After the Century of Strangers: Hospitality and Crashing in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

In a 1999 essay discussing the representation of minorities in Britain, Stuart Hall notes, “Our picture of them is defined primarily by their ‘otherness’—their minority relationship to something vaguely identified as ‘the majority,’ their cultural difference from European norms, their non-whiteness, their ‘marking’ by ethnicity, religion and ‘race’” (30). Certainly with regard to fiction by these groups, this critical trend of underscoring that otherness can emphasize minority communities as advent, a new pressing against an established and rooted majority. This trend is most visible in the way immigration and hybridity are monumentalized, in the infamous words of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, as the way “newness enters the world” (281).¹ Against a nationalized frame, racial, ethnic, and cultural minorities are rendered as the new, as the inauguration of something different, a position resonant with that of Homi Bhabha, who links emergence with migrant communities in an essay named for Rushdie’s well-known line. However, as Sukhdev Sandhu warned in 2003, this equation of nonwhite demographics with the new threatens to become rote: “blacks and Asians tend to be used in contemporary discourse as metaphors for newness” (xviii). Indeed, as Hall and Sandhu hint, such talk of newness invokes the unquestioned priority of an unexamined or unmarked majority: discussion of the new grants the already established nature of what must be the old. Further, these chronological distinctions persist: the old will always antedate the new, their temporalities seemingly forever divided. Newness as advent functions as shorthand for alterity, and stress on recency implies an ongoing contrast with something older and settled. Here an emphasis on newness raises unfortunate echoes of anti-immigrant ideologues’ proclamations of irreducible cultural differences, distinctions leading to dire national apocalypses—the racial/ethnic/cultural gulf permanently partitioning old and new, temporal distinctions affixed to seemingly stable identities.² Central to the maintenance of such dichotomies has been the double-edged trope of hospitality, a thematic at once providing welcome and simultaneously drawing sharp and seemingly permanent distinctions between host and guest. Hospitality as trope foregrounds the problem of home and dwelling, thus figuring prominently in postimperial metropolitan texts from Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners to Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The roles of host and guest do not seem to permit an erasure of difference: the host’s apparent priority cannot be undone; it is a temporal gulf auguring a permanent divide, the inability of the “guest” to ever have an equal claim to the home. This essay examines Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, a 2000 novel that, though in great debt to the Rushdiean lineage of migrant newness, in fact performs a thorough interrogation of the purported pride of place through priority.³ White Teeth moves past the rhetoric of newness by dismantling a central appeal of majoritarian priority: the spatial and temporal thematic of hospitality. Hospitality functions as a claim to antecedence, an already-in-place positioning that denies attempts of the new to establish itself. In this trope of antecedence, the new is permanently epiphenomenonal and thus a peripheral or harmful entity, one threatening the established and essential, the native. White Teeth, most particularly through its stress on second generations, moves away from the new and its association with guests through a revision of hospitality. This rewriting refuses the linear and simple temporality of precedence in favor of a complex understanding of time (and space) unraveling the claims of the prior and of the host.

The significance of hospitality is well manifested in conservative racial rhetoric. For Enoch Powell, Conservative politician and standard reference point for historical discussions of racialism in the U.K., race permanently divides host and guest: “[T]he West Indian does not by being born in England, become an Englishmen. In law, he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or an Asian still” (qtd. in Gilroy, No Black 46). According to Powell, on the outer periphery are those who are only technically citizens through jus soli, a grouping pointedly restricted to New Commonwealth...