Gendered, post-diasporic mobilities and the politics of blackness in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016)

Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time (2016) traverses the geographies and
temporalities of the Black Atlantic, unsettling conventional definitions of a black
African diaspora, and restlessly interrogating easy gestures of identification and
belonging. In my analysis of Smith’s text, I argue that these interconnected
spaces and the characters’ uneasy and shifting identities are representative of
post-diasporic communities and subjectivities. The novel’s representations of
female friendships, mother-daughter relationships, and professional relationships
between women, however, demonstrate that experiences of diaspora/postdiaspora are complicated by issues of gender. Forms of black dance and
African diasporic music represent the novel’s concerns with mobility and stillness;
dance is used by its young female characters as a “diasporic resource” (Nassy
Brown 2005, 42), a means of negotiating and contesting existing structures of
gender, class and culture.