Dead and Alive

Dead and Alive is a 2025 collection of essays, speeches, and occasional pieces by the British novelist Zadie Smith. Spanning a decade of writing, the collection addresses art, fiction, technology, politics, race, mourning, and selfhood, with Smith positioning herself throughout as both guest and host: a visitor entering galleries, books, protests, and ideas who then guides the reader through what she finds.

In a foreword, Smith frames the book as an open house, invoking the philosopher Jacques Derrida's concept of unconditional hospitality, which envisions welcoming the unknown other without demanding reciprocity. She pledges clarity of language, provides footnotes for accessibility, and grants readers absolute freedom of movement within the text.

Several essays focus on visual art and performance. In "European Family," Smith visits the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, where objects from Dresden's Kunstkammer, a centuries-old collection of art and curiosities, are displayed under a curatorial framework emphasizing Eurocentrism. She argues that the framing inadvertently replicates the self-regard it claims to critique, ignoring that many of the collection's finest objects were masterworks from Senegal, Japan, and Iran. A small Chinese porcelain piece called European Family becomes the essay's pivot: Smith imagines the Chinese artist's amused gaze upon European customs, inverting the question of who is exotic to whom. In "The Muse at Her Easel," Smith reviews the memoir Self-Portrait by the British painter Celia Paul. Paul was the painter Lucian Freud's lover for 10 years beginning when she was 18 and he 55, and was widely mistaken for his muse. Smith establishes that Paul's own childhood experiences, not Freud, made her a painter, and contrasts their philosophies: Freud painted flesh and surfaces, while Paul painted the ineffable, love, faith, and the "invisible skein" of emotional connection. Smith argues that misogyny constituted a form of partial sight that left Freud blind to the essential qualities of the women he painted.

An essay on the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola reads her exhibition A Countervailing Theory as a philosophical inquiry into power. The show depicts a fictional world ruled by women called the Eshu, who have manufactured male humanoids called the Koba as laborers. Smith applies the German philosopher Hegel's master-slave dialectic, a theory in which domination and dependence shape both parties, and the Martinican political philosopher Frantz Fanon's ideas about colonialism and mutual misrecognition. She argues that love alone cannot substitute for systemic recognition and that Ojih Odutola's visual reversals expose enabling systems rather than simply flip scripts. In "The Instrumentalist," Smith reads the conductor Lydia Tár, played by Cate Blanchett in the film Tár, as an embodiment of Generation X's confusion of its own cultural obsolescence with the end of time itself. A short piece casts the rapper Stormzy's 2019 Glastonbury headlining set as Shakespearean history, framing the performance as the arrival of a Black-British king.

"Fascinated to Presume" mounts a defense of fiction against the injunction to "stay in your lane." Smith replaces Walt Whitman's "I contain multitudes," which she finds carries a whiff of entitlement, with Emily Dickinson's "fascinated to presume," a mode that acknowledges uncertainty while reaching toward the other. She argues that the intimate encounter between reader and book remains one of the few spaces of genuine freedom, contrasted with data-harvesting algorithms that reduce people to exploitable patterns. "Under the Banner of New York," written days after the 2017 Lower Manhattan truck attack, defends the city's elastic social bonds through small incidents of strangers wordlessly cooperating. "Egypt: Laughter in the Dark" advocates for the imprisoned Egyptian novelist Ahmed Naji, whose novel Using Life earned him a two-year sentence under an indecency law; a 2025 postscript notes that words in New York can now also lead to deportation, citing the revival of the McCarran-Walter Act, a 1952 immigration law originally targeting suspected communists, under the Trump administration.

"Some Notes on Mediated Time" traces how technologies have distorted collective experiences of time. Smith recounts her childhood of up to nine hours of television daily, identifies The Truman Show as the archetypal film of her generation's unmoored unreality, and argues that the Internet was captured by monopolies that monetized human attention. She contends that algorithmic mediation particularly harms girls, whose socialization around relationships and comparison is weaponized against them, and critiques Meta's assignment of a "lifetime value" of approximately $270 to each 13-year-old user.

Several essays address history, politics, and public life. In forewords to reissues of the historian Gretchen Gerzina's Black England and James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan, Smith argues for the complexity of the past against the narcissism of the present, recalling 15 years of British education without encountering any reference to the presence of Black people in England. Her essay on the artist Kara Walker defends Walker's use of caricature and stereotype as tools for making history truly visible, detailing the record of Thomas Thistlewood, a Jamaican plantation owner whose diary documents thousands of sexual assaults on enslaved people. Smith addresses the critique from the older artist Betye Saar, who labeled Walker "a black artist who obviously hated being black," framing this as a familiar charge against minority artists whose success is assumed to signify self-hatred.

In a speech for the Kenyon Review, a prominent American literary journal, delivered after the 2024 election, Smith uses the American short story writer Flannery O'Connor's Mr. Shiftlet, a sentimental fraud who abandons a vulnerable woman, as an analogue for newly elected leaders, while the vulnerable Lucynell represents those who depend on others to fashion a tolerable world. "The Tufton Pragmatists," delivered at a climate rally outside 55 Tufton Street in London, where climate-denial think tanks operate, distinguishes between sincere deniers and fiscal Conservative "pragmatists" who know the science is real but prioritize enrichment. "Ruination" catalogs 14 years of Conservative damage, from 900,000 children in poverty to piecemeal National Health Service (NHS) privatization; a postscript notes that Labour, upon winning, proposed pensioner fuel cuts and welfare cuts for people with disabilities, while the Prime Minister accepted over £100,000 in gifts from donors.

"Shibboleth," published during the 2024 student protests against the war on Gaza, defends the protests' ethical foundations while insisting that dismissing the felt unsafety of Jewish students is a failure to apply the students' own philosophy consistently. Smith contends that shibboleths, phrases like "river to the sea" or "existential threat," mark tribal membership rather than clarify entangled history. "The Dream of the Raised Arm," written on election day 2024, draws on Charlotte Beradt's The Third Reich of Dreams, nightmares recorded from ordinary Germans as the Nazi movement grew, to compare the propaganda mediums of past and present: the megaphone and the algorithm. Smith argues that the Right has understood the power of Gleichschaltung, or mandatory conformity, far better than the Left. In "Trump Gaza Number One," she reads an AI-generated video posted by Trump depicting post-war Gaza as a beachfront resort, applying Fanon's analysis to argue that the video reduces Palestinians to desensitized backdrop figures.

The collection gathers obituaries of writers to whom Smith felt indebted despite significant differences. She characterizes Joan Didion's legacy as the authority of her tone: a woman who could write without hedging or deference. She frames Toni Morrison as an existential presence for Black girls of her generation. She characterizes Philip Roth as "writing taken neat." She credits Martin Amis with leading the English novel into the vulgarity of Thatcherite Britain. Her essay on Hilary Mantel recounts their friendship, including Mantel's vivid description of her Thomas Cromwell project, which Smith ranks among the greatest live performances she has witnessed. Smith admits to avoiding Wolf Hall for years while writing The Fraud, fearing Mantel's brilliance would function as a wall too high to scale.

Personal essays round out the collection. "The Realm of the Unspoken," a speech accepting the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, argues that the fiercest political battle concerns who will harness atavistic yearnings for the absolute. Smith contends that universal basic income, fair taxation, and regulation of offshore wealth are also things people long for in their souls, and that these, too, constitute Heimat, the German concept of homeland and belonging. In "The Fall," Smith narrates falling 40 feet from her bedroom window at 17, using the incident to explore time, volition, and teenage misery. "Conscience and Consciousness," her final craft lecture at New York University (NYU), argues that the communication of human consciousness is what only creative writing can do. She conducts an extended reading of the American essayist and novelist James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, demonstrating how Baldwin's sentences refuse slogans and remain alive to both "the people" and "the person." The collection also includes "Kilburn, My Love," a brief tribute to Kilburn High Road, which Smith calls the most interesting street in Europe.