Dead and Alive: Essays - Hardcover

Smith, Zadie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593834682 ISBN 13: 9780593834688

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, TIME, Vanity Fair, and Kirkus Reviews • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2025

"Smart, somber . . . There’s pleasure in watching a novelist wired to see all sides at once wrangle with her own dynamic subjectivity."
- The New York Times Book Review

A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays

In this eagerly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years.

She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tár, and to New York to reflect on the spontaneous moments that connect us. She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North-West London and welcomes us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic – and the meaning of "the commons" in all our lives.

Throughout this thrilling collection, Zadie Smith shows us once again her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time, and The Fraud; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and a play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.

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European Family

Sometime around 2013, in the middle of a stage interview, a literary critic had an interesting question for me. Why had I begun to write more about the visual arts? And less about books? Answering his own query, he began to muse about the visual turn in the culture, the emergence of the black body as a site of enquiry, the rejection of the white male gaze . . . And kept talking. I nodded and smiled, doing my best to follow, though I hadn't slept properly in a while and he was using a lot of jargon. Later that evening, much later - whilst propping myself up against a wall with one hand and swinging a Moses basket with the other - I thought: there should be a more practical arm of literary theory, one that takes into account the realities of women's lives . . .

I had my first child in 2009. It didn't take long to figure out that looking at art requires neither both your hands nor silence. That it can be done swiftly, between playground and naptime, and that you can be very tired, looking at art. Sometimes a fugue state even helps! Whereas, if you are trying to breastfeed your baby to sleep, any attempt at simultaneous page-turning will wake them. Even if you transition to a silent Kindle, the contrast between the piecemeal, necessarily time-consuming practice of reading, and the all-encompassing, instantaneous moment of looking, will be stark. All of that is over now, though. No more playgrounds, no more naptimes. And no more teaching. No more marking essays on the soft-top of a buggy. But I still retain the old habit of dashing in and out of galleries like a criminal, especially, for some reason, the Musée du Luxembourg. I love that museum. Small enough to walk around in an hour, even with a screaming child strapped to your torso. I used to teach in Paris, every summer, and each time I dashed in and out of the Luxembourg I would emerge with an idea for an essay. Even if, in the final analysis, I never got round to writing it.

Fast forward, many years. Finding myself in Paris once again, not teaching - and temporarily childless - I hurried from the gardens into the gallery, then reminded myself that the emergency is over: take your time. The show was called Miroir du Monde. It consisted of about a hundred paintings and objets d'art from Dresden's legendary Cabinet of Curiosities, or Kunstkammer. Collected over two centuries - by the Prince-Elects of what was once Saxony - the Kunstkammer can be thought of as a kind of one-stop-shop, intended to bring together in one place representative examples of the many art treasures to be found upon this earth. A mirror of the world, exactly. At this point you may be thinking (as I did), but surely it all went up in flames, with the rest of Dresden? In fact, the Kunstkammer was mostly relocated to a fortress on a hill for the duration of the war, and the bulk of it has survived. Now here were some of its marvels right in front of me, magnificent to behold, and yet also somewhat penned in - like one's true thoughts during a literary interview - by the banal framing of somebody else's words. In this case, a curatorial description:

This exhibition places an emphasis on the artistic quality and provenance of the works which not only reflect the many global relationships and cultural exchanges, but also the Eurocentric world view they embody. A few historical objects are arranged so as to mirror works by contemporary artists, putting these historic collections into perspective through the key issues of our time.

The key issues of our time turned out to be basically the one issue, that pesky white male gaze once again, a critique impossible to argue with - as far as it went. Take, for example, Moor with Emerald Cluster by Balthasar Permoser, circa 1724. About fifteen inches high, he is a muscled youth, a noble savage type, and therefore, yes, for sure a familiar Eurocentric cliché. Carved from pear wood, lacquered a very dark brown, he is depicted half-naked, multiply tattooed, wearing gold cuffs, gold necklace, a feathered and bejewelled headdress, and holding a platter of emeralds - all while grinning like a figure from the commedia dell'arte. The museum had helpfully put him under a spotlight in his own corner, presumably so that we might all focus our Eurocentric gazes upon him, and dutifully note what a perfect example of exoticization he was, and fetishization of same. Still, he was beautiful. Far more egregious were two laughing 'Chinese' porcelain busts, 1732, produced by the Meissen factory. These gargoyles managed to combine the physical clichés of Asian physiognomy - as caricatured by European artists - with a wild, near total ignorance of traditional Chinese dress, as if the artist did not even know enough of the truth to satirize it. The woman - who seemed to be kitted out like a Dutch milkmaid - wore a fantastical hat that turned up at each end and featured a lot of incongruous bobbles and tassels, while the man's hat looked no more Chinese than the baseball cap upon my own head. Fictional creations, these two, from a nowhere place called 'Foreign'. Looking at them I realized I felt a little sorry for the much vaunted, much dreaded, 'Eurocentric world view'. Supposedly all-powerful, and yet so incredibly ignorant! It does not know what it does not know. It conjures up a beautiful Moor - carrying emeralds stolen from the New World, to be presented to the Old - but then dresses him incongruously, borrowing his costume from a series of contemporary images of sixteenth-century America. That's how he ends up tattooed like the Native Americans of Florida, and in their ceremonial costume, too. His feathered headdress meanwhile is drawn from an even stranger source:

Montezuma II, the ninth Aztec emperor of Mexico. Eurocentric. The word itself began to feel a little too self-regarding. Euro-blindness? And besides, shouldn't there be another, more specific word to describe the act of plunder and purchase, into which category at least a third of the objects in the Kunstkammer truly belong? Such objects embody no 'Eurocentric world view' - how could they? They are not the product of Europe at all. And how dazzling!

An engraved ivory horn from Senegal.

A painted Japanese teapot.

An Iranian scimitar, encrusted with precious jewels.

All exotic from the perspective of Saxony, but never exotic in and of themselves. Rather, they sit at the very centre of their own worlds, conceived and constructed by master craftsmen, whose skills and materials were - like Chinese porcelain - sometimes copied and poached by Europeans, but whose roots lay elsewhere. And yet, of course, once contact is made, and those 'cultural exchanges' noted by the curators occur - between Old World and New, 'indigenous' and 'civilized' - at that very moment, an impure and ungovernable channel of influence inevitably opens up, through which ideas will pass back and forth, until the category of 'exotic' begins to look like a moveable feast. For who, exactly, is exotic to whom?

In the Luxembourg Museum there was only one possible answer to that question. It was as if the curators, in their wisdom, had decided to take power - especially colonial power - at its own word. That is, as all-conquering. As eternally and uniquely capable of labelling and locating the exotic 'other' in the colonized, the subjected, the indigenous. As not only militarily and economically triumphant but also aesthetically and psychologically. In fact, by some perverse circularity of logic, the 'Eurocentric world view' was basically being re-presented to me in more or less the same terms in which it had once fondly thought of itself, nearly three hundred years ago. This self-belief in Europe's own prepotency is, of course, a part of the Kunstkammer's history - a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593834682
• ISBN 13: 9780593834688
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar