"A study of the decolonization of trauma and selves in Zadie Smith's white teeth (2000), the autograph man (2002), on beauty (2005), NW (2012) and ""the embassy of Cambodia"" (2013)"

Resumo

This PhD Thesis analyses several works by British author Zadie Smith – White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and “The Embassy of Cambodia” – from the perspective of trauma studies. More particularly, this Thesis uses the framework of postcolonial trauma theories, which, as explained in the theoretical section “Contextualizing Postcolonial Trauma”, offers a critique of the Western approach of the foundational texts of trauma theory and seeks to de-centralize and decolonize it. For this purpose, this project carries out a close textual analysis that reveals how form and content in Smith’s narratives reflect traumatized identities while laying bare trauma as a potentially master narrative that can further oppress some subjects. Furthermore, this analysis of trauma repeatedly brings to the front the need to pay attention to the social, economic, and political contexts in which the characters’ traumatic experiences take place, moving away from the traditional focus on exclusively individual events. In like fashion, the analysis of the characters’ trauma points to the continuation of colonial practices in racist discourses and a series of macro- and micro-aggressions that amount to insidious forms of trauma. The societies reflected in Smith’s narratives here analysed, both in the UK and the US, do not seem to allow for the development of hybrid identities and the full integration of difference into Western societies, which shows the pervasiveness of a certain degree of anxiety around otherness. This is reflected in the conflict with origins which structures this Thesis: the excessive attachment to the past, the need to erase it, and the disconnections and dialogues between different origins. The first two chapters study the consequences of the pain of unbelonging and explore two opposing reactions to difference and trauma that is transmitted through various generations of diasporic subjects. These chapters analyse the ambivalences and tensions between forgetting and remembering and link the study of trauma to the affect of shame, especially relevant in those characters who try to move away from their lower-class origins. The third chapter provides alternative ways of understanding the relationship to origins and trauma that might create a productive dialogue between (hi)stories of suffering and healing through relational and multidirectional approaches. All chapters draw attention to Smith’s critique of traditional psychoanalysis and trauma theory and focus on the ways in which societies continue to reject otherness through neocolonial and neoliberal discourses and practices. Therefore, this PhD thesis seeks to contribute to the decolonization of trauma studies and the identity struggles that postcolonial and hybrid subjects, have developed in the last decades in Britain, and emphasizes the need to develop a situated and ethical understanding of theory and self that allows for the co- existence of the complex entanglements of history.