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.