ABSTRACT
In Swing Time, Zadie Smith finds models of “swinging time” in black music and dance. Rooted in jazz history, “swing” references both tradition and the artist’s capacity for adaptation and innovation, making time bend to the imagination. These meditations on music resonate with the protagonist’s navigation of oppositions—e.g., between past and present and post-racial and black identities—as she searches for a groove within the changes and unpredictability, contradictions and conflicts of the current historical era.
This chapter links the notion of swing to the phenomenology of blackness in order to explore the narrator’s negotiation of intersecting and irreconcilable identities. This framework shapes my interpretation of Smith’s approach to the form of the bildungsroman and especially her refusals of linearity in the coming-of-age novel. The effect is the production of a narrative of self-making in which the subject oscillates between blackness as social identity and the particularities of the individual self. The interconnected notions of swing and ambivalence offer models for living with and through contradiction that allow Swing Time to conceive of the aesthetic realm as a space capable of cultivating an ethical orientation toward “blackness.”
