A Swing and a Miss: On Zadie Smith’s Swing Time

In Swing Time, Zadie Smith describes a home video uploaded to the Internet and gone viral. “Can children exploit themselves? Is it anything more than a couple of girls messing around, simply two girls dancing—two brown girls dancing like adults—copying adult moves innocently, but skillfully, as brown girls often can? And if you think it’s more than that, then who has the problem, exactly, the girls in the film—or you?”Swing Time, the British writer’s fif