Transformative dystopia in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
Transformative dystopia in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores a hitherto unexplored issue in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and namely the meaningfulness of the fact that two of the main characters in the novel, the Englishman Alfred Archibald Jones (Archie) and the Indian Bengali – Samad Iqbal, go through an extreme dystopian experience leading to their discovery of multiculturalism during World War II in the spaces of a defunct British tank and of a little Bulgarian village near the Greek and Turkish border. The paper examines some of the cultural incongruities in the novel, which renders the “Bulgarian” experience there locked in a dystopian space generated by the Bulgarian village as well as delineates the transformative significance of this experience in Archie’s and Samad’s awakening to multiculturalism.

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