النص
Volume 11, Numéro 2, Pages 199-221
2025-12-10

Dual Identities And The Convivial Self: Rethinking Diasporic Identity In Zadie Smith’s White Teeth Through A Lacanian- Gilroyan Perspective



Authors : Ben Ahmed Abir . Aaid Salah Eddine .

Abstract

Based on its significant engagement with intersecting lives across ethnic, cultural, and generational divides, Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth (2000) manifests to uncover her unparalleled style, which interrogates dual identities, (un) belonging and the fragmented sense of self in London’s multicultural metropolis. Smith’s protagonists cease not to wrestle with fractured notions of selfhood and the elusive quest for coherence in a space shaped by migration and transnational encounters. This paves the way for a novel analysis through the intersecting lenses of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Gilroy’s theory of conviviality. Postulating on Lacan’s concepts of the split subject and lack and desire alongside Gilroy’s notion of the convivial or mongrel self, this article will explore how psychic fragmentation and sociocultural hybridity may possibly converge. By juxtaposing two generations, Smith dramatizes the unattainability of essentialist identity while gesturing towards the probability of convivial futures, wherein the second-generation characters renegotiate their fractured selves by embracing hybridity and relational belonging, redirecting towards Gilroy’s notion of the convivial self. Ultimately, this study contributes to scholarship by bridging psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory to demonstrate how the Lacanian recognition of lack is not a dead impasse but rather a precondition for the emergence of convivial selfhood across multiple diasporic generations.

Keywords

Zadie Smith ; White Teeth ; the Split Subject ; the Convivial Self ; Multicultural London

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