本文是一篇英语论文，笔者通过突出她在911后仇外心理和2008年后自由市场全球化导致的经济萧条中对移民生活的描述，本论文的讨论可能会提供一个关于史密斯伦敦空间叙事中移民困境的见解，而不仅仅是对其伦敦小说的主要后殖民阅读。因此，脆弱性的概念可以用来分析她关于移民的其他著作。
Chapter 1 Situational Vulnerability of Northwest Dwellers
1.1 Xenophobic Closure in Northwest London
Northwest London, with its attached prejudice and poverty, is a black hole that “draws its characters repeatedly back into its closed and classed overdetermination” (Arnett 3).This section illustrates the closure in the secluded home, exclusive office and discriminated council estates (a kind of social housing), to analyze the xenophobia and immobility faced by immigrants.
英语论文怎么写
A home is a private place, “an intimate place of rest where a person can withdraw from the hustle of the world outside and have some degree of control over what happens within a limited space…where you can be yourself” (Seamon 150), and also “a vessel in which a tangle of abstract, cultural concepts is found” (Gathorne-Hardy 124). The homes of Willesden people in NW are characterized by narrowness, disorder and seclusion, represented by the house of Lloyd Cooper (father of Felix Cooper) which has “NO DOORBELL” (Smith, NW 104), giving away the disfunction of its owner’s life and suggesting a “new level of surrender” (104) towards a reality that has various suffocating aspects.
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1.2 Class Disparities between London Districts
All situated in Willesden, a notorious district in northwest London for its presumptive non-Britishness and poverty, the second-generation immigrants in NW travel between districts for a living. They depend on public transportation infrastructures such as “streets, walkways, transit lines, canals and railroads” (Lynch 46) which provide them important positions to observe and experience disparities between places in the city. Therefore, this section illustrates immigrants’ travels in London streets, tube and park that reveal profound and harsh disparities between people from different positions and analyzes underclass immigrants’ vulnerability to undereducation, poverty and anxiety.
Firstly, immigrant’ walks in London streets demonstrate disparities between districts, which reveals the class stratification in London. “Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets.” (Jacobs, Great American Cities 39). Streets, as Jane Jacobs reminds us, have always been the epitome of a city. In the “Visitation” part, Leah walks from a street to another street: form the “Lowdown dirty shopping arcade” of Yeats Lane to “mansion flats” of Barlett Avenue, reading the city as a text (Smith, NW 40). What she sees changes from multi-ethnic places where people are in filth, poverty, chaos and misfortune to “Bank of Iraq, Bank of Egypt, Bank of Libya” (40), then to shops of high-end brands, to mansionsof “security lights, security gates, security walls, security trees” (40) where the “Arabs, the Israelis, the Russians, the Americans…united by the furnished penthouse” (41). Leah’s walk is a journey from the multicultural sad land to the multicultural happy land, which reveals the insurmountable disparities between the upper-class immigrants and bottom-class immigrants. As Smith has claimed that “human problems persist” in the capital but “most of them…are ones of class and money, not of race or cultural tendencies” (2010), immigrants in NW become more than “exaggerated ethnic stereotypes” (Shaw 17), but are media to reflect on related issues of disparate socio-economic status or social-standing.
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Chapter 2 Pathogenic Vulnerability of Northwest Precariats
2.1 Instrumentalized Marriages after Neoliberal Traumas
The novel presents Leah Hanwell and Natalie Blake’s pathogenic vulnerability in their instrumentalized marriages caused by traumatic experiences as social underdogs in the capitalist market. Through marrying high, Natalie outgrew her humble beginnings in Caldwell while Leah made a desperate move into marriage to cope with her existential anxiety. Therefore, their marriages doomed by utilitarian intentions or nihilistic imprudenceare dysfunctional and disturbing in lack of mutual understanding and sincerity, which further disempowers them and leads to emotional disorder and even mental breakdown.
Natalie Blake views marriage as a social ladder through which she manages to overcome familial, class and race barriers. As a result, her marriage with Frank De Angelis from an affluent Italian family features an unscrupulous pragmatism. Raised up in a Jamaican plumber family, poverty is Natalie Blake’s first language. When the phone did not ring with news “of pipes leaking or backed-up toilets” (Smith, NW 178) for her father to repair, a strong anxiety would flood the small flat of her family. Natalie suffered a disturbing insecurity in a financially unstable family in childhood, which promotes her to seek economic security in men “socio-economically and culturally alien to her” (211) intentionally. Therefore, Natalie’s attraction to Frank generates first and for most from his aura of relaxing effortlessness with his Ralph Lauren wardrobe and indescribable accent that point to his privileged social and economic status. Smith ironically names Natalie’s marriage with Frank as a three-act play— “The invention of Love” in episode 69, 88 and 91, implying that it is a delicate scheme by Natalie.
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2.2 Estranged Friendship as Failed Inter-racial Bonding
Female protagonists’ pathogenic vulnerability also generates from their estranged friendship in the capitalist market that produces disparities and alienation. The novel charts the friendship of the two female protagonists through a modernist blending of past and present, with particular attention to their estrangement from each other in later life.
Their initial bonding comes about through a near-death experience of Leah which highlights their different ethnic identities: in a children’s pool party, Keisha Blake saved Leah Hanwell’s life, for which Leah’s mother Pauline, a self-important Irish woman, thanked Keisha’s mother. This act of gratitude “in itself was a kind of event” (175) in the deteriorated inter-ethnic conflicts in the community. Thus, in fact, Keisha’s act eased the pision between the Jamaican and Irish parts of the London immigrant population and their friendship has served to embody a comradeship across ethnicities. However, their path perges and their inter-ethnic bonding is corrupted by neoliberal class disparity and competitiveness.
The estrangement between Leah and Natalie in the future was laid down in their childhood when Natalie experienced inequalities between her and Leah in racist environments. In episode 6 titled “Some Answers” in the “Host” part, the young Keisha Blake and Leah Hanwell make a parallel list of their orientations. The list catalogs their favorite movies, crushes, colors and professional aspirations, and a few of their answers match one another.
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Chapter 3 Corporeal Vulnerability of Northwest Inpiduals ........................ 36
3.1 Nonautonomous Subjects in Neoliberal Gender Norms ........................ 36
3.2 Unauthentic Selves in Postcolonial Identity Politics .................................. 40
3.3 Injured Bodies in Failed Multicultural Conviviality ..................... 42
Conclusion .............................. 46
Chapter 3 Corporeal Vulnerability of Northwest Inpiduals
3.1 Nonautonomous Subjects in Neoliberal Gender Norms
Female protagonists’ corporeal vulnerability to hegemonic neoliberal gender norms is presented through their repressed subjectivity in motherhood and sexuality. Writing about the issue of subjectivity, Judith Butler explains that “the self delimits itself, and decides on the material for its self-making, but the delimitation that the self performs takes place through norms which are, indisputably, already in place” (“Rethinking Vulnerability” 225), thus, subjectivity is vulnerable to “the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effect that it names” (“Gender Trouble” 2). In the novel, Smith shows Natalie and Leah’s repressed subjectivity implied in the very ideas of motherhood and heterosexuality which represent the patriarchal gender norms and neoliberal logic of assimilation.
Leah’s spiritual crisis in the novel is mostly caused by motherhood. Nancy Chodorow corroborates that those “behaviors that sabotage fertility and pregnancy…meet up with anunconscious belief and commitment with time standing still” (103). Leah’s wish for stillness and fears of losing herself and her identity result in a rejection of motherhood which she equals to definiteness and death. However, she is constantly pressured into motherhood by her own mother, husband and female colleagues. Though she rejects from the bottom of her heart the image of “normal woman”, whereby woman is understood as an essentialist category, and the “institution of motherhood as compulsory for women” (Butler, “Gender Trouble” 92), Leah tries to behave as “normal women do” (Smith, NW 35) when being with her colleagues. After finding out that she is pregnant, she has her third abortion. But Leah’s concerns over reproduction do not end with the abortion. She has to act to agree with her husband to have a child.
英语论文参考
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Conclusion
In her lecture at the New York Public Library in December 2008, Zadie Smith passionately called for attention to the plight of contemporary immigrants who are “tragically split…between worlds, ideas, cultures, voice”, worrying about “whatever will become of them? Something’s got to give—one voice must be sacrificed for the other. What is double must be made singular” (“Speaking in Tongues” 145). Four years later, NW came out as her most concrete account of the melancholic struggles of immigrants in the socio-economic and ethno-political troubles of the early twenty-first century. In this novel, her special engagement with various complexities that immigrants confront in London makes immigrants’ vulnerability a key issue in this work.
This thesis is first and foremost inspired by academic discussions on human vulnerability. Despite the general undertheorization of the concept of vulnerability, it is generally recognized both as an ontological condition of human being and a socially induced condition that some inpiduals and populations, exposed to social and political violence and the ills associated with poverty, are disproportionately precarious. Immigrants in the London presented in NW are undeniably vulnerable.
Firstly, Smith’s emphasis on locations, acts of mapping, mobility and immobility unveils different ways in which immigrants are subject to the neoliberal and postcolonial construction of the London urban space where there is an asymmetry of power and signification among different groups. Importantly, no matter how hard her characters refuse to play the script assigned by their environment, their struggles are complicated by the increasingly potent postcolonial national discourses as well as global forces impacting in uncontrollable ways on immigrants. The sociopolitical implications of London landscape: the closure, disparity and fragmentation, are what constitute and demonstrate immigrants’vulnerability to marginalization, discrimination and spiritual diaspora.
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