Elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002 and named Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017 (“About Zadie”), Black British writer Zadie Smith is at the top of her game. Decorated regularly, from the beginning of her career, she won her latest major award, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, in 2018 (“Österreichischer Staatspreis”), the very year the international research group “Intersections: Gender and Identity in the Short Fiction of Contemporary British Women Writers” (FEM2017-83084-P, AEI/FEDER, UE) took up its work. It is in the context of this collective scholarly effort that the present article seeks to read Smith’s “The Embassy of Cambodia” as a story about compassionate fantasising about the cultural “other” figured as “the immigrant.”
Born to a Jamaican mother, who emigrated to the United Kingdom in the late 1960s, and an English father, Smith grew up in Northwest London, studied at Cambridge University, whe...