The title of White Teeth is instructive because it encapsulates one of the book's main themes—how society reinforces the harmful notion that our shared humanity is challenged and undermined by differences of race and culture. However, all of us, whatever our skin color, nationality, or racial heritage, have the same white teeth. It is the color of our teeth that identifies us all as being part of the same human family.
Paradoxically, white teeth can also symbolize racial differences. The children discover this in chapter 7 when they bring food from their school's Harvest Festival to an old man by the name of Mr. Hamilton. The old war veteran is an unabashed racist, and tells the children about the time he served with the British Army in the Congo. At that time, white teeth served to accentuate racial distinctions:
Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the n****r was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery, it was. And they died because of it, you see? Poor bastards (p.113).
Ironically, Mr. Hamilton only has false teeth. This can be interpreted as further evidence of his general lack of humanity.
Monday, March 16, 2015
Explain title of the novel White Teeth. Where does Smith explicitly reference the title in the novel and what does the scene demonstrate?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment