Literary Analysis Of White Teeth By Zadie Smith Essay

Literary Analysis Of White Teeth By Zadie Smith - Essay Example She is currently a Fellow at Harvard University in the US. Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes. -Zadie Smith, White Teeth If World War II and the knowledge of oppression it represents are absent from all too many postcolonial studies, fifty-five years after its ending, the event and its lingering effects have found a critical position in the remarkable novel White Teeth, by Zadie Smith, Britain's most celebrated postcolonial prodigy. In White Teeth, the last days of that war mark the beginning of an escape from the nightmare of belonging to someone else and chart a journey to somewhere else. White Teeth proclaims a declaration of independence not only from the haunting and constraining memory of the war's catastrophes and racist oppression, but from the very idea of belonging. After centuries of colonial oppression and decades of postcolonial depression and anger, White Teeth imagines the grand finale of Empire as the construction of a multicultural, multiclass British bazaar. Acknowledging its colonial history and debt to postcolonial studies, the novel creates a set of unanticipated mutating connectio ns among historical and imagined events and identities interwoven among first-, second-, and third-generation postcolonial citizens of Britain. (Mike Storry, Peter Childs 53) The end of World War II meets the creation of a new Britain when a younger generation seizes the monocultural ground of Englishness on which their racialized conditions originated. As this younger generation remaps the future of their interrelated history, the narrative and political effects of their takeover represent a response not only to postcolonial critics, but to British women writing the end of Empire. Born in 1975, of a Jamaican mother and English father, in the epicenter of "British racism of the 1970s and 1980s, "Zadie Smith writes White Teeth as a rebellion against her confinement in the role of marginalized victim in an ongoing history of oppression. Neither she nor her characters will accept their places as objects of an interminable and global racist plot. (Nasta 11) Instead, she insists that "her own education at a comprehensive school and then at Cambridge shows that"life changes, my family is a picture of change"). The novel's hyperkinetic romp across interracial, multiethnic London veers from the marriage of working-class Englishman Archie Jones to biracial Jamaican Clara, from his friendship with his Bengali Muslim army mate, Samad Iqbal, to their children's entanglements with the Jewish Chalfen family. As their children hip-hop unimpeded through London's jumble of social and cultural identities, White Teeth understands, toys with, and then refuses inclusion in the "official racism of Britain in the 1970s". These characters and the whole of White Teeth will not play into the hands of Enoch Powell's racist rhetoric-"the triumph of barbarism over civilization". Powell's rallying cry against the postwar waves of postcolonial immigration reverses that slogan used by colonial conquerors and also by the Allies in their war against Nazi conquest-th e triumph of civilization over barbarism. But Powell's slogan also exposes what all

Law for Business Case Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Law for Business Case - Essay Example The point of perfection in a contract of sale has to be distinguished from the point of perfection in other contracts. For instance, in a pawn or pledge, the owner of the thing has to deliver the personal property to be pawned or pledged as is commonly understood even in layman terms.5 Hence, if X tells Y that the former wants to borrow money from the latter with a pawn or pledge of a gold ring as security, the contract of pawn or pledge is perfected when X physically brings the gold ring to Y. Going back to sale, since it is a consensual contract, any loss of, or damage caused unto, the thing or object is to be borne by the buyer after the perfection of the contract. In the illustration given above, let it be presumed that it was Monday when A makes the offer to sell and when B accepts it. On Tuesday, C steals the car. Under that circumstance, the legal implications will be that B suffers the loss and his recourse is not against A but against C whom he (B) can run after for the car-napping or theft. For further ramification, let it be supposed that B asks A to deliver the car to him (B) and A thus drives the car from his (A's) house to the place designated by B. While on the way, the car is hit by a lightning. In that case, B still shoulders the loss. What if, on the way, A bumps a tree because of his negligence and the car is destroyed Who suffers the loss In that case, A suffers the loss. The reason for the latter does not have any bearing anymore as to whether or not the contract of sale was perfected. Instead, A shoulders the loss because of his negligence in delivering the car to B and A's liability is founded on the principles of common law on torts and damages. In the case at bar, Toys4U Ltd became the owner of the merchandise when Megastores accepted the order. Under the general rule, therefore, Toys4U Ltd should be the one to shoulder the loss of all the three damaged toys. In the present situation, it is not so. Megastores is liable for the loss of the two toys which were damaged by the fork lift truck operator while still in the custody of Megastores. This liability is anchored on the fact that the damage was caused by the negligence or imprudence of the fork lift truck operator of Megastores. Under the legal precept of respondeat superior, the liability of the servant is the liability of the master. That is the universal rule on one who acts through another.6 Stated in another way, the responsibility of the employee is the responsibility of the employer. As to the third toy which was damaged in transit, Megastores is not liable for the same. As mentioned earlier, Toys4U Ltd became the owner of the goods when it placed the order for th e toys and accepted by Megastores. From thence, Toys4U Ltd shoulders any loss or damage. As mentioned above, it has to be noted that the general rule is that the buyer shoulders the loss if the same is sustained after the perfection of the contract. There can however be conditions which the parties may agree on. For example, John offers to sell his gun to Henry. Henry accepts the offer on the condition that John delivers the specific pistol on Monday evening at his (Henry's) residence and that upon receipt of the firearm, he (Henry) pays John.