Caryl Phillips

Ledent, Bénédicte

doi:10.4324/9780203830352.ch10

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…This means that what remains unrepresented and unsaid in Phillips's fiction acquires a fundamental importance (see also Birat 1999;Schatteman 2001;Ledent 2002, Clingman 2004. This is true both in the way that gaps between the narratives call forth absent histories and in the way that the silences within particular narratives gesture towards what remains unrepresented within certain discursive structures.…”

Section: The Criticsmentioning

confidence: 96%

The silence of Palestinians in Caryl Phillips’sThe Nature of Blood

Miller

2013

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

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Section: The Criticsmentioning

confidence: 96%

The silence of Palestinians in Caryl Phillips’sThe Nature of Blood

Miller

2013

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

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“…In Cambridge, despite Emily's initial contempt for the slaves on the plantation, she eventually establishes friendly links with Stella, who even becomes "the legitimate substitute for Isabella," who used to be Emily's white servant. 21 But Emily's baby, who represented what "Stella had hoped [...] they might share" (C, 178), is stillborn, which might indicate that the encounter with other oppressed people is not easy. The novel ends with a tension between the willingness to come together and the extreme difficulty of doing so, which also reappears in A Distant Shore, where the protagonists long to open up to the other, but are soon confronted with the impossibility of such closeness.…”

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confidence: 99%

Omnipresent and Everlasting Imperialism: Race and Gender Oppression in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and A Distant Shore

Gillet

2012

Caryl Phillips

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Caryl Phillips published Cambridge in 1991 and A Distant Shore in 2003. Twelve years and two novels separate these two books, whose stories also take place almost two centuries and two thousand kilometres apart. Yet these narratives may be viewed as strikingly similar in many respects. In what follows, I wish to examine how the similarities and differences between Cambridge and A Distant Shore operate to convey the idea that imperialism-the dominion of one nation or group of people over another-has lived on from the nineteenth century depicted in Cambridge to the twenty-first century of A Distant Shore. Cambridge recounts the stories of Emily Cartwright, a white Englishwoman who travels to her father's plantation in the Caribbean, and of Cambridge, a black African slave who ends up on Mr Cartwright's plantation after going through two middle passages. The narrative unfolds at the beginning of the nineteenth century, between the abolition of the slave trade and that of slavery. A Distant Shore follows Dorothy Jones, a white Englishwoman, and Solomon Bartholomew, an African political refugee who has fled to England. The two characters meet in Weston, a small village in the north of England, and eventually become friends. The novel is set in contemporary England, about twenty years after "Mrs Thatcher clos[ed] the pits." 1 Because of their different settings, Cambridge and A Distant Shore may at first sight appear to be very dissimilar. But, like their main characters, they have significant features in common. Both novels discuss racial and gender oppression by presenting a black man from Africa and a white Englishwoman, two protagonists "separated by gender [...] and ethnicity" 2 but nonetheless both subjected to "white male supremacy." 3 Moreover, both novels can be 1

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Writing the biofictive: Caryl Phillips and The Lost Child

Clingman

2018

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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This article is an exploration of the biofictive in Caryl Phillips’s writing, in particular in his novel The Lost Child (2015). The term “biofiction” has been in critical use for some 20 years, but is in general under-theorized. The article intends to help fill that gap by considering the biofictive in Phillips’s work as a form of postcolonial epistemology. It also introduces a new but logical dimension by setting the biofictive in conversation with biopolitics. However, whereas the dominant focus in discussions of the biopolitical (formulations from Foucault to Agamben and beyond) concerns the structures and dispositions of power, the role of the biofictive is inflected differently insofar as it both acknowledges a history of power but also creates a space of narrative alterity and resistance. In Phillips’s work this is revealed both in his nonfiction and fiction, not least where the two are combined; and it is especially evident in the multimodal operations of his fiction, dispersed across time and space in the aftermath of slavery, migration, and empire. We see all this in The Lost Child, which also introduces a complex rereading of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Overall, Phillips’s version of the postcolonial is capacious, intersecting with other forms of post-traumatic and fugitive experience. The biofictive becomes a bona fide form of knowledge in our postcolonial, post-imperial moment.

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Caryl Phillips

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The silence of Palestinians in Caryl Phillips’sThe Nature of Blood

The silence of Palestinians in Caryl Phillips’sThe Nature of Blood

Omnipresent and Everlasting Imperialism: Race and Gender Oppression in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and A Distant Shore

Writing the biofictive: Caryl Phillips and The Lost Child

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