Barbara Wohlsein

Englishmen Born and Bred?: Cultural Hybridity and Concepts of Englishness in Hanif Kureishi's the Buddha of Suburbia and Zadie Smith's White Teeth Barbara Wohlsein

The idea and image of Englishness has changed a lot within the last decades. As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has memorably observed, modern Britain is more reflected in multiracial families curry and the fiction of Zadie Smith than the Royal family fish and chips and Shakespeare?". This book analyses the works of two mixed-race English writers: Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith. Hanif Kurishi's novel The Buddha of Suburbia was published in 1990 Zadie Smith's debut novel White Teeth a decade later in 2000. Both authors deal with questions of identity racism and cultural hybridity amongst second- and third-generation immigrants living in England. The aim of this book is to show how the images of Englishness and the attitude towards hybridity have changed between 1990 and 2000. Whereas Kureishi's novel focuses primarily on racism Smith portrays millennial London as a city where hybridity ? either by birth or by experience ? is an integral part of everyday life. "