The Opacity of the World: Zadie Smith’s Swing Time

Abstract

Abstract Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time explores the complex ways in which women relate to each other across cultural difference and generational gaps, as mothers and daughters, as rivals and friends. My article traces the friction between Black feminist group solidarity and aesthetic distance in Swing Time to suggest that the novel can be brought into dialogue with a postcolonial aesthetics of opacity, as coined by Édouard Glissant. The tension between opacity and transparency is the organizing principle of Swing Time, as the novel engages with movement and change, postcolonial spaces, and the mysteries of friendship, while vacillating between ironic narrative commentary and a more elusive aesthetics of concealment. Reading Smith’s work through a Glissantian lens also sheds light on affinities between her essayistic writing and her fiction.