1In On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s third novel, Carl, a young Black rapper from the suburbs of Boston, is suddenly introduced to the very coded academic universe of Wellington, the fictional city where the novel is set. Following the opposite trajectory, Levi, a young mixed-race upper-middle-class teenager elaborates a fake Brooklyn accent and joins a group of Haitian immigrants to fight for their rights. Two women whose husbands hate each other become friends, while their children fall in and out of love with young people from different social and geographical backgrounds. Despite their apparent self-confidence, all of them are marked by doubts, vulnerability and a strong sense of otherness.

2Such are some of the characters constituting the population of On Beauty. Their diversity as well as their commonalities trigger the need to make sense of their crisscrossing trajectories that defy the well-established and ancient geography of the place, a venerable town whose university is reminiscent of Harvard, which was probably “modeled on Mefdord, MA” (Jackson 2012, 860), a city northwest of Boston. Zadie Smith loves a variety of characters, a diversity of social, geographical and racial origins; she loves blurring lines that are supposed to be neat and to introduce confusion where there should be order. Crossing lines is even the topic of her fourth novel, NW. On Beauty prefigures this with the varied cast of characters who meet and whose relations flourish or are destroyed by misconceptions, prejudices or death in one case. A contemporary rewriting of E.M. Forster’s Howards End, On Beauty has been read as a postmodernist novel, “a revision” of a classic novel “to present different sides of the original [story] or to demonstrate something lacking in [it]” (Paproth 2008, 23). This missing element would be the focus on power and race relations in issues of class, as Tynan explains (2008, 78). Set “in a postcolonial world in which the complicity of aesthetic norms with power and oppression has been so thoroughly exposed” (Anjaria 2008, 48–9), On Beauty nevertheless establishes a sharp contrast with White Teeth, which also deals with postcolonial issues. Far from what James Wood called “hysterical realism” (Wood 2000), Smith’s third novel contains fewer characters, fewer plot lines, and offers clear-cut contrasts that have nothing to do with White Teeth’s buoyant excesses. Yet, as Tynan interestingly points out, “the movement of these novels is to consistently undermine these seeming contradictions, dwelling on their various points of intersection, rejecting the hollowness of a dualistic view of the universe, and embracing complexity and hybridity” (2008, 75). Smith focuses on encounters which take place despite geographical distance, social or racial disparity, antagonistic familial beliefs and she introduces confusion and disorder. Her characters themselves combine, often with difficulty, several identities. How does Smith propose to reconfigure borders that usually define neat categories? What role does language play in the invisible battle that consists in finding the place where one belongs? Can social relationships reconfigure space?

3Social relations, by dislocating and re-creating borders, tentatively create ‘places’, in the meaning conferred to the word by geographer Doreen Massey. Physical spaces and social order, however, remain the same, notably through the permanence of institutionalized borders. Suggesting that race can be the reason for this endurance, the study will lead to a discussion on how On Beauty deals with blackness and alterity, in between subjective and normative borders.

I. Creating ‘Places’: Social Relations Dislocating and Re-creating Borders

4In On Beauty, diverse characters meet, whose origins or histories would probably have made these encounters impossible. Yet they happen, friendships develop and these new social relations tend to dislocate social borders.

5On Beauty is initially structured around the academic and personal hatred of two Professors, Howard Belsey and Montague Kipps. The former was born into a British working-class family, married an African-American woman and proudly holds progressive political and moral principles, while the latter was born in the Caribbean, raised in the UK and can be best described as a fervent conservative Catholic. In a rebellion that is strongly reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (and surely it is not by chance that Smith named one of the Professors Montague), Belsey’s son falls in love with Kipps’s daughter, a transgression that forcibly brings the two families closer. Later on, Kiki Belsey decides to pay Carlene Kipps a visit and the wives of men who have been feuding for decades progressively become friends. Thus doing, they renegotiate what Doreen Massey calls the “social geometry of power” (Massey 1994, 3) as defined by their husbands who, until then, held power in deciding that they were enemies. Their friendship defies the insurmountable borders created by their husbands and goes against the usual family stands that the Kippses and the Belseys hate one another. This unexpected friendship creates a ‘place’, defined by Massey as follows:

a ‘place’ is formed out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location. And the singularity of any individual place is formed in part out of the specificity of the interactions which occur at that location (nowhere else does this precise mixture occur) and in part out of the fact that the meeting of those social relations at that location […] will in turn produce new social effects.” (Massey 1994, 168)

6If the teenagers’ short-lived love affair embarrassingly brought the two families closer, the wives’ friendship does so imperceptibly but unquestionably. The ‘specificity of their interaction’ produces ‘new social effects’. When Kiki goes to a conference given by Kipps, her irate husband demands an explanation and she answers: “Sometimes I feel it’s always the same viewpoint in this house. And I’m just trying to get all points of view.” (Smith 2006, 392). Carlene, upon her premature death, bequeaths a valuable painting to Kiki, because, she writes, “this painting […] needs to be loved by someone like you” (Smith 2006, 430), thus suggesting that her own family are unable to appreciate the work of art for its artistic value (in which she is proven right by the stingy reaction the Kippses have when they discover this legacy: they do not respect Mrs Kipps’ will and decide to keep the painting, for its financial value might become of interest). Carlene’s death, however, does prevent the friendship from further blossoming and the two families remain divided, as the example of the painting illustrates.

7Challenging social borders is the friendship Zora Belsey (Howard and Kiki’s daughter) tries to create and keep alive with Carl, the young rap genius. Carl comes from the suburbs of Boston and his repeated encounters with Zora are primarily due to chance. Attracted by the young man’s exceptional beauty, Zora makes friends with him, secretly hoping that a love story will follow. Undeterred by their very different social backgrounds, Zora experiences the fact that, as Massey explains, “the identities of place are always unfixed, contested and multiple” (Massey 1994, 5). She does not, at first, “place boundaries around” (Massey 1994, 5) Wellington, as the Kipps family does for instance, and she readily accepts that a place is defined by social relations that stretch beyond themselves. Carl comes from another world, geographically and socially, though he makes frequent intrusions in Wellington, and Zora is open to this. But they obviously do not share the same codes of communication because, for a start, Zora never understands that she is just a friend to Carl, though this is rendered obvious enough to the reader; and sadly, despite her infatuation, she is very often blinded by her own prejudices against him. On her first two encounters with him, she suspects him of having stolen something from her, though the first time, it is actually Zora who takes Carl’s Discman by mistake: we can see how Smith diverts the readers’ expectations and possibly raises awareness on their own prejudices. When Zora’s brother asks her to give the Discman back to Carl, whom, at this stage, no one among the Belseys knows, she tartly answers: “Levi, if you and your friend want to be gangstas, piece of advice: you’ve got to take, not ask.” (Smith 2006, 74). The irony is noticeable: Smith makes a well-educated young woman advise her brother on how to “be gangsta”, reversing the phrase one would expect from her, “you have to ask, not take”. Still playing on inverting stereotypes, Smith then describes Carl, a hooded, tall, young, Black man, carefully approaching Zora: “The young man stepped forward cautiously, with one hand up as if to show he meant no harm.” (Smith 2006, 74). This description shows that Carl is harmless and honest, not the expected ‘gangsta’. It also implies that, because of his appearance, Carl has to introduce himself this way, obviously waving a white flag. According to Massey, a place is not defined by contrast with “the other which lies beyond”, but by “interconnections to that ‘beyond’.” (Massey 1994, 5). Carl’s extended hand is a signal, an offer of interconnection replying to the Belseys’ wariness, who could be prone to differentiate themselves from the socially, if not racially, other. However, though Carl keeps on proving his honesty (by always giving back what has been inadvertently exchanged or borrowed), in Zora’s interconnections with him, the ‘beyond’ often takes more place than the ‘interconnection’: she is even seized by “paranoia” at some point, while Carl’s eyes merely “wandered around the place” (Smith 2006, 139, my emphasis): “She imagined for a moment that all these questions were a kind of verbal grooming that would later lead—by routes she didn’t pause to imagine—to her family home and her mother’s jewelry and the safe in the basement.” Despite her attraction to Carl, and his politeness and kindness towards her, Zora instinctively imagines the worst without even trying to make herself see reason, as the phrase between dashes points out. She challenges social borders (probably just because she’s smitten) but more or less unconsciously, she maintains invisible boundaries in place.

8Levi, Zora’s younger brother, completes the opposite trajectory to that of Carl. He hides his upper-middle-class origin by elaborating a Brooklyn accent and adopting the outfit that will allow him to look ‘street’, in his own word (Smith 2006, 63). Massey explains that the identity formation of a subject is paralleled to that of a place, seen as an ‘articulation’ (Massey 1994, 8) yet Levi places himself out of this particular articulation: his place of identity formation is a wealthy and white university town in which, not being much interested in the academic world, he does not feel at home. “The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics.” (Smith 2006, 79–80). Though this remark in which the teenager is blatantly exaggerating his ‘predicament’ is designed to make the reader smile, we are meant to understand how alienated Levi feels in his own home, which, it is said a few pages later, ‘appeared more surreal to him than ever’ on the occasion of this anniversary (Smith 32). His dark skin is also a source of awkwardness in his area, despite the fact that he has always lived in the same house, and Levi is sure that ‘There was always some old lady who needed to be reassured’ on the fact that he was not going to rape her (Smith 2006, 80). Hence his need to escape his home and to create a circle of friends outside Wellington. We could argue that this makes him an “anti-essentialist”, which Massey defines as someone who “can recognize difference, and which yet can simultaneously emphasize the bases for potential solidarities” (Massey 1994, 8). Levi knows that he is seen as different, as other, in his neighbourhood, while also perceiving the possible solidarities with other people, and it is in this particular articulation that he chooses to place himself. Dislocating social borders, beginning with his own social origin, Levi starts mixing up with a group of Haitians and he fights for their rights alongside them. He sincerely empathizes with this group, though he is too young and too new to political struggles to get the bigger and proper picture, unobstructed by stereotypes: “People in Haiti, they got NOTHING, RIGHT? We living off these people, man! We - we - living off them! We sucking their blood!” (Smith 2006, 428). The broken grammar in these sentences, in addition to illustrating how Levi detaches himself, linguistically, from his family (“stealing somebody else’s grammar” in Zora’s words, (Smith 2006, 85)), may account for Levi’s lack of acute understanding of this complex issue. However, just as Carl does not fit in Wellington, Levi does not fit within this group: social barriers remain strong and he is soon recognized as being upper-middle class, especially when he pays a visit to one of them who does not understand the purpose of this social call, and who eventually tells him: “And I know you don’t live near here, Levi. […] Felix lives in Wellington […] He saw you there.” (Smith 2006, 360–1). Levi defines himself at an articulation larger than the geographical place he grew up in, but for the immigrants he wants to help, despite their shared skin colour, he is “other”, and eventually he faces the same wariness from them.

9The characters in On Beauty are often curious about one another and try to get to know each other and create different places, changing the smooth social order of Wellington, but most of the time, either their appearances or their prejudices prevent a real friendship from existing, except in the case of Carlene and Kiki who create a sincere but ephemeral friendship. In this old university town, institutionalized borders hold fast.

II. Institutionalized Borders: the Permanence of Physical Spaces and Social Order

10If social borders are strongly felt by the characters, geographical and institutional borders are even more conspicuous in the neat, old and venerable city of Wellington.

11This fictitious university town is indeed described as a bounded space, and for some (like the conservative Montague Kipps), there is “a reassuring boundedness” (Massey 1994, 168) to it. As Massey explains, “such understandings of the identity of places require them to be enclosures, to have boundaries and—therefore and most importantly—to establish their identity through negative counterposition with the Other beyond the boundaries” (Massey 1994, 169). The reason why the liberal, mixed-race Belsey family hate the Kippses is because, despite their blackness, they are conservative and anti-Affirmative Action, as Kiki Belsey explains to one of Howard’s colleagues who is surprised by this piece of information: “He’s just a black conservative who thinks it’s demeaning for African-American kids to be told they need special treatment to succeed, etcetera” (Smith 2006, 122). Monty Kipps, during an argument with Howard, declares that the Affirmative Action bill is a “corruption” (Smith 2006, 329), and he readily confesses his objection to gay people, which is a Christian moral principle for which he finds inacceptable to be discriminated against (Smith 2006, 330–1). Kipps’ different poles of identity formation (his elite class, his religion) actually separate him from others whom he does not want to include in a closer social circle. He strongly maintains these boundaries with twisted arguments that are alluring but biased, thus establishing, and entirely taking responsibility for, his reputation as a conservative. Howard Belsey, in his hatred, even goes as far as comparing the Kippses to the Ku Klux Klan (Smith 2006, 392). However, Belsey is much less liberal when it comes to letting Carl, whom he barely remembers after the Discman incident, into his house, and here is how he perceives him when Carl rings at his door: “Tall, pleased with himself, pretty, too pretty like a conman, sleeveless, tattooed, languid, muscled, a basketball under his arm, black. Howard kept hold of the half-open door.” (Smith 2006, 105) The last word of the noun sentence, “black”, seems inevitable after such a description fraught with allusions (conman, tattoos…) but is nonetheless surprising given that Belsey is married to a Black woman and has three mixed-race children, one of whom happens to have invited Carl over. However, this time, Carl, who just came from the basketball court, “act[ing] like [he] belonged there” (Smith 2006, 105) remains on the threshold. A few pages later, meeting Zora at the university swimming-pool, he accompanies her to the entrance of the university and leaves her there. Carl’s different trajectories and geographical positions in On Beauty reveal how difficult it is to cross certain boundaries and even when he crosses those thresholds, he still does not belong. When, by way of elaborate plot twists, he gets an official job at Wellington, the uselessness of his job only serves to show the endurance of a physical and social space that does not welcome him: “[Erskine] created a job where before there had been only floor space” (Smith 2006, 372). Sure enough, Carl is given a job instead of “floor space”, a rather ironic phrase to use when we know that what Carl loves to do is to “take the floor” to rap. But his office is located in a remote corner of the library, far away from everything and everyone: “a closed-off corridor at the back of the Black Studies Department with three small rooms leading from it” (Smith 2006, 372). From this moment, Carl is inside but he remains an outsider on the margins of the university. The examples of Carl and Monty Kipps reveal how complicated it is to cross thresholds, be it for social or ideological reasons.

12In addition to the university, there is another, less official ‘institution’ in Wellington, but an institution nonetheless, according to the narrator: the ‘Bus Stop’, which is a bar, a Moroccan restaurant “attracting students, the aged hippies of Kennedy Square, professors, locals and tourists” (Smith 2006, 211) and a club space in the basement where everyone can take the stage to sing, rap or slam. Given this alluring description, we can wonder whether it is a real transcultural place, in the meaning proposed by Mikhail Epstein in Transcultural Experiments: “Transculture is not simply a mode of integrating cultural differences but a mode of creating something different from difference itself” (Berry and Epstein 1999, 112). It surely looks like a unique place where different social, racial, ethnic communities, mingle together, particularly around food: “Although there was no Moroccan diaspora in Wellington to appreciate the authenticity of lamb tagine or the saffron couscous, this had never tempted the Essakalli family into Americanization. They served what they themselves enjoyed eating and waited for the Wellingtonians to acclimatize, which they did” (Smith 2006, 211, my emphasis).

13The Moroccan family makes no effort to americanize their food (though the décor betrays a “kitschy ethnic charm” (Smith 2006, 211)) and the locals enjoy the place as it is, which would suggest a successful example of transculturalist encounter, “something different from difference itself”. However, when looking closer, one realizes that for the Wellington students, coming to the Bus Stop is a social experimentation. When Claire, the fancy poetry teacher takes her students there, they have come to judge the quality of the poetry and performance, not without a certain dose of contempt and a smug feeling of distinct belonging. Claire’s first observation on “the ethnography of the basement” (Smith 2006, 220), where the show takes place, is that “she could see only a few other white people […] it would take a little while to feel comfortable.” (Smith 2006, 220). Claire’s first instinct is to look for people like her, in skin colour and age, and failing to find them, she feels at once uneasy and relieved that she can be “camouflaged among her students” (Smith 2006, 220). The use of the word “ethnography”, opening this chapter, reveals the true intention of the teacher for taking her students here: they are on a mission, to observe “the Other” in their “natural habitat”. And the students, listening to the first artist, play their part willfully: “This was not good. Claire listened to her students’ lively discussion about why this was not good. In the spirit of pedagogy she tried to encourage them to be less abusive, more specific. She was only partially successful in this.” (Smith 2006, 220). The whole passage is written from Claire’s point of view and it is made clear how, feeling uneasy in this environment, she makes no great effort to control her students. Students analyzing a real-life performance should not be abusive at all, precisely for pedagogy’s sake, but Claire does not condemn their attitude, she only “encourage[s] them to be less abusive”. When one of the students makes a joke that everybody hears, the presenter repeats it, incredulous, and then goes on, mocking him:

Bring on the poetry? […] I know that be a Wellington kid…’ Laughter detonated through the basement, loudest among Claire’s class itself. ‘[…] We got some educated brothers in here tonight. Bring on the poetry. Bring on the trigonometry. Bring ON the algebra—bring that shit ON,’ he said in the ‘nerd’ voice with which black comedians sometimes imitate white people. (Smith 2006, 222)

14Behind the apparent humour, and because of the mock call-and-response dialogue, racial tensions are palpable, and the mirthless laughter (particularly from the students who try to hide themselves with an artificial communal laugh) only reinforces the phony good spirits of the room. If The Bus Stop tends towards transculturalism, the presence of Wellington students suggests the upholding of an elitist boundedness, therefore a failure of a genuine transcultural experience.

15Despite these initial tensions, it is thanks to the Bust Stop that Carl, having won the contest, unofficially integrates Claire’s poetry class at Wellington. However, this sudden deterritorialization, to use a Deleuzian term, does not allow him to reterritorialize, that is, to leave his mark—for as Deleuze reminds us, “it is the mark that makes the territory” (Deleuze 1980, 388, my translation). Carl is definitely talented but just as Zora does not understand his communication codes, Carl does not understand academic codes. During his first class, he realizes that he knows nothing about poetry’s technique and after several classes he still wonders if this “wasn’t a kind of sick joke being played on him” (Smith 2006, 260). When Claire asks him what is the difference between poetry and rap, the circularity and lack of arguments in his answer show how little he is used to oratory debates: “ ‘They two different things,’ Carl had argued, ‘two different art forms. Except rap ain’t no art form. It’s just rap.’” (Smith 2006, 259). Carl is using an imperfect concatenation here: his language is flawed, as the absence of the verb in the first sentence illustrates—and this also indicates that despite the academic context, Carl will not make an effort to speak in a more formal way. Yet he still succeeds in bringing a poetic rhythm thanks to a mix of epanadiplosis (with the repetition of the word ‘rap’) and anadiplosis (with the repetition of ‘two different things’) into a casual sentence. Thus, he proves his teacher right when she says “the grammar of it…is hard-wired in your brain” (Smith 2006, 259): “The first thing Claire did with Carl’s rap… was show him of what it was made. Iambs, spondees, trochees, anapaests. Passionately Carl denied any knowledge of these arcane arts” (Smith 2006, 259). Language is key here in the sense that it is what makes Carl enter this class, but it is also what marks him as an outsider. We know that he does not really care for this class. He knows how to rap but has no theoretical knowledge, no use for it, and no desire to learn it since poetry comes naturally to him. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, “deterritorialising oneself means leaving a habit, a sedentary way of life. More exactly, it means escaping an alienation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 162). But in Carl’s case, it is precisely that deterritorialisation that alienates him. Never at ease, never sure to understand the codes, always doubting the enthusiasm of the other students, he does not feel freer or more at ease with his personal use of language, despite what Claire, the liberal teacher who fancies herself as a (white) savior, would like. Even when he gets a job at Wellington, thus entering the university on an official contract, he cannot properly reterritorialise himself because this job was not created for him but for the tranquility of the Professor who created it. Eventually, he knows better than to remain in this space where, he legitimately remarks, “I’m just some experiment for you to play with” (Smith 2006, 418), that is to say, a space where he has become alienated.

16Wellington Institutions are not impenetrable physically, but the social order they impose is sure to let outsiders on the thresholds, especially when these outsiders are Black.

III. Subjective and Normative Borders: Dealing with Blackness and Alterity

17Carl’s failed integration into Wellington shows how race can still be an alterisation factor, which triggers, for some characters, a feeling of vulnerability and the loss of their sense of belonging.

18This is most obvious with Carl, who claims, before disappearing from the novel, “you people aren’t even Black anymore” (Smith 2006, 418). Here, Carl, certainly one of the characters with the strongest moral sense, is defining blackness as a behaviour, an attitude of solidarity and respect that he feels the Belsey children lack: “People like me are just toys to people like you… […] I don’t know what you are. You think you’re too good for your own people […] You so sure of yourself, you so superior” (Smith 2006, 418–419). If he ever thought their skin colour would make their relations easier, it is clear to him by the end of the novel that social conventions are stronger than their race. In the quote above, the division between “people like me” and “people like you” is social, not racial, a community which is referred to with the phrase “your own people”. In Carl’s logic, race should be the one factor that brings them closer against white oppression, and it is deeply upsetting for him to discover that rich Black people, ‘intellectuals’ as he calls them, can participate in this oppression: “Ok, how about Monty Kipps? […] You know him? OK. He been screwing Chantelle Williams […] And now he wants Chantelle out of the class, for why? Cover his ass” (Smith 2006, 418). This degree of corruption is unimaginable for Carl, despite the fact that he himself has had sex with one of his teachers: at least there were no political consequences then. Despite their shared skin colour, Carl feels alienated, which triggers a feeling of vulnerability because the usual borders are blurred and his usual categories are shaken. His is a vulnerability in the Levinasian term: a sensibility, in so far as it is “an exposure to the other” (Levinas quoted in Ganteau 2015, 77), an ‘openness to the other’. Carl has dared enter this world, mix with them, try and understand them by listening to them and observing them, but what he understands in the end is their blatant selfishness, their pride in being there, and their corruption. However, he is actually right on one thing: the Belsey children are not Black, they are mixed-race. It is their father, English and white, who made them fluent in “Wellington language”, and he perfectly succeeded only with Zora: Jerome chooses another university while Levi prefers the street. But then again, we know from passages focusing on Zora that she doesn’t know who or what she is either: when she does not “feel the part: she dresse[s] it instead” (Smith 2006, 129), when she is “not in company it [does not] seem to her that she ha[s] a face at all” (Smith 2006, 209). These remarks point to Zora’s deep-rooted insecurity that she hides with the masks, clothes and attitude of “the cool kid”, but she is never sure to be doing it right, and as a matter of fact, part of her popularity comes from the fact that her father is a professor and that she can feed her friends with juicy anecdotes. At home, race is a forbidden topic: Howard “disliked and feared conversations with his children that concerned race” (Smith 2006, 85), probably because he can’t follow them here, in this experience that they live in their flesh, not in their intellect. So in this racially complex family, where race should be an easy topic, it is actually a taboo and it alienates the family members from one another. Howard, who should learn from his children, shuns all racial conversations for fear of being lost. Despite his having three mixed-race children, he is not able to be as open to difference as Carl is when he enters Wellington. Hence, Carl is despondent and indignant when he realizes that there are forms of blackness that are other to him because of social backgrounds, but the Belsey children and Zora in particular feel no better, for they live in a permanent state of alterity.

19Carl’s last comment, “you people aren’t even black anymore”, echoes the desperate cry uttered by Kiki Belsey in one of her many rows with her husband, earlier in the novel. Betrayed by her husband who cheated on her with a white intellectual (nothing like Kiki), and feeling utterly alone, she exclaims: “My whole life is white. I don’t see any black folk anymore unless they be cleaning under my feet in the fucking café in your fucking college […] I don’t even know who I am anymore.” (Smith 2006, 206). Her skin colour, and the fact that she’s not, like her social circle, an intellectual, makes her feel illegitimate and, ironically, invisible, in this white environment. This may be the reason why she has put on a lot of weight. Some complex issues are at stake around Kiki’s obesity: it may be read as an unconscious signal to her husband to see her, to keep seeing her beauty despite her altered physical appearance (which he fails to do). It can also be seen as a way of conforming to the representation she thinks white people have about black women: it is, as bell hooks explains in Ain’t I A Woman, “the image of the overweight nagging maternal figure” (bell hooks 1981, 66), and “the stereotypical image of Aunt Jemima depict[ing] the black woman as passive, longsuffering and submissive” (bell hooks 1981, 84). After years, and especially after the infidelity of her husband, Kiki’s blackness becomes a burden, even a source of shame, as we can suppose from her wry, and surely not accidental, comparison with “the Aunt Jemima on the cookie boxes of their childhoods, the pair of thick ankles Tom and Jerry played around” (Smith 2006, 51). Despite Kiki’s strong personality, despite the fact that she owns the house and that her British husband is the immigrant, after years of living in a white world, she cannot help falling into the traps of stereotyped representations when her husband ceases to see and love her for who she is. Her openness to her husband’s alterity has made her vulnerable. As Jean-Michel Ganteau writes in his introduction to The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction: “If subjectivity is defined in ethical terms as the capacity to welcome the other—the subject hosting the other—, vulnerability designates the way in which the subject is emptied of his/her being” (2015, 6).

20This is exactly what happens to Kiki who, at this stage in the novel, is but the shadow of her former self. Despite her obesity, or maybe because of it, she feels empty inside, she confesses that she does not know who she is and where her loyalty lies. Like her daughter Zora, she has no self-confidence and is never sure to adopt the proper tone, as her conversations with Carlene testify. It may be that this alterity she feels is only a subjective border and not a normative one, but for her, it is real enough to push her to leave her house by the end of the novel. And for Levi, one of her mixed-race children, who is often suspiciously watched as he walks the streets of his neighbourhood, this alterity, this blackness, is far from subjective as he feels “he could use a T-shirt” saying “YO - I’M NOT GOING TO RAPE YOU” (Smith 2006, 80), to reassure all the “old ladies” who fear his blackness. Levi, Carl and Kiki’s feelings of vulnerability under the gaze of the (mostly white) inhabitants of Wellington tend to show that the norm here is still white, and that they are part of a tolerated alterity and minority.

21With its diversity of perspectives, points of view and trajectories, On Beauty, to borrow Ganteau’s words, both “hosts and performs” (Ganteau 2015, 27) alterity. Zadie Smith transcends literary borders by writing a multifaceted text, effortlessly flowing from the academic language which Zora brilliantly masters to the administrative language of university members, to Claire’s poetry, to Carl’s rap, to Levi’s “street” cadence, and to Kiki’s mobile language, switching from regular American to the vernacular she inherited from her mother. Smith’s text is layered by these different forms of language which can unsettle the reader and which turn out to be the perfect literary device to make the reader encounter the alterity it represents. Smith performs alterity in her writing and represents it under many different forms, from Carl getting a job at the university of Wellington, Levi infiltrating the group of Haitians, the surprisingly conservative Kipps family, Zora’s duplicity between what she shows (the popular girl) and the emptiness inside her. All these examples deconstruct categories and with the many border crossings which are described in On Beauty, Smith insists on the fact that categorizing is a dangerous thing indeed. These border crossings create frictions, tensions, unsettling and upsetting discoveries, but they lead the characters who have crossed borders to deconstruct the categories through which they looked at the world and see it in greater complexity. However, reconfiguring new borders is painful for most characters, especially Carl and Kiki who fall victim to their own openness to alterity. In The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge writes: “a responsible response to an inventive work of art […] is one that brings it into being anew by allowing it, in a performance of its singularity for me, for my place and time, to refigure the ways in which I, and my culture, think and feel.” (Attridge 2004, 125). Smith seems to demand this responsible response from her reader and by reconfiguring all possible borders, challenges us to follow her in this task.

22The two sentences quoted above, Carl and Kiki’s cries about blackness and whiteness, echo a feeling of uneasiness, if not distress, faced to the complexity of the task that consists in reconfiguring borders. In On Beauty, the characters discover that their skin colour keeps marking them as ‘other’, no matter how open they are to alterity. Zadie Smith literally represents this uneasiness by unsettling the reader with constant displacements from one voice to another, one language to another, daring the reader to adapt. She complicates and blurs what usually are neat categories. In On Beauty, the dichotomy “poor Blacks/rich white people” is no longer true, but neither are the stereotypes of the Black thug or respectable university professors. Losing their usual landmarks (however imperfect), the characters learn to deal with alterity, with their sometimes burdening blackness, and attempt different techniques to belong, or make do. Carl’s disappearance from the narrative, Carlene’s death, the Belsey’s probable divorce and the broken hearts of the Belsey children leave a bitter taste in our mouths and it is this bitterness, that we experience because our reading has brought us closer to alterity, that brings us to reconfigure borders, in our personal environments.