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Picture and text|Kanshi Omei
Editor|Kanshi Omei
preface
Swing Time is the fifth novel by British ethnic novelist Zadie Smith published in 2016. The novel unfolds from the perspective of a brown-skinned protagonist, and gradually shows the current situation of the protagonist falling into black aesthetic depression because he has lost his black identity by depicting the protagonist's complex growth experience.
The protagonist's melancholy about his own African nature, especially brown skin, and his rejection of traditional African art forms such as music and dance, are expressed in the novel.
In order to find his roots, the protagonist embarks on a journey to the African continent to find his roots.
However, this journey does not bring a sense of belonging to the protagonist.
When the protagonist chooses to leave Britain and actually come to the African continent, he can only feel the harsh reality that neither local blacks nor white Britons accept him.
Eventually, after returning to the black British community, the protagonist re-meets his good friend Tracy, who is also a brown-skinned person who once tried to integrate into white British society but failed.
Together, the two found a heterozygous cultural identity and based on it created a heterozygous black aesthetic with "brown sex" as the core.
"Swing Time"
Swing Time is a novel by Zadie Smith published in 2016, marking a new foray into literary creation.
From the perspective of a girl with brown skin and no specific name, the novel depicts her identity confusion with her friend Tracy, who has the same skin color, growing up through music and dance.
In the story, she chooses to return to the black community in Britain to pursue her identity after losing her sense of belonging.
Music and dance, as important black art forms, continue throughout the story and gradually become clear as cultural identities emerge.
The protagonist goes from learning classical music and ballet that represents white art, to understanding the cankeran dance, which represents black art, and finally appreciating the combination of African music and ballet of Tracy's unique dance.
This illustrates the important role of cultural identity in the development of aesthetics, especially for the aesthetic development of blacks.
Aware of the unique black beauty of the African American community, the protagonist and Tracy gradually emerge from the black aesthetic blues and establish a hybrid black aesthetic that fits their own heterozygous cultural identity.
Black aesthetics emphasizes independent black cultural traditions and black nationalism, opposes white aesthetic standards, and represents values derived from black traditional art.
The transformation of the inferiority complex into black aesthetic depression
In Swing Time, the protagonist meets Tracy, and they immediately notice each other, not only because they have similar brown skin, but also because they are separated from the same brown cloth.
However, unlike Tracy's confident temperament, the protagonist has always been shrouded in a melancholy atmosphere.
Although he was able to identify with the importance of black beauty and hoped that black beauty and white beauty could coexist, after adolescence he gradually forgot these thoughts, and pessimism and melancholy prevailed.
He began to feel the absence of black sexuality, the desire relationship between blacks, mestizos and whites that were hidden.
White beauty is seen as the standard on both racial and cultural levels, which makes them frustrated with their natural black characteristics, especially skin color, and shows rejection of representing black art forms, such as music and dance.
Thus, the protagonist and Tracy fall into black aesthetic blues.
The protagonists grow up in a black community in northwest London, but they are able to notice each other because of the difference in skin color from everyone else.
Differences in skin color contribute to their inferiority complexes, especially in a diverse city like London, where black-skinned minority groups are more likely to feel inferior.
The artistic activities they participate in, such as classes in English as a second language and learning ballet, show their inferiority complex in the face of white culture and skin color.
However, this inferiority complex gradually evolved into black aesthetic blues because of the loss of black sexuality. Blackness refers to the physical and cultural status, qualities, and conditions of those who identify as black or self-identify as black.
It represents black identity and cultural traditions and is essential to the construction of black aesthetics.
First, the source of black aesthetic blues is the protagonist's identification with racial hierarchies based on skin color.
When he first met his white father's illegitimate son, his half-siblings, he intuitively assumed that their skin color was "as white as snow," and even that they were more likely to be the children of his white father. It made him feel melancholy about his brown skin.
Racial hierarchy is one of the causes of black aesthetic depression, which brings the sadness of slavery that blacks endure, which is reflected in the skin color and hairstyle of blacks, and makes blacks fall into melancholy.
When he looked at his white sister, he thought to himself, "Father gave birth to me like this, and gave birth to her like that."
How can these two completely different people come from the same place". When the protagonist confronts his half-siblings, the melancholy of his brown skin stems from the racial hierarchy represented by skin color, which makes him pay more and more attention to his appearance.
His dream became the best proof of this: "In my dreams, we all have golden skin!" No one is more beautiful and graceful than us, and we are God's favored people."
The desire for the beauty represented by the white complexion, as well as the thought of "longing to be yearned for, afraid not to be desired", led to his latent dream, in which the beautiful and elegant golden skin embodies the harsh reality that he can only achieve "intense satisfaction" in dreams.
The quest for the beauty of white skin is never achievable for the protagonist, and this racial hierarchy based on skin color prompts him to lose his black identity, manifested in a disagreement with the beauty of his brown skin of African origin, and gradually transforms into black aesthetic melancholy.
Symptoms of black aesthetic blues
Black aesthetic blues is a mood disorder centered on loss, characterized by self-criticism at its core, emphasizing the transition from imbalance and depression to loss of mood.
Melancholia confronts a person with a vast, inevitable, ubiquitous sense of emptiness of the self and eventually exhausts the ego. Patients often fall into endless self-deprecation, feeling unbearable feelings of unattainable things, leading to endless sadness, fear, and hopeless anger.
Racially discriminated groups take this expression from quantified sadness to discontent to the extreme.
Whites treat these groups with both inclusion and exclusion, resulting in depression among discriminated groups.
On the aesthetic level, this also leads to the emergence of black aesthetic melancholia, which is manifested as the loss of objectification of beauty. This is manifested in the rejection of the natural characteristics of blacks and traditional African art forms among African ethnic groups, who reject their own beauty because of the racialization of beauty, and ultimately only grieve the loss of the right to black beauty.
In the novel, the protagonist and Tracy represent two choices made by an African ethnic group to transcend awkward cultural identity situations.
The protagonist chooses to return to the African continent, but is seen locally as white and lives in a false African protective circle.
This made him more and more rejecting his own skin color, unable to accept the reality of black identity and loss of beauty, resulting in him unable to establish a sense of belonging spiritually and falling into the abyss of black aesthetic depression.
Tracy, on the other hand, struggled for opportunities, but could only work as a background dancer in a small troupe, and the shabby clothes she wore were printed with the word "obedience", expressing her constant dissatisfaction and grievances at not being able to integrate into the status quo of white society, but having to submit.
Both options embody the hardship of escaping the dilemma of cultural identity, as well as the characteristics of black aesthetic blues.
The cure for black aesthetic blues
The protagonist of "Swinging Time" and Tracy represent each other in the final chapter of the novel, "Epilogue".
Mired in black aesthetic blues, we return to the black community we were born and raised together.
The protagonist follows his mother's last wishes and decides to help Tracy's family.
As a mixed-race girl with the same brown skin, I really dug Tracy, thought about her, and built a heterozygous black aesthetic that fits our cultural identity.
No unique beauty is completely isolated from others, nor is black aesthetics.
It is based on collective identity while being influenced by other aesthetic standards and factors.
However, black aesthetics changed with the roots and routes of Black Atlantic migration, and was also influenced by changes in individual and collective identities, leading to the development of black aesthetic melancholia.
Therefore, faced with the dilemma of black aesthetic depression, the first thing to do is to find your own cultural identity. Cultural identity is a reflection of shared historical experiences and cultural norms, providing a stable, unchanging and continuous framework of reference and meaning for a community.
Cultural identity seeks identity in its interactions with others for the identity of its way of being, starting with acknowledging differences and finding similarities in differences.
After experiencing the diaspora, ethnic groups have become more interested in identities that represent a common history and culture. However, due to the disturbing intermediate state, that is, the split and conflict between the invisible source culture and source consciousness and the manifest present culture and present consciousness, it is difficult for them to form a definite monocultural identity.
At the same time, due to the influence of the underlying imprint of African culture and the culture of European hegemony, they formed a heterozygous cultural identity. Tracy and I failed in our quest for cultural identity, whether it was to integrate into white society or to find our roots.
epilogue
"Swing Time" is a new creative experiment by British ethnic novelist Zadie Smith, featuring the mixed-race girls "I" and Tracy, depicting the story of their loss of black identity and falling into black aesthetic depression as they grow up.
The novel presents important forms of black aesthetics by showing brown skin as a natural feature and elements of music, dance, and other elements of African art forms.
Smith gradually shifted to a more positive attitude on an aesthetic level, from falling into the melancholy of black aesthetics to reframing black aesthetics, showing black aesthetics as defined in cultural understanding of pluralistic characteristics and inclusive attitudes.
bibliography
[1] CHENG Xilin. Key words in Western literature: black aesthetics
[2] MENG Ping. Tan Huijuan." Black Hole" metaphor and black women's sexual "silent politics"
[3] Wang Hui. Between Arrival and Return: A Study of British Migration Novelists in the Second Half of the 20th Century
[4] WANG Hui. On the racial blues in Lala
[5] Wang Hui. Shakespeare's Black Lady in Ghost Companion
[6] Jiao Zishan. Black aesthetic blues in Zadie Smith's Swing Time