Imagining Boston: Haitian Immigrants and Place in Zadie Smith's On Beauty

This essay considers how place matters in Zadie Smith's most recent novel, On Beauty (2005). I focus on the ways the presence of Haitian immigrants in her fictional “Wellington” reflect an urge to make meaning out of social relations in the city that inspired the novel. I argue that even her most cliched Haitian characters should not be read as casual insertions that merely introduce dramatic irony. More than any of the local details, Haitians authenticate Smith's imagined geography. They establish both the (historical) time and place (or context) of her novel and enable On Beauty to illuminate important features of contemporary urban inequality, complex black diasporan relations, and the ironies of America's celebrated post-racial society. I conclude that – although many of her Haitian characters are stereotypical and her representation of Boston is partial – imaginative ethnographies such as Smith's challenge scholarly claims to privileged readings of the city.