Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy tale!” (196).

As Alsana Begum, one of the Londoners in the book with Bangladeshi roots, points out (after reading in an encyclopedia about the multicultural history of Bangladesh itself),“You go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. And appropriately so: in the post-imperial era, of course, England itself has roots all over the globe. The “British” characters of the book, Londoners all, have roots that span the globe, from Jamaica, to England, to Bangladesh. It’s a sprawling, energetic, rambunctious novel built on many influences and drawing on many genres it contains many styles and many narratives, exhibiting a plural nature that is typical of much postmodernist fiction-but that is also much like contemporary Britain itself. White Teeth is a sort of epic of late-twentieth-century multicultural Britain, a central literary monument to the mongrel nature of British culture and society in the postimperial era. British literature moved into the twenty-first century with the publication of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which remains to this writing the most feted text of twenty-first-century British literature.

Zadie smith white teeth 2000