Borderland Strangers in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore

Journal of International Social Research, 2016

The conception of identity has been studied through many different branches of humanities, in terms of language, ideology, psychoanalysis, sociology or history just to name a few. All theories come close in defining identity as an ever transforming, fluctuating and instable concept.. The term multiculturalism, which is usually preferred in trying to define the state of different cultures in the attempt of existing together, seems to be insufficient when it comes to the globalized world of the twenty-first century. Even though transnationalism was introduced by Randolph Bourne in the early twentieth century, its broader significance did not reveal itself in English literature until the final decades of the century. This study aims to explore the concept of transnationalism and its effect on the process of identity formation within different novels to demonstrate how individuals living in a globalized world construct a unique sense of identity while carrying certain features in common through this process. Within this frame, I intend to refer to Meera Syal's

2019

International audienceRobert H. Colescott's paintings My Shadow (1977) and Knowledge of the Past is the Key to the Future (St Sebastian) (1986) point to the taboo of mixed-race relationships. The question seemed topical enough for the painter to repeatedly question the terror linked to the evocation of "miscegenation" in the United States in his vivid renderings of triumphant or defeated lovers challenging white supremacism. The intermedial convergence between these works and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) (1974) also illuminates Caryl Phillips's overall concern, as stated in his introduction to The Shelter (1984), that "[...] the story of the black man and the white woman in the Western world is bound together with the secure tape of a troubled history; and the relationship between the black man and the white woman has always provoked the greatest conflict, the most fear, the most loathing" (10). In Al...

Lectures du monde anglophone ISSN 2429-2664, 2018

Robert H. Colescott’s paintings My Shadow (1977) and Knowledge of the Past is the Key to the Future (St Sebastian) (1986) point to the taboo of mixed-race relationships. The question seemed topical enough for the painter to repeatedly question the terror linked to the evocation of “miscegenation” in the United States in his vivid renderings of triumphant or defeated lovers challenging white supremacism. The intermedial convergence between these works and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) (1974) also illuminates Caryl Phillips’s overall concern, as stated in his introduction to The Shelter (1984), that “[…] the story of the black man and the white woman in the Western world is bound together with the secure tape of a troubled history; and the relationship between the black man and the white woman has always provoked the greatest conflict, the most fear, the most loathing” (10). In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Fassbinder carefully examines the plight of a mixed couple in a Germany that is still haunted by Nazi white supremacist ideology, while Phillips, in “Somewhere in England,” the fourth part of his novel Crossing the River (1993) and its 2016 re-writing for a BBC radio play, focuses on the thwarted love between an African-American GI and a white English villager during WWII. I will point to striking parallels in these different works such as the motif of the interracial dancing couple, central to both versions of Philips’s story and also present in Colescott’s and Fassbinder’s works. Indeed, dancing is often used in Phillips’s plays and novels to delineate, within a momentarily pacified Black Atlantic, a space of emotional resistance defying social constraints, with the changing music a period marker that reveals the persistence over time of conflict, fear and loathing around embattled lovers. The three artists record the interplay of emotions in works that converge towards the building of aesthetic empathy and, through that, of social empathy and healing, as indicated most explicitly by Phillips’s revisiting of “Somewhere in England” as a radio play twenty-three years after the publication of Crossing the River.

2017

was born in 1958 in St. Kitts and Nevis, then still a British island, and was brought by his parents as an infant to Leeds, in Yorkshire, Great Britain, where he grew up. After reading English Literature at Oxford, he embraced a writing career and has now written ten novels, two non-fiction books, four plays, three collections of essays, along with radio plays and screenplays for the cinema. He is currently a Professor of English at Yale University. Caryl Phillips kindly accepted to answer my questions regarding his first three plays: Strange Fruit (1981), Where There Is Darkness (1982), The Shelter (1984), and their links with the political atmosphere of the '70's and the '80's. I was particularly interested in knowing whether Strange Fruit was related in any way with Pressure (1976), a film by Horace Ové, the first feature film by a Black British filmmaker. "Pressure" is also the name of the credit song written by Horace Ové that is played along a series of drawings narrating the canonical story of the generation of British nationals hailing from the Caribbean who came to Britain to do their share of the reconstruction effort, the Windrush generation. Their hope for a brighter life in Britain was quickly shattered as the effect of the postwar shortage of housing and jobs, combined with the fear of miscegenation, made it difficult for British Caribbean newcomers to feel at home in the country they had been made to believe was their motherland. The protest initiated against institutional racism in Britain by the Anglo-Caribbean youth from the following generation is depicted both in Caryl Phillips's play and Horace Ové's film. Caryl Phillips went back to this period in novels such as The Final Passage (1985) and In the Falling Snow (2009). Pressure was kept on the shelves for two years before being eventually released by the British Film Institute because of the scenes showing violent police behavior towards secondgeneration British Caribbean youths during arrests under the "Sus Law." British society and its approach to race relations, as well as the notion of family which is also discussed through its depiction in The Lost Child (2015), Caryl Phillips's latest novel, are other topics discussed by the writer. Since the word "pressure" is recurrent in Strange Fruit, I wondered whether the film had been an influence on the play.

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2017

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2017

Starting from the vocal nature of Crossing the River, the article looks at Caryl Phillips's archives housed at the Beinecke Library and thereby attempts to retrieve the voices that did not make it into the book, but which are nonetheless important pieces in the writers's imaginative universe. This article will refer to three thematically linked radio plays as well as an early draft of the third section of the 1993 novel.

Etudes britannique contemporaine, 2018

The refugee has been traditionally perceived as an archetype of displacement and marginalisation, and what Julia Kristeva refers to as a liminal 'abject' other. This article argues that Caryl Phillips's novel A Distant Shore deconstructs these notions and offers an alternative way of reconceptualising the figure of the refugee, by using Paul Gilroy's concept of 'conviviality'. It also illustrates how Phillips sensitively balances the exclusion and oppression of the refugee with the possibility of multicultural conviviality, symbolized by the mutual trust and recognition that obtain between the different characters in this novel.

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment [Online] 5.1

Examining Caryl Phillips's later fiction (A Distant Shore and In the Falling Snow) through the characters' lived experience of their environment, this article seeks to pave the way toward a mutually enriching dialogue between postcolonial studies and urban ecocriticism. Phillips's British novels show how Western racist/colonial underpinnings that persist in a postcolonial context are manifest in the phenomenon of spatialisation of race. The latter devises separate spaces of Otherness, imbued with savage connotations, where the undesirable Other is ostracised. The enriching concept of "man-in-environment" is thus reconfigured so that the postcolonial subject's identity is defined by such bias-constructed dwelling-places. Consequently, the Other's sense of place is a highly alienated one. The decayed suburban nature and the frightening/impersonal city of London are also "othered" entities with which the protagonists cannot interrelate. My "man-as-environment" concept envisions man and place as two subjected Others plagued by spatialisation of Otherness. The latter actually debunks the illusion of a postcolonial British Arcadia, as the immigrants' plight is that of an antipastoral disenchantment with England. The impossibility of being a "man-in-place" in a postcolonial context precisely calls for a truly reconciling postpastoral relationship between humans and place, a relationship thus informed by the absolute need for environmental and social justice combined.