Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith’s first novel
White Teeth. The status of Smith’s fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of On Beauty, encourages an analysis of disciplinarity and institutionalization. I offer a reading of Smith’s representation of blackness in its institutional, social, and aesthetic dimensions.