Interview with Caryl Phillips

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. Resumen Analizando las últimas novelas de Caryl Phillips (A Distant Shore y In the Falling Snow) a través de la experiencia del (medio)ambiente que viven los personajes, este artículo persigue enriquecer el diálogo entre los estudios postcoloniales y la ecocrítica urbana. Las ficciones británicas de Phillips desvelan cómo las bases racistas/coloniales occidentales que persisten en un contexto poscolonial se hacen evidentes en el fenómeno de la espacialización racial. Éste elabora espacios aparte de alteridad, impregnados de salvajes connotaciones, donde el indeseable “Otro” es excluido. El enriquecedor concepto de “man-in-environment” es reconfigurado de manera que la identidad del sujeto poscolonial acaba definiéndose por tan sesgados lugares de residencia. En consecuencia, el sentido del espacio del “Otro” está muy alienado. La decadente naturaleza suburbana y la aterradora e impersonal ciudad de Londres son también entidades ajenas con las cuales los protagonistas no pueden interactuar. Mi concepto de “man-as-environment” concibe al hombre y al lugar como dos “Otros” sometidos, acosados por la espacialización de la alteridad. Esto último desacredita la ilusión de una Arcadia poscolonial británica, en tanto que los aprietos de los emigrantes es tal que se crea un desencanto antipastoril con Inglaterra. La imposibilidad de ser un “man-in-place” en un contexto poscolonial demanda precisamente una auténtica y reconciliadora relación postpastoril entre hombres y lugares, es decir, una relación caracterizada por la absoluta necesidad de aunar justicia social y medioambiental.

Download Full-text

Rights, Routes, and Refugees: The Fiction of Caryl Phillips

Law & Literature ◽

10.1080/1535685x.2015.1099220 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 27 (3) ◽

pp. 365-381 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Stephen Clingman

Keyword(s):

Caryl Phillips

Download Full-text

Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas in the Work of Caryl Phillips

Postcolonial Witnessing ◽

10.1057/9781137292117.0010 ◽

2013 ◽

Keyword(s):

Caryl Phillips

Download Full-text

“Shakespeare’s Pioneer Migrant Othello”: Desire, Migration, Pathology and the Politics of Citizenship in The Nature of Blood

Pólemos ◽

10.1515/pol-2021-2019 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 15 (2) ◽

pp. 307-331

Author(s):

Chiara Battisti

Keyword(s):

Social Identity ◽

Early Modern ◽

Sense Of Belonging ◽

Historical Period ◽

Subjective Feeling ◽

Complex Reflection ◽

Caryl Phillips

Abstract In a historical period characterised by political and social occurrences of immigration crises, Shakespeare’s and early modern dramatic attention to aliens and foreigners invite us to re-read the anguish of Shakespeare’s alien and to investigate the ways in which, in the specific case of Othello, the Moor’s experience prefigures subsequent migrations and the contemporary immigrants’ struggle for integration. Caryl Phillips’ creative re-appropriation of Shakespeare’s Othello in The Nature of Blood (1998) gives voice to the psychological anguish of a migrant in the guise of an unnamed Othello-like black general newly arrived in Venice. In a never-ending dialogue between present and past, Phillips articulates a complex reflection on the immigrants’ desire to be granted recognition as a legitimised individual with a social identity, while problematising the idea of home and the sense of belonging, here understood as the subjective feeling of identification with a city/nation. With such a complex redefinition in mind, my reading conceptualises Othello (alias the migrant) as an ethnopsychiatric “symptom”, in a psychopathology of migration and exile which exposes the meanings and practices of belonging produced and supported by host societies.

Download Full-text