Economic hardship can change how people interpret cultural difference, novelist Zadie Smith argued at a London event, linking Britain’s social tensions to pressure on jobs, housing and public services.
Smith joined Dua Lipa at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday, Oct. 24, for a discussion of White Teeth, her 2000 debut novel. The Southbank Centre said the conversation was recorded live for Lipa’s Service95 Book Club podcast as part of the London Literature Festival. The center’s event listing describes the novel as following the Jones and Iqbal families.
Asked about changing attitudes toward multiculturalism and immigration, Smith connected people’s responses to the security of ordinary life. She pointed to difficulties involving work and housing, along with pressure on schools and hospitals. Smith linked broader access to education, health care and housing with a time when cultural difference felt less threatening. When access to those institutions and essentials is less dependable, she argued, differences can carry greater weight. Her explanation centered on how material circumstances shape social relations.
Smith described the tension as having an economic and institutional basis. “That is an economic and structural question,” she said. In her account, public services matter both for the support they provide and for how people live alongside those with different backgrounds.
She contrasted current pressures with a social-democratic model she said had made cultural differences easier to live with. Smith said Britain should recover elements of that approach, including public services. But she did not advocate restoring the social climate of the 1980s: She rejected the racial prejudice and LGBTQ+ politics of that decade.
The Southbank Centre lists the London Literature Festival as running through Nov. 1.
