Globalization of Local Lives: Performing Self-Authenticity as Personal, Local and Social Process in Zadie Smith’s <i>NW</i>

This research aims at investigating the social and local relevance of the process of selfauthenticity in Zadie Smith’s NW. The novel imagines a complex network of relationships ranging from individual association with occupation to friendships and families, and to participation in local and public oriented interactions, all bring individuals to experience multiplicity of identifications with others in complex ways. With regard to density and complexity of overlapping social relations this essay indicates how self-authenticity is a social process determined by confirmation with and from other’s as well as one’s own experiment as means and results of social interactions while acting as a local process operating in practice and in relation to local relevance. The study interrogates to what extent locality acts as a firm framework of reference in construction and maintenance of self-authenticity and identity formation in the current context of increasing global dynamics. It follows the concept of critical cosmopolitanism that assumes individual’s capacity for self-reflexivity as integral to formation of self-authenticity and necessitates the emergence of a cosmopolitan consciousness that views self-authenticity as dependent on situationally-relevant conditions of time and place rather than on pre-give social patterns.