How do we become who - PowerPoint Presentation

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2. How do we become who we are?Can we ever truly escape our origins?Must we dance to the music of our time? ‹‹I absolutely adored Swing Time. Perfect as far as literary novels go.››(Taiye Selasi, Observer, Books of the Year)

3. Zadie SmithNovelist Zadie Smith was born in North London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She read English at Cambridge, graduating in 1997.Her acclaimed first novel, White Teeth (2000), is a vibrant portrait of contemporary multicultural London, told through the story of three ethnically diverse families. She became a tenured professor of fiction at New York University in 2010 and lives between New York City and London. Her most recent novels are NW (2012), set in north west London, and Swing Time (2016), set in London, New York and West Africa.

4.  ‹‹[…] You will have to take liberties, you will have to feel free to write as you like… even if it is irresponsible.››(Zadie Smith)

5. BibliographyThe most famous novel by Zadie Smith is White Teeth, her first book  written in 2000.  It won the Whitbread First Novel Award 2000, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize  and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for narrative. She also wrote essays, short stories and novels.White teeth (2000)The autograph Man (2002)On Beauty (2005)NW (2012)Swing Time (2016)

6. Zadie Smith has a lot in common with the protagonist of her most recent work, Swing Time.The author and her unnamed character both were raised in multicultural working-class London neighbourhoods during the 1980’s with Jamaican mothers and English fathers, wrapped in racially ambiguous features of the sort that complicates the senses of identity, culture and belonging for many mixed individuals.

7.  ‹‹It’s as if I had written a book about a path that I’ve never taken […] As if I was performing my fake autobiography. An Imaginary Life.›› (Zadie Smith, An interview with Zadie Smithby Lisa Sproull)Like the narrator of Swing Time, Zadie was a talented singer from an early age. She worked as a cabaret singer to earn money while studying at King’s College, Cambridge. Her love of the American songbook and of the black-and-white movie musicals starring Fred Astaire and GingerRogers that used to air on BBC4 are interests she shares with her novel’s narrator. ‹‹The most autobiographical partin the book are the passions›› (Zadie Smith)

8. Swing TimeGenre: Novel Publisher: Penguin Press (15 November 2016) Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017 Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards 2017Swing Time is Smith’s first book to be narrated in the first person. 

9. ‹‹I didn’t really understand the first-person form,but I was curious about it […] It’s really a new way of looking at other people.››(Zadie Smith, BookPage interview by Lauren Bufferd) ‹‹People want to control how they are perceived […].On Facebook or Instagram, you show others what you want them to see.My experience, though, is there is a lot more going on in the interior.You find out who you are by the things that you do,and it’s not always a pleasant discovery.››(Zadie Smith, BookPage interview by Lauren Bufferd)

10. Structure A very long and breathtaking novel divided into short and outstanding chapters.ProloguePart One – Early Days = 14 chapters Part Two – Early and Late = 7 chaptersPart Three – Intermission = 4 chaptersPart Four – Middle Passage = 12 chaptersPart Five – Night and Day = 6 chaptersPart Six – Day and Night = 7 chaptersPart Seven – Late Days = 11 chaptersEpilogue                                                     

11. Swing time features a change of tone from Smith’s previous work. ‹‹I wanted it to be open that way, to feel very specific but almost as if when you were reading it, you could convince yourself that you were that person, that these things happened to you, that you too were having these childhood memories››(Zadie Smith)‹‹I make characters that seem to me to be credible. I suppose when I’m putting people through hypothetical situations, I think of myself and my flaws. I generally tend to think  that I’m an average type of person so if I’ve had this bad thought, most people have. I kind of go from that basis and extrapolate from my own knowledge of myself.››(Zadie Smith in an interview for cultmontreal.com)

12.  Q: Since your new book spans continents, from Europe to Africa, did you think about the target audience? Who are you writing for?A: This time I was thinking very particularly about black girls. I’m very happy if other people read the book, but that’s who the book is for explicitly, and that’s who I wanted to write to. ‹‹ It’s as if all black life were squished into one story››‹‹It just seemed to me, that what was done to black people, historically, was to take them out of the timeof their life. That’s what fundamentally happened.We had a life in one place and it would have continuedand who knows what would have happened —nobody knows. But it would’ve gone a certain way, and we were removed from that timeline, placed somewhere entirely different,and radically disrupted. And the consequences of thatare pretty much unending. Every people have their trauma.It’s not a competition of traumas. But they’re differentin nature. And this one is about having been removed from time.››(The Pieces of Zadie Smith by Jeffrey Eugenides, The New York Times) 

13. Swing TimeThe title is a clear hyperlink to the 1936 musical comedy film starring the famous dancer Fred Astaire. Since the first lines of the work, dance is the leading thematic element. Born in the Afro-American communities, Swing is a particular genre mainly characterised by oscillations both of rhythm and body. In the novel, dance seems to turn into the writing style of the author. The space-time structure is continuously subject to rhythmic switches: the story moves along two alternating timelines, youth and adulthood; the setting goes back and forth in the triangle London-New York-West Africa.When the music changes, so does the dance.- Hausa proverb

14. SettingThree are the places where the story is shaped, and they are above all states of mind rather than simple physical locations. They are the stages of the progressive growth and definition of the main character.London is the birthplace of the protagonist and the setting of the first phase of her youth. The most recurring and detailed places are the estates, where the main character lives together with other mixed-race families, the nearby St. Christopher's church dance class, and the Willesden school, which gathers multiethnic children.In the middle passage of her life, she moves to New York for work reasons. The Big Apple, commonly considered the emblematic city of the self-realization (the so-called American Dream), is unexpectedly a mere link which will lead her to West Africa, where she will find her inner fulfillment. It is in Africa that she discovers and recognizes her ancestral roots.

15. I wondered whether this will be our last visit and I felt some urgency to retain everything I saw, to imprint the village in memory, its unbroken light, the greens and yellows, those white birds with their blood-red beaks, and the people, my people. (Part Seven, Late days, Chapter six, p.409)

16. In the novel, geographical references to West Africa are not well specified. The only site mentioned is Barra, located in Gambia.The perspective in describing Africa is filtered by an attitude to consider it as a too much generalised and not differentiated block.It was on the plane to Togo […]‘What’s it like?’ I’d asked, leaning over him, looking out of the porthole window, and meaning, I must admit, ‘Africa’. ‘I have not been,’ he said coldly, without turning round. ‘But you practically live here – I read your résumé.’‘No. Senegal, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Sudan, Ethiopia, yes – Togo, never.’‘Oh, well, you know what I mean.’He’d turned to me, red-faced, and asked: ‘If we are flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?’(Part Four, Middle passage, Chapter six, p.194)

17. Plot and charactersThe novel is narrated in the first person from the main character’s point of view, and tells the story of two mixed-race girls who share the same passion for dancing and dream to become professional dancers. Their relationship changes throughout the narration. During their childhood, they behave as close friends, despite some differences in their way of being and background; growing up they separate and undertake different lives: one of them, Tracey, helped by her natural talent and perfectly shaped body, follows her dreams; the other one, the protagonist and narrator whose name is never mentioned, gets the college degree and, by chance, becomes the first assistant of Aimee, a famous pop star.

18. Aimee’s philanthropic project in Gambia leads the protagonist to discover the conditions of life in that part of the world, and to appreciate these far culture and customs. A constant presence in the life of the protagonist is her mother, with whom she has a difficult relationship. The woman follows her – even though not physically – in her several work trips all over the world. Through the words of the narrator, the plot and the characters are shaped following a spasmodic comparison between the protagonist and the people she's surrounded by.

19. MotherWhat do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission. […] all you want from your mother is that she once and for all admit that she is your mother and only your mother, and that her battle with the rest of life is over. She has to lay down arms and come to you. And if she doesn’t do it, then it’s really a war, and it was a war between my mother and me.(Part One, Early days, Chapter 3, p.18)The mother is a Jamaican immigrant who shapes her own existence devoting herself to a political activism, aimed to achieve a social redemption, that is supposed to be both personal and public.

20. The complexity and the majesty of the character are immediately stressed by the association with the image of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti.

21. As a result of the daughter-mother juxtaposition, the protagonist feels a sense of admiration which is, at the same time, constantly mixed up with the difficulty of dealing with her mother's high ambitions.Consequently, she refuses to be entrapped in the stereotyped role of the domestic environment's keeper.Only as an adult did I come to truly admire her - especially in the last, painful years of her life - for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself. (Part One, Early days, Chapter three, p.18) When I was young her refusal to submit to me confused and wounded me. […] my earliest sense of her was of a woman plotting an escape, from me, from the very role of motherhood.’ (Part One, Early days, Chapter three, p.18)I don’t mean that my mother didn’t love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind. (Part Four, Middle passage, Chapter seven, p.200)

22. It is the father instead who plays a role which is commonly associated with mothers' duties. In addition, his only idea of self-fulfillment is linked to family and love. This inversion in aspirations leads to divorce. We all three knew that in divorces the father left, but my father could not leave, there was no question of that. Who, in his absence, would tape up my knee when I fell, or remember when my medicine was to be taken, or calmly comb the nits out of my hair? Who would come to me when I had my night terrors? Who would wash my stinking, yellow sheets the next morning? (Part four, Middle passage, 7, p.200) In the last pages of the novel, when she's about to die, the mother seems to wonder whether her struggle during her life has been effectively successful. This doubt makes the protagonist reflect on her position in the world. Maybe the only possible definition of herself has to be found in a space between my mother's idea of salvation and nothing at all. (Epilogue, p.453)

23. AimeeThe second character in relation to which the protagonist's identity is defined is Aimee. She is an Australian pop star escaped from Bendigo in order to start her artistic career, which has characterised her look, her way of speaking and of conceiving the world. Global is her accent, global are her fame and success, as well as her attitude towards reality. In contrast, she's unable to see the peculiarities of the world around her.What could she know about the waves of time that simply come at a person, one after the other? What could she know about life as the temporary, always partial, survival of that process?(Part Three, Intermission, Chapter two, p.141) 

24. She considers her own life a model which can be applied to everyone's lives ('all of us came from Bendigo'). It emerges that her idea of love is a form of appropriation that allows to possess people.Aimee looked at me […] and told me that she was an artist, and artists have to be allowed to love things, to touch them and to use them, because art is not appropriation, that was not the aim of art – the aim of art was love. And when I asked her whether it was possible both to love something and leave it alone, she regarded me strangely, pulled her children into her body and asked: 'Have you ever been in love?’ (Part Seven, Late days, Chapter two, pp.369-370)

25. An enlightening example of this form of possession is the way Aimee behaves with Lamin. He is a Senegalese man who works as a teacher in Gambia, in particular in the female school financed by Aimee for charity. The pop star falls in love with him and decides to take him with her back to America. The ruling personality of Aimee forces the protagonist to act in order to highlight her superiority and predominance; she feels like a mere object that works in the shadow, protecting her from any kind of negativity that could hit Aimee. The only rebellious action the protagonist has the courage to do is having a sexual relationship with Lamin.I think we both knew perfectly well that whatever passion existed between us was directed […] simply to prove to ourselves our own mutual independence from Aimee.(Part Seven, Late days, Chapter seven, p.421)It causes the dismissal of the protagonist, who finds herself lost and forsaken. 

26. Where the relationship between the narrator and Aimee is clearly based on subordination, there's a character with whom the protagonist feels equal: Hawa, a middle class girl who lives in Gambia.They both want to feel free: they don’t want to get married and have children, and that is what brings them together since the first moment, when they joke about this shared aspect of their lives.'Still no baby?' had become our shorthand and catchphrase for all of this, our mutual situation, and it seemed the funniest thing in the world whenever we exchanged the phrase with each other, we giggled and groaned over it. (Part Six, Day and Night, Chapter two, p.303) 

27. “I am getting married!” I hugged her but felt the familiar smile fasten itself on my face, the same one I wore in London and New York in the face of similar news, and I experienced the same acute sense of betrayal. I was ashamed to feel that way, but I couldn’t help it, a piece of my heart closed against her. (Part Seven, Late days, Chapter three, p.377)Their relationship seems to be wasted at the end of the novel, when Hawa decides to get married.

28. TraceyTracey is the co-protagonist of the novel. Since the first years of their youth, they establish a relationship, which is based on an immediate, physical identification: There were many other girls present but for obvious reasons we noticed each other […]. Our shade of brown was exactly the same – as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both – and our freckles gathered in the same areas, we were of the same height. (Part One, Early days, Chapter one, p.9) 

29. At this early stage Tracey and I were not friends or enemies or even acquaintances: we barely spoke. Yet there was always this mutual awareness, an invisible band strung between us, connecting us and preventing us from straying too deeply into relations with others. (Part One, Early days, Chapter two, p.16) Tracey's talent for dance is immediately evident and it also causes the envy of the main character who, in her turn, has a particular aptitude for singing, but wants to carry on her dedication to dance.

30. Tracey seems to be an arrogant, spoiled and bossy girl. Her behaviour and her will of excel in everything fracture their friendship and it is the reason of several separations in their lives. Her determination influences her way of perceiving the world around her: according to Tracey's vision, music is strictly divided into two categories, black and white. I still knew more than Tracey: I knew there was something not quite right about her rigid notions – black music, white music – that there must be a world somewhere in which the two combined.(Part One, Early days, Chapter four, p.25)It can be seen that, on the other hand, the protagonist tries to find a middle stage in which these two poles can coexist. Tracey's problematic conduct seems to be a reaction to the suffering caused by her difficult familiar situation (her father in jail and her mother unable to be authoritative) Thus, the only reason for Tracey to envy the protagonist is the close bond she has with her father.

31. It is much more evident in relation to Tracey than to the other characters that is just a strong dependence on a dominant figure that let the protagonist define her identity: Tracey is the first and last reference point to which she needs to belong, the resolute guide which gives shape to her life: That autumn, in my first term at my new school, I found out what I was without my friend: a body without a distinct outline. The kind of girl who moved from group to group, neither welcomed nor despised, tolerated, and always eager to avoid confrontation. I felt I made no impression.(Part Four, Middle passage, Chapter ten, p.213)

32. It is only at the end of the novel that the awareness of belonging to two opposite social systems appears to be the major cause of their irreconcilability. The perspective through which the characters are here introduced wants explicitly to stand out the continuous swing which leads the protagonist to switching from a dependent figure to another. Those three dominant characters are at the same time the three reflections and shadows that help her, by contrast and negation, defining her own identity. I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow. (Prologue, p.4)

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34. Why WriteWhat is the author’s role? Is the concept of the author still compelling? In a world where every man is a writer, and everyone “published”, writing must distinguish itself by its skill, its clarity and craft, and writers will justify their existence only if by doing their work they are able to remind us of the true capabilities of language.Zadie Smith, June 15th, 2011

35. Why writeFour reasons: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose.Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. […] No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.George Orwell

36. Why writeThe writing offers a chance to be useful, to be engaged in a dialogue with the wider world.Desire to see things things as they are. Cosindering that we are surrounded by fake realities, the desire of seeing things as they are is a radical act itself. Important to note here that seeing clearly does not mean seeing singularly: on the contrary, it’s the counterfeit realities that tend to be linear and singular.Zadie Smith, 15th June 2011

37. At first simply out of a sense of guilt , but soon enough with the realization that I could reconstruct […] the experience of having been there, until, by one a.m., nobody could have been there more than me. I was far more there than any of the people who had actually been there, they were restricted to one location and one perspective – to one stream of time – whereas I was everywhere in that room at all moments, viewing the thing from all angles, in a mighty act of collation. […] I was compelled by the process. To observe in real time, the debates as they form and coalesce, to watch the developing consensus, the highlights or embarrassments identified, their meanings and sub-texts accepted or denied. (Swing Time, Part Seven, Late Days, Chapter two, p.369)

38. Why writeWhy write? To express the reality of human capacities. Without that, there can be no art and no politics. The way we live now is designed to encourage us to believe that our only worthwhile capacities are the ones that enable us to buy things. Everything else is “farmed out”, delegated to others. Other people grow our food and cook it, other people make the clothes we wear, often in circumstances we’d rather not hear about. […] Writing - no matter how pitiful or absurd it might feel to do it - allows us to demonstrate the fact that we do still have abilities, ideas and means of communication that are our own, unrelated to our credit cards or social positions. It enables us to see the end of our actions – at least here, on this page.Zadie Smith, 15th June 2011

39. Why writeIf modernism has already thought us that the author can’t be all-seeing anymore, today is clear: there’s just too much to see. What else does a writer have but sentences? Asking a writer to forget about sentences is like telling a builder not to worry about the quality of his bricks. Why write? Because you care about this small matter of sentences: you think it important. And you will write them at your own snail’s rate, with all the elaborate care writing deservesZadie Smith, 15th June 2011

40. Small chaptersAlternation between small and long chaptersLong chapters

41. Tracey and the narrator recognize each other in their skin colour:[…]“Tracey and I lined up next to each other, every time, it was almost unconscious, two iron filings drawn to a magnet.” (Part One, Early Days, Chapter two, p.16)“Our shade of brown was exactly the same – as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both –” (Part One, Early Days, Chapter one, p.9) 

42. Moreover, sexual references are explicit such as the “mania in the playground”.The author highlights not only the sexual discrimination between white and black children, but also the power’s dimension since childhood. It seems that the little white girls are covered by an invisible cloak.

43. Working in a pizza place in Kensal Rise after graduation, the narrator meets Bahram, a racist Iranian restaurant-owner and his Somali delivery-boy. “He was in a rage all the time about everything” . “He pointed to a picture of Shelton […]. ‘What? I’m working.’‘Look close. Not black. Brown. Like you.’‘I’m working.’‘Probably he is half-half, like you. So: this explains.’ I looked not at Shelton but at Bahram, very closely. He smiled.‘Half-winner’, he said. I put the phone down, took my apron off and walked out.”(Part Six, Day and Night, Chapter five, p.327)

44. The racial distinction also appears from Tracey’s father words about his experience in jail:[…] “and it wasn’t the guards or anyone telling you to do it, that’s just the way it was, tribes stick together, and it even goes by shade, he explained […] So all of us that was dark like me, well, we’re over here, tight with each other, always […] and brown like you two is somewhere over here, and Paki is somewhere else, and Indian is somewhere else. White is split, too: Irish, Scottish, English.”(Part Four, Middle Passage, Chapter four, p.184) […] “You learn a lot that you can’t learn in school, because these people won’t tell you nothing, nothing about African kings, nothing about Egyptian queens, nothing about Mohammed, they hide it all, they hide the whole of our history so we feel like we’re nothing, we feel like we are at the bottom of the pyramid, that’s the whole plan, but the truth is we built the f****** Pyramids! Oh, there’s a devilishness in them, but one day, God willing, this white day will be done.”(Part Four, Middle Passage, Chapter four, p.185)

45. Within the play Showboat, the main character hides her being a “tragic mulatto” to her husband. So the couple: […]”are threatened with prison, for their marriage is illegal under miscegenation laws. Steve cuts Julie’s palm and drinks a little of her blood: the ‘one drop rule’ – they’re both Negroes now.”(Part Seven, Late Days, Chapter one, p.359)[…] “I remembered the Mississippi, where the ‘niggers’ all work, where the white people don’t, and I gripped the armrest and felt an urge to rise up out of my seat.”(Part Seven, Late Days, Chapter one, pp. 358)

46. It seems that African history does not exist at all: […] “I did not want to rely on each European fact having its African shadow, as if without the scaffolding of the European fact everything African might turn to dust in my hands.”(Part Six, Day and Night, Chapter one, p. 294)

47. Zadie Smith creates a novel that is just like a ballet, a dynamic and exciting tip-tap dance with its rhythms and melodies just like those performed in the American streets by Irish immigrants and African slaves.

48. The narrator shows Tracey the 1937 movie Ali Baba Goes to Town…

49. […]”Ok, Michael, she said, then let’s go to the thing that is most discussed about you, I think, is the fact that the colour of your skin is obviously different than when you were younger, and so I think it has caused a great deal of speculation and controversy as to what you have done or are doing …?” (Part five, Night and Day, Chapter one, p. 237)

50. The novel opens with a meditation on Astaire’s performance in Bojangles of HarlemHis magical performance suddenly seems stained by racism exaggerations.

51. Smith’s critique of western aid policies in developing nations – that financial aid is often ill-conceived, poorly executed and rarely sustained – is not new or unexpected.

52. “The journey creates us, we become the frontiers we cross .”(Salman Rushdie, Step Across this Line, p.410)

53. One by one, people enter the circle to dance and finally the narrator is forced to take the turn; after seeing her dance moves, Hawa says: “Even though you are a white girl, you dance like you are black.”(Part Seven, Late Days, Chapter six, p.417)

54. […] “Then you will know how it is, and how class works, in America. Frankly it was too much for me. I’d really had enough of it by the time I reached New York. Of course we have a system of class here […]But my point is, the people here are still able to say: ‘Of course, a jongo is different from me but I do not have contempt for him.’ Under God’s eye we have our difference but also our basic equality. In New York I saw low-class people treated in a way I never imagined was possible. With total contempt. They are serving food and people are not making even eye contact with them. Believe it or not, I was sometimes treated that way myself.” (Part Five, Night and Day, Chapter five, pp.278-279) 

55. “Another line crossed is the frontier of the skin, of racial difference.” (Salman Rushdie, Step Across this Line, p.418) 

56. But Smith most recently, during an interview with Slate, has declined the political aspect about the multicultural world she creates in her fiction. “I’ve always dealt with [multiculturalism] as a descriptive fact. I don’t have political intelligence […] Sometimes people’s intimate lives reflect the political world, but my first concern is always people.”(Zadie Smith, Article from The Slate Book Review by Isaac Chotiner)

57. […] “It took me a while to figure out that Hawa was that relative rarity in the village, a middle-class girl. The daughter of two university teachers, neither of whom I ever met, her father was working in Milan now, as a traffic warden, and her mother lived in the city and still worked at the university. Her father had taken what people in the village called ‘the back way’, along with Hawa’s elder brother, travelling through the Sahara to Libya and then finally making the dangerous crossing to Lampedusa.” (Part Four, Middle Passage, Chapter eleven, pp.219-220)

58. “You will also find that there are frontiers which, being invisible, are more dangerous to cross than the physical kind.”(Salman Rushdie, Step Across this Line, p.411)

59. Identity, Hybridity and Unhomeliness“But to me a dancer was a man from nowhere, without parents or siblings, without a nation or people, without obligations of any kind, and this was exactly the quality I loved. The rest of it, all the detail, fell away.” (Part one, Early Days, Chapter four, p. 29)Oxford English Dictionary, identity is defined as “The fact of being who or what a person or thing is” “Our shade of brown was exactly the same…our freckles gathered in the same areas, we were of the same hight. But my face was ponderous and melancholy, with a long, serious nose, and my eyes turned down, as did my mouth.” (Part one, Early Days, Chapter one, p.11)

60. “it [identity] only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty“ (Saman Abdulqadir Hussein Dizayi, The Crisis of identity in Postcolonial Novel, p.43)“I saw all my years at once, but they were not piled up on each other, experience after experience, building into something of substance – the opposite. A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.” (Prologue, p.5)

61. Identity and Tracey“How pale, practically colorless, I looked beside him! [Lamin] It made me think of Tracey, of the many times, as a child, she’d placed her arm next to mine, to check once again that she was still a little paler than me” (Part Four, Middle Passage, Chapter three, p.228) “I nodded and waited. Relief came over me, familiar, though I had not felt it for a long time, and I connected it to being taken in hand by Tracey, to having decisions removed from me and replaced instead by her will, her intentions. Hadn’t Tracey always known what games to play, what stories to tell, what beat to choose, what moves to make to it?” (Part six, Day and Night, Chapter five, p.430)

62. Identity and her mother“a woman plotting an escape”(Part one, Early Days, Chapter three, p.23).“I know what poverty is, Mum.” “No, dear, you don’t.” (Part Three, Intermission, Chapter four, p.195)“Weren’t we all Africans, originally? Weren’t we people of the land?” (Part One, Early Days, Chapter thirteen, p.75)“identity as a ‘production’ which is never complete but always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, 1996, p. 167).

63. Identity and Aimee“I noticed she did not have an Australian accent, not anymore, but neither was it quite American or British, it was global: it was New York and Paris and Moscow and LA and London combined” (Part Two, Early and Late, Chapter three, pp.120-121) “a person for whom I scheduled abortions, hired dog walkers, ordered flowers, wrote Mother’s Day cards, applied creams, administered injections, squeezed spots, wiped very occasional breakup tears and so on.” The narrator, in other words, gets that “tiny white woman’s life in order” (Part Two, Early and Late, Chapter seven, p.153) “No, that’s not right – you don’t have a life. She has a life. She has her men and her children and her career - she has the life. We read about it in the papers. You service her life. She’s giant sucking thing, sucking your youth, taking up all your-” (Part Three, Intermission, Chapter four, p.196)

64. Identity and others as Hybridity“But wait: to you I am white?” […] Fern drew back: “Well, it’s interesting for me. In Brazil we don’t understand ourselves as white, you understand. At least my family does not. But you’re laughing – this signifies yes, you think I am?” (Part Five, Night and Day, Chapter three, p.322) “Where I saw deprivation, injustice, poverty, Granger saw simplicity, a lack of materialism, communal beauty… Where I saw polygamy, misogyny, motherless children (my mother’s island childhood, only writ large, enshrined in custom), he remembered… a depressed single mother [and] spoke to me with genuine tears in his eyes of how happier he might have been raised by not one woman but 15.” (Part Four, Middle Passage, Chapter eleven, pp.283-284)

65. Unhomeliness“When Tracey got home each day after school her flat was almost always empty.” (Part One, Early Days, Chapter fourteen, p.80)“Cultural centers, discrete regions, and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of people and things.” (James Clifford, History of Consciousness,1997, p.3)“You have to be familiar enough with it [the center] to know how to move in it. But you have to be sufficiently outside it, so you can examine it and critically interrogate it.” (Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, 1996, p.381)

66. What’s it like?[…] “Africa” “I have not been” “But you practically live here” “No. Senegal, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Sudan, Ethiopia, yes – Togo, never” “Oh, well, you know what I mean.” He’d turned to me red-faced, and asked: “If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?”(Part Four, Middle Passage, Chapter six, p.248)

67. Dancing away from the shadowThe role and meaning of dance in Swing Time

68. Fred Astaire dances backed up by shadows“On the huge screen before me Fred Astaire with three silhouetted figures. They can’t keep up with him, they begin to lose their rhythm. […] Astaire danced alone. I understood all three of the shadows were also Fred Astaire.” (Prologue)

69. From the beginning of the novel, many famous pop stars and dancers are cited.

70. Jeni LeGon“the physical resemblance was so strong, yet she didn’t dance like Tracey. […] she was a hoofer, not an obsessed technician. And she was funny: walking on her toes or freeze-framing for a second in an absurd comic attitude […]. Dressed like the rest - grass skirt, feathers - but nothing could diminish her.”(Part Four, Middle Passage, Chapter five)

71. Jeni LeGon“The person that Tracey had imitated so perfectly all those years ago, the girl we’d watch dance with Eddie Cantor, kicking her legs, shaking her head - that was not really a person at all, that was only a shadow. Even her lovely name, which we’d both so envied, even that was unreal, in reality she was the daughter of Hector and Harriet Ligon, migrated from Georgia, descendants of share croppers, while the other LeGon, the one we thought we knew - that happy-go-lucky hoofer - she was a fictional being, born of a typo […].”(Part Seven, Late Days, Chapter eight)

72. The Kankurang“The greatest dancer I ever saw was the kankourang. […] a wildly swaying orange shape, of a man’s height but without a man’s face, covered in many swishing, overlapping leaves. Like a tree in the blaze of a New York fall that uproots itself and now dances down the street.” (Part Four, Middle Passage, Chapter five)Who comes for the girls?

73. “the Black female dancing body has reclaimed agency over her body as a laborer and producer by using the movement techniques representative of the Wolof ethnic group. […] the movements of women's bodies act as a replacement for the voice in situations where being visual is more effective, more sustaining, and at times more politically empowering than being vocal.” From “Black Dance and the Fight for Flight: Sabar and the Transformation and Cultural Significance of Dance from West Africa to Black America (1960-2010)” by Angela Fatou Gittes

74. A truth revealed“A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.”(Prologue)

75. World Englishes African American Vernacular EnglishJamaican Patois Australian EnglishIranian EnglishGambian English

76. World EnglishesTom McArthur’s Circle of World Englishes (1992)

77. English DiasporaFirst Diaspora  1586 17th century: English spreads to America and Caribbean;18th century: with the United States Declaration of Independence (1776), many settlers left for Canada;1788: first arrival in Australia;1790: first arrival in New Zealand.

78. Second Diaspora  18th and 19th centuryAsia18th century: British trade with China and Hong Kong: development of East Asia English;South Asia English: Indian, Pakistani English;South-East Asia English: Singapore English.AfricaFrom 1850: massive settlements linked to slave trades, led to the development of Pidgin and Creole languagesNigerian pidgin;Gambian English.

79. African American Vernacular English“It is a repertoire of features and systematic structures that African Americans use generally in tandem with standard English, use more with each other than with whites, and use to differing degrees, depending on level of education and identity.” John McWhorter, Word on the street. This variety is spoken by Granger, Aimee’s bodyguard, who comes from Harlem, a large neighborhood in Manhattan. Since the 1920s, Harlem has been known as a major African American residential, cultural and business center

80. African American Vernacular English

81. African American Vernacular EnglishFeatures:Use of ain’t: (I am not) “Yeah, but I ain’t giving it to you. No without me being there.” (Part Two, Early and late, Chapter five, p.106)Deletion of the verb ‘to be’ before the progressive form:“I’m done. We heading back.” (p.105)The use of the verb stem as past and lack of concordance: “I hear there’s some cute boys up in there said Aimee in a sing-song voice- this was meant to be an imitation of Granger.” (p.106)

82. Jamaican PatoisAn English-based creole language with West African influences; This variety, spoken by Estelle, Aimee’s Jamaican nanny, is a “lilting accent” (Part Seven, Late Days, Chapter five, p.396) or “familiar lilt” (p.418), the protagonist says, as she connects it with her childhood memories.

83. Jamaican PatoisFeatures:The use of cyan = can’t“You cyan just come up and touch the baby!” (Part Seven, Late Days, Chapter seven, p. 418)The /d/ pronunciation of all instances, where RP would have /ð/ “My mudder take care of dem for me.” (p. 420) “You ever been dere?” (p. 420)

84. Australian EnglishThere are no clear references to differences in structure and grammar, the author just wants to point out the differences in accent with Aimee:“Though she’d left Bendingo behind - did not sound like her people any more, had always sung with a faux-American accent.” (Part Three, Intermission, Chapter two, p.133)“Chin up, Granger, said Aimee, in a terrible British accent.” (Part Two, Early and Late, Chapter five, p.105)

85. Australian EnglishUnderline, with her lack of accent, her being global: “I noticed she did not have an Australian accent, not any more, but neither was it quite American or quite British, it was global: it was New York and Paris and Moscow and LA and London combined. Of course now lots of people speak in this way but Aimee’s version was the first time I heard it.” (Part Two, Early and Late, Chapter three, p. 95)

86. Borrelli Carmela MCC/00610Califano Enza MCC/00607Califano Maddalena MCC/00639D’Alterio Anna MCC/00540Esposito Roberto MCC/00613Marra Arianna MCC/00533Martorelli Roberta MCC/00646Orfano Anna MCC/00630Pelullo Elsa MCC/00667Romano Martina MCC/00626Salato Valeria MCC/00636Tkach Oksana MCC/00635Tramontano Giovanna MCC/00668