Into the melting pot vocable 683 "The economist"

The rapid rise of mixed-race Britain is changing neighbourhoods—and perplexing the authoritie







ZADIE SMITH, a novelist born to a black Jamaican mother and a white British father, recently recalled that when she was growing up in Willesden Green, a London district with a large immigrant population, “nothing could be more normal than a mixed-race girl”. The surprise, she said, was entering publishing and finding that people thought it unusual. Nobody could get that impression now: Britons are mixing at extraordinary speed.

This book deals with the formation of New York City's multicultural character. It draws a sketch of the metropolis' first big immigration waves and describes the development of immigrants who entered the New World as foreigners and strangers and soon became one of the most essential parts of the city's very character. A main focus is laid upon the ambiguity of the immigrants' identity which is captured between assimilation and separation, and one of the most important questions the book deals with is whether the city can be seen as one of the world's greatest melting pots or just as a huge salad bowl inhabiting all kinds of different cultures. The book approaches this topic from an historical and a fictional point of view and concentrates on personal experiences of the immigrants as well as on the cultural impact immigration had on the megalopolis New York.