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 withinthe last decades. As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has memorably observed, modern Britain is \"more reflected in multiracial families, curryand the fiction of Zadie Smith than the Royal family, fish andchips, and Shakespeare?\". This book analyses the works of twomixed-race English writers: Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith. HanifKurishi\'s novel The Buddha of Suburbia was published in 1990, Zadie Smith\'s debut novel White Teeth a decade later in 2000. Bothauthors deal with questions of identity, racism and culturalhybridity amongst second- and third-generation immigrants living inEngland. The aim of this book is to show how the images ofEnglishness and the attitude towards hybridity have changed between1990 and 2000. Whereas Kureishi\'s novel focuses primarily onracism, Smith portrays millennial London as a city where hybridity? either by birth or by experience ? is an integral part ofeveryday life.