Dancing Bodies in Zadie Smith's Swing Time

This essay reads Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) as generating innovative and insightful conversations between literary criticism and dance studies. Smith's novel explores the onstage and offstage performative experiences and challenges of hybridized bodies and hyphenated identities in a t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ariel 2024-04, Vol.55 (2), p.85-108
Main Author: Yang, Karen Ya-Chu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African Americans
Black history
Cultural appropriation
Cultural studies
Dance
Essays
Females
Gender
Harlem Renaissance
Literary characters
Literary criticism
Multiracial people
Novels
Objectification
Race
Smith, Zadie (1975- )
Transnationalism
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Summary:This essay reads Zadie Smith's Swing Time (2016) as generating innovative and insightful conversations between literary criticism and dance studies. Smith's novel explores the onstage and offstage performative experiences and challenges of hybridized bodies and hyphenated identities in a transcontinental context. The novel sets up an interactive dancefloor for its leading characters—the unnamed female narrator and her childhood friend Tracey—both of whom are biracial and live in the working-class neighborhoods of Northwest London. Drawing from cultural studies and dance theories, this essay considers the narrator's and Tracey's practices and experiences of dance to discuss the swinging connections and disconnections between selves, bodies, and cultures carried through the protagonists' challenged expressions of agency and mobility in glocal and transnational contexts.
ISSN:0004-1327
1920-1222
1920-1222
DOI:10.1353/ari.2024.a925430