Zadie Smith and Postcolonial Trauma: Decolonising Trauma, Decolonising Selves Zapata Beatriz Prez

This monograph analyses Zadie Smith's White Teeth, On Beauty, NW, The Embassy of Cambodia, and Swing Time as trauma fictions that reveal the social, cultural, historical, and political facets of trauma. This book then explores transgenerational trauma, the tensions between remembering and forgetting, multidirectional memory, and the possibilities of the ambiguities and contradictions of the postcolonial and diasporic characters Smith depicts. Starting with Smith's humorous critique of psychoanalysis and her definition of original trauma, this volume explores Smith's challenge of Western theories of trauma and coping, and how her narratives expose the insidiousness of (post)colonial suffering and unbelonging.

This analysis discloses Smith's effort to ethically redefine trauma theory from a postcolonial and decolonial standpoint, reiterates