Harjunen draws our attention to the fact that this conception of the body is one of self-reliance: an imagining of selfhood which is central to the neoliberal humanist politics brought to centre-stage in the Thatcher-Reganism of the 1980s (Harjunen, 2021). According to Harjuen, the fat body is imagined to be a physical manifestation of an individual’s poor choices. The logic that underpins this subtle expression of objection stems from a belief in what Hannele Harjunen terms the body as an ‘individualist project one can choose and shape as one wishes’ (Harjunen, 2021). One of the ways in which Kiki’s body is abused are the ‘disapproving looks’ she receives from, presumably, non-fat-bodied women when eating her breakfast in public (2006: 162). In On Beauty, Smith demonstrates the ways in which the fat, black body is abused and then asked to shoulder the blame for the prejudicial treatment it is made to suffer. In On Beauty, however, weight exists as the novel’s primary site of resistance against the neoliberal values that dominate Wellington, a fictional East Coast college town, especially such virtues as self-reliance, control and personal hygiene.

Since then, the sign of the female fat black body is one which has been reduced to comic caricature in much of popular culture (String, 2019). Scholars like Sabrina String have noted that, historically, weight has been intrinsically linked with ideas of race with eugenicists like Georges-Louis LeClertt, Comte de Buffon defining ‘black Africans by both their dark skin and their enormity’ (String, 2019). In this novel, Smith follows Kiki Belsey and her fat, black body. Of particular interest is the representation and politics of fatness in Zadie Smith’s second novel On Beauty (2006). Through these close readings literary theorists can problematize how fat characters have been dismissed or misunderstood in popular culture. Literary theorists, in particular, employ a nuanced critical vocabulary to analyze the portrayal of fat characters and the subtleties of external and internal fat experiences. Rothblum (to name the three important thinkers) has helped to complicate social conceptions of the fat body. The recent emergence of the Fat Studies discipline, bastioned by Samantha Murray, Cat Pausé and E. Huff (2013) and Pat Rogers (2010) to help historicize the fat body, close readings of the fat body in literature are still somewhat scarce.

While works of literature like William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote have been employed by theorists like Joyce L. Sara Fogarty Olmos re-reads Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) and articulates the politics of fat resistance and the black female body.įat has been neglected in literary discussion.

On beauty smith