In Dead and Alive, Smith explores the tensions between identity, language and power, and their relationship to art and thought. In so doing, she consistently advocates for plurality and ambivalence: not as abstract ideals, but as essential ways of looking at a world that often tends towards certainty. In one of the essays in the collection, on the British painter Celia Paul, Smith examines the power of the gaze in relation to gender. She illustrates how people long regarded Paul as a muse due to her relationship with Lucian Freud. Through her painting, however, Paul chose to define her own gaze rather than merely becoming its object. Smith argues that Freud, like all artists, had blind spots, and she takes a critical stance towards ‘cancel culture’, where discussions tend to take overly simplistic forms. Simultaneously, she emphasises that misogyny is not a blind spot, but a razor-sharp insight embedded within a well-constructed intellectual superstructure.
Smith also turns her attention to the colonial gaze. In an essay on the Nigerian-American visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, she asks whether art should merely serve as a political and artistic counterweight to asymmetrical power relations. In Odutola’s work, she recognises an ideal of hybridity. Smith’s interest in complex identities is just as evident in her fiction. As early as her debut novel White Teeth, she explored characters navigating between different cultural and social realities. Ambiguity also lies at the heart of On Beauty, NW, Swing Time and her recent historical novel, The Fraud.
An essay on the American artist Kara Walker develops this line of thought. In sculptures that some critics have described as ‘scabrous’, Walker exposes colonial power dynamics. Smith lays bare the tension inherent in the familiar criticisms levelled at artists from minority groups: on the one hand, they are accused of pandering to the dominant white art world; on the other, critics say that their work falls short of meeting the need for self-care within Black audiences. Smith praises Walker’s uncompromising decision to pursue her artistic obsessions and to present the wretched mishmash of history in its entirety, both processed and unprocessed.
In ‘European Family’, the opening essay of the collection, Smith recounts her visit to the Palais du Luxembourg to see an exhibition on a Wunderkammer from Dresden. She questions the curators’ self-satisfied language. In her view, they interpret the word ‘power’ too literally, whereas Smith sees it as ‘eternally and uniquely capable of labellingand locating the exotic “other” in the colonized, the subjected, the indigenous.’ Smith contrasts this with a piece of Chinese porcelain entitled ‘European Family’, a caricatured representation of the European ‘other’. She also dissects the term ‘Eurocentric’, arguing that it fails to do justice either to the act of plunder and appropriation or to the specificity of the actual objects.
The role of language within questions of power and identity is a recurring theme in Smith’s essays. It is no coincidence, therefore, that she also includes her much-discussed essay ‘Fascinated to Presume: In Defence of Fiction’. In this text, originally published in The New York Review of Books in 2019, she argues against the overriding principle of ‘staying in your lane’: the idea that authors can or should only write about people who are fundamentally like themselves. She acknowledges the sensitivity around language in a context where words are deployed in support of immigration policy and military strategy, while also emphasising that concepts such as ‘cultural appropriation’ are not neutral. They, too, are linguistic constructs that facilitate certain ideas while limiting others. Nor does Smith believe that readers necessarily respond most strongly to stories featuring people whose experiences mirror their own. Instead, she advocates for ‘interpersonal voyeurism’ and polyphony.
At a time when language is increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and exploited by authoritarian movements, both with scant regard for nuance, Dead and Alivestands as a plea for curiosity and freedom. Authors, artists, readers and viewers alike must set aside principles that hinder open-mindedness and the freedom to think. As Smith writes in the foreword: ‘Within the covers of this book, you have freedom of movement, and this freedom is absolute.’
