Zadie Smith's White Teeth and the Centrality of World War II

After listening to an interesting lecture by a professor, Michelle M. Wright, from Northwestern on "Black physics," or adapting theories of physics to the study of the African diaspora, the lecturer incorporated Zadie Smith's brilliant White Teeth into her lecture (I have blogged about the novel, here). The professor's videos can be found here, in 3 parts. I am a little disappointed to not have seen some of the obvious ties to World War II, eugenics, and Nazi racial theory that permeate Smith's text through the middle-class, liberal white family, whose male patriarch seeks to improve humanity through creation of a better, superior breed. The eugenicist-leaning white family, the middle-class liberal Chalfens, eventually takes in one of the twin brothers of Bangladeshi descent, and the mother of said white family falls in love with the beautiful, young brown man. Needless to say, the family's obsession with eugenics can be traced, in part, to Nazi racial theory and genocide, which is one of the ways World War II is central to the multiracial, immigrant communities in postwar Britain and elsewhere in Europe. The Chalfen patriarch's obsession with genetically-engineered mice and the family's political views and sense of self-importance clearly reveal a disturbing, paternalistic eugenicist perspective they have toward immigrants and non-whites. In addition, World War II occupies a large portion of the narrative structure, since it is how Irie's English father met Iqbal, both were serving in Europe during the war, though, as one could guess, their experience was far from heroic. In addition, the postwar years in Britain and other European nations led to opening the doors for immigration from Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, often through labour programs that invited workers from India, Pakistan, Algeria, and various other regions of the world to settle and work in the European metropoles just as colonialism's formal structure was dissolving. The following quotations from the text are quite revealing of the Chalfen arrogance, eugenics-leaning beliefs.

"They were still the same remarkable family they always had been. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers--judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers, actors, and other frivolous professions Chalfenism sneered at--there was no one left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyed passengers on the Mayflower with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land. They were bored, and none more than Joyce."
  
"In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite, and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say."