Author(s): Mingying Xu, Ying Meng

Abstract: Focusing on Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, this paper examines how immigrants construct rooted cosmopolitan identity in globalized London. By combining Appiah’s rooted cosmopolitanism with close reading, it explores the disillusion behind the first-generation immigrants’ nostalgia for mythologized “roots” and the second-generation immigrants’ mimetic assimilation to “pure Britishness”, revealing how recognition-seeking trajectories fracture the subject’s sense of temporal continuity. Through the second-generation immigrant Irie’s embodied memory which echoes the sensory survival lineage of the Maroons, Smith rethreads roots and routes, suturing racial memory to the textures of London everyday life and resisting cultural–spiritual coloniality that exceeds territorial sovereignty. In the resistant narrative, White Teeth explores a third route to immigrants’ identity—the construction of rooted cosmopolitan identity which passage from rootless assimilation to rooted identification, highlighting the cohabitation of ethnicity and cosmopolitanism at the scale of nested memberships, showing Smith’s unique writing back to the Empire.

Keywords: White Teeth; Zadie Smith; Rooted Cosmopolitanism; Identity Construction

Article Info: Received: 08 Dec 2025; Received in revised form: 05 Jan 2026; Accepted: 09 Jan 2026; Available online: 14 Jan 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.111.9