‘Violent conclusion[s]’ versus ‘hopeful return[s]’: Zadie Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia and the Performative Border-Crossing of the Narrative Voice

This chapter examines Zadie Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia (2013a) as a work that probes the performative boundaries of narrative voice(s) in their political and identitarian implications, and particularly in their ability to question Europe’s celebratory discourses of multiculturalism in the face of pervasive migratory and post-migratory violence and border surveillance. Through the experiences of Fatou, a newly arrived Ivorian immigrant trapped in an abusive domestic role in suburban London, Smith’s novella explores the complexities of narrative boundaries through a continuous shift in focalisation between Fatou’s own perspective, narrated by a third-person voice, and that of a second, collective narrative voice that pretends to represent the entire local community. Drawing on Mary Louise Pratt’s speech-act theory and Susan Lanser’s insights on the narrative voice, the chapter demonstrates that Smith’s text questions both the displayed emphatic capacity of a supposedly enlightened North-West public, and the genre and gender conventions characterising Europe’s prevailing identitarian discourse. The complex narrative border-crossing staged by the novella entails the condemnation of perspective insularity in terms of genre, gender, geopolitics, and cultural identity, and encourages a polyvocal conversation in which, as Smith writes, ‘violent conclusion[s]’ are always contradicted by ‘hopeful return[s]’.