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La primera novela de Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000), ha sido considerada como ejemplo del multiculturalismo y de la pluralidad que caracterizan hoy en día a la ciudad de Londres. Este artículo estudia los modos en los que los personajes de White Teeth negocian un sentido de pertenencia e identidad y establecen y/o transgreden fronteras espaciales dentro de dicha localización. Este trabajo analiza también la identidad híbrida de los personajes y el carácter maleable que tiene tal espacio multicultural a través del análisis de las relaciones inter- e intra-familiares que se representan en la novela.Abstract:Zadie Smith’s fi rst novel White Teeth (2000) has been analysed as an example of the diverse and multicultural society of the present-day city of London. This essay studies the way in which characters in White Teeth negotiate a sense of belonging and identity and how boundaries are established, and/or violated within that location. It also analyses the characters’ hybrid identities and the malleable aspect of that multicultural social space by focusing on the ways Smith depicts spatial confi gurations of inter and intra family life.

Diana Evans' debut novel 26a deals with the parallel childhood and subsequent dissimilar adult development of a set of female identical twins. Identical twins problematize the definition of identity and individuality by their superfluity, since being an identical twin is paradoxical, in that that one's body is a signifier of both individuality and twoness or duality. This article investigates the space of individual identity. Focusing on the body as the primary space of interaction, it analyzes the problematics inherent to a relation of twinship in Nigerian and western tradition, and the significance of the trope of twins in Evans' narrative, where it functions as a way of negotiating an ethnically diverse identity. The idea of space is important in the construction of the twins' identities; physical dislocation and dissimilar experiences bring about identity crises, and eventually death for one of the twins.

Abstract. War and its aftermaths are at the kernel of The Memory of Love, yet, rather than only dwelling on loss and suffering, the novel explores the enabling possibilities of emotion, and love in particular, as the title suggests, through the lenses of characters who are survivors or witnesses of the devastating civil war in Sierra Leone. In this article, I shall argue that Forna's novel encourages the reader who has not experienced first-hand such distressing events to recognize the emotional spaces of others. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's views of emotions as openness (2004), I shall analyse the reasons behind these apparently unlikely interpersonal emotional connections. I shall examine how the main characters in the novel, Mamakay, Agnes, Kai and Adrian, establish interpersonal relations that allow them to come to terms with the ordinary spaces that surround them and eventually construct alternative emotional spaces. The narrative, thus, depicts emotions as fluid, non-static temporal positions, from where to start alternative journeys of surviving and of being. The spaces of emotion form a continuum in the characters' lives: they are never fixed, never stable, never secured but always adapting, reinventing themselves and changing.