Empire and the Rhetoric of Total War in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

In reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) this essay proposes a definition of total war that illuminates the close connection between the rhetoric of war and the rhetoric of imperialism. Building on the recent scholarly accounts of how “totality” is never truly possible, this essay sees total war not as a descriptor of reality but rather as a rhetorical strategy that categorizes entire populations as ally or enemy—a binary that both emerges from and remains in tension with the binaries structuring imperialism (white/nonwhite, civilized/savage). Total war, that is, defines colonial subjects as allies with their colonizers against white, European enemies. White Teeth explores these contradictions, this essay argues, by revisiting the binary rhetoric of the Second World War. And in challenging the relationship between imperial and wartime categories, Smith’s novel resists the tendencies of both imperial and anti-imperial forms of history to represent the past in terms of just such totalizing categories. As historical fiction, White Teeth counters this totalizing tendency and, dwelling instead in ambiguity and uncertainty, suggests that a truly decolonial history depends not on reversing imperial categories but on rejecting them altogether.