” in idem, ed., Zadie Smith: Critical Essays (New York: Peter Lang), 2008, 1–6.
5 See Lanone, Catherine, “Mediating Multi-cultural Muddle: E. M. Forster meets Zadie Smith,” Etudes Anglaises, 60 (2007), 185–97Google Scholar; Alter, Robert, “Howard's End,” New Republic, 3 Oct. 2005Google Scholar; Dalleo, Raphael, “Colonization in Reverse: White Teeth as Caribbean Novel,” in Walters, Zadie Smith, 91–104Google Scholar; and Fischer, Susan A., “‘A Glance from God’: Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Zora Neale Hurston” Changing English, 14 (2007), 285–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 See Caldwell, Gail, “Come Together: Zadie Smith's Boisterous New Novel Finds the Through Line of ‘Beauty’ in Entwined Tales of Culture and Class Collisions,” Boston Globe, 11 Sept. 2005Google Scholar; Freeman, John, “Zadie Smith's Satire Mixes Race and Rivalry in a Place Like Harvard,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 Sept. 2005Google Scholar; Woodman, Tenley, “Author Finds ‘Beauty’ in Relationships,” Boston Herald, 27 Sept. 2005Google Scholar. Woodman notes, “On Beauty reveals Smith's strength in gathering detail from the world around her.”
7 Lubbock, Percy, The Craft of Fiction (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons), 1921, 222–23Google Scholar.
8 See Acocella, Joan, “Connections,”New Yorker, 3 Oct. 2005Google Scholar.
9 Preston, Peter, “Zadie Smith and Monica Ali: Arrival and Settlement in Recent British Fiction,” Philologia, 5 (2007), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Pollio, Howard R., Henley, Tracy B. and Thompson, Craig J., The Phenomenology of Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1997CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 5.
11 Wood, James, “Human, All Too Inhuman,” New Republic, 30 Aug. 2001Google Scholar.
12 Casey, Edward, Getting Back into Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Mugerauer, Robert, Interpretations on Behalf of Place (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994)Google Scholar.
13 Acocella.
14 See Gieryn, Thomas F., “The City as Truth-Spot: Laboratories and Field-sites in Urban Studies,” Social Studies of Science, 36 (2006), 5–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 See Edward Relph, “A Pragmatic Sense of Place,” in Frank Vanclay, Matthew Higgins and Adam Blackshaw, eds., Making Sense of Place: Exploring Concepts and Expressions of Place through Different Senses and Lenses (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2008).
16 Maeve Tynan, “‘Only Connect’: Intertextuality and Identity in Zadie Smith's On Beauty,” in Walters, Zadie Smith, 79; see also Susan A. Fischer, “‘Gimme Shelter’: Zadie Smith's On Beauty,” in ibid., 107–22.
17 Welty, Eudora, The Eye of the Story (New York: Vintage, 1990)Google Scholar.
18 See Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar; see also Wortham-Gavin, B. D., “Mythologies of Place-Making,” Places, 20 (2008)Google Scholar, available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6bp6c7xf.
19 Relph, Place and Placelessness, 141.
20 See David Seamon and Jacob Sowers, “Place and Placelessness, Edward Relph,” in P. Hubbard, R. Kitchen and G. Vallentine (eds.), Key Texts in Human Geography (London: Sage, 2008, 43–51).
21 Caldwell, “Come Together.”
22 Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2006–8.
23 See Regine O. Jackson, “The Uses of Diaspora among Haitians in Boston,” in R. Jackson, ed., Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), 135–62.
24 Source: US Census Bureau, Census 2000, Summary File 4.
25 See Yu, Henry, “Los Angeles and American Studies in a Pacific World of Migrations,” American Quarterly, 56 (2004), 531–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Yu continues, “Understanding the dynamic of racialization in the Northeast as an outgrowth of the particular challenges of its migration history is crucial. Anti-Semitism and anti-Catholic practices dominated the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the expansion of a generic Judeo-Christian whiteness to embrace Jews and Catholics was accompanied by a heightening of the racial divide between white and black, not its lessening … the expansion of white supremacy in the mid-twentieth century now allowed those willing and able to embrace it to erase problematic origins” (538).
26 Brown, Jacqueline Nassy, Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, 9.
27 Smith, Zadie, Autograph Man (New York and London: Vintage, 2002)Google Scholar.
28 Murphey, Jessica, “Zadie: Take Three,” Atlantic Monthly, 16 Sept. 2005Google Scholar, available at www.theatlantic.com/doc/200509u/zadie-smith-interview.
29 Smith, Zadie, “Generation Why?”, New York Review of Books, 25 Nov. 2010, 57Google Scholar.
30 Gieryn, “The City as Truth-Spot,” 6. To be clear, my claim is not that Smith's status as an outsider requires that she justify her representation of American racial issues. Rather, as a novelist, a detailed, realistic depiction positions her reading of the city alongside the best ethnographies of place.
31 Vanderbeck, Robert M., “Vermont and the Imaginative Geographies of American Whiteness,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96 (2006), 641–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Fischer, “A Glance from God,” 287. Other binary pairs in the novel include thin/fat, Mozart/hip-hop, Rembrandt/Haitian art, beautiful/ugly, high art/cheap commodity, poetry/spoken word; see Ulka Anjaria, “On Beauty and Being Postcolonial: Aesthetics and Form in Zadie Smith,” in Walters, Zadie Smith, 31–56.
33 See Walters, Tracey, “Still Mammies and Hoes: Stereotypical Images of Black Women in Zadie Smith's Novels,” in idem, Zadie Smith, 123–39Google Scholar.
34 For a counterargument on the importance of Haitians as couleur locale see Amine, Laila, untitled review of On Beauty, Postcolonial Text, 2 (2006), 1–4Google Scholar.
35 For more on this point see Walters, “Still Mammie and Hoes.”
36 See Wortham-Gavin, “Mythologies of Place-Making.”
37 This phrasing is borrowed from geographer Tim Cresswell: “In the search for essence, difference has no place.” Cresswell, Tim, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 20050, 25Google Scholar.
38 Melissa R. Gilbert, “Identity, Space, and Politics: A Critique of the Poverty Debates,” in John Paul Jones, Heidi J. Nast and Susan M. Roberts, eds., Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 29–45.
39 Tejumola Olaniyan describes the precarious space that African Americans and diaspora blacks inhbit as an interstice. “An interstice is a small intervening space between entities. It is a confining space even for one group, much less when two groups so similar and yet so differently marked experientially as Africans and African Americans are massed together in it.” See Tejumola Olaniyan, “Economies of the Interstice,” in Percy C. Hintzen and Jean Muteba Rahier, eds., Problematizing Blackness: Self Ethnographies by Back Immigrants to the United States (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 61.
40 See Jackson, Regine O., “Black Immigrants and the Rhetoric of Social Distance,” Sociology Compass, 4 (2010), 193–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Fischer, “A Glance from God,” 111.
42 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1980Google Scholar; first published 1947), xix.
43 See Tynan, “Only Connect,” 83.
44 American literary historian Leonard Lutwack claims, “The representation of place in literature has an important influence on how people regard individual places and the whole world as a place.” See Lutwack, Leonard, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, 2.
45 Oakes continues, “The open-ended and complex quality of literary representation allows the crisis-prone interactions between space, human agency, and abstract historical processes to come sharply into focus in a way social science is too often unable to match.” See Oakes, Timothy, “Place and the Paradox of Modernity,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 510.
46 Walters maintains, “The fusion of reality and the imagined distorts the concept of the real.” See Walters, “Introduction,” 4.
47 Relph, Place and Placelessness, 64.
48 Rollwagon, Jack R., “The City as Context: The Puerto Ricans of Rochester, New York,” Urban Anthropology, 4 (1975), 53–9Google Scholar.
49 According to Yi Fu Tuan: “The visual quality of an environment is quickly tallied if one has the artist's eye. But the ‘feel’ of a place takes longer to acquire. It is made up of experiences, mostly fleeting and undramatic, repeated day after day and over the span of years.” See Tuan, Yi Fu, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977)Google Scholar, 183.
50 See Tynan, “Only Connect,” 80.
51 Marshall, Paule, Brown Girl, Brownstones (New York: Feminist Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928).
