Nowhere and Northwest, Brent and Britain: Geographies of Elsewhere in Zadie Smith’s NW

My primary argument in this paper is that in NW, Zadie Smith’s characters work against dominant conceptions of the city of London and chart their own maps and geographies through the postcolonial urban space. By articulating their own understandings of London, and making these understandings a key part of the narrative of the city and the novel, they are able to turn what many think of as a peripheral space – Brent – into a central part of Britain and London, and likewise are able to convert what many think of as nowhere (NW) into a place with a strong identity: northwest (NW) London.