Caryl Phillips's interstitial poetics

ABSTRACT

The “spatial turn” in literary studies has challenged the perception that time is the fundamental organising principle of fiction and has drawn attention to the ways in which writers create literary cartographies. In a similar vein, postcolonial critics have foregrounded the role of “contact zones” and investigated the “third space” in between cultures as productive sites of interconnectedness, while also simultaneously laying bare the “labour of translation” that takes place in the territories reconfigured by the colonial domination. This article highlights the centrality of space in Caryl Phillips’s novels on transatlantic slavery and argues how, through a meticulous exploration of multiple spaces of transit and of the characters who inhabit them, the author suggestively lays out an interstitial poetics. Within Phillips’s composite oeuvre, the investigation of transatlantic slavery and its legacy is a pivotal, recurring theme. In his works, Phillips dwells on the liminal spaces that emerged in the context of the Middle Passage and the institution of slavery. As this article will argue, by reimagining the Black Atlantic as contiguous to the imperial centre, Phillips complicates the geography of colonial and imperial Britain.

KEYWORDS:

• Caryl Phillips
• transatlantic slavery
• Middle Passage
• interstitial poetics
• intertextuality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Phillips grew up in Leeds and has often discussed his “northern soul” and the difficulty of growing up as a black child in the North of England in the 1960s and 1970s (Colour Me English, 2011). The “rural racism” of the countryside is addressed in the work by other Black British writers, such as Andrea Levy’s novel Fruit of the Lemon (1999) or Jackie Kay’s collection of poetry Other Lovers (1993). It is a central theme in the work of leading Guyanese-British photographer and visual artist Ingrid Pollard, who was a Turner prize nominee in 2022. Since the 1980s, Pollard has presented works that have intended to disturb the pastoral myth of the countryside: in Pastoral Interlude (1989) she raises issues of race in connection to landscape and place, and in her volume Hidden in a Public Place (2008) she displays photographs of “the Black Boy” in the signs of eponymous pubs across Britain, contending that the presence of Black people in supposedly quintessential English villages and rural areas has been relegated to margins, like incidental signs on pubs and inns.

2. See in particular the novel Dancing in the Dark (2006) in which Phillips retraces the career of the black actor and entertainer Bert Williams, who “played the coon” for largely white audiences in early 20^th century America.

3. In 1997 Phillips edited Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging, an anthology of writing by “outsiders” to Britain (Phillips 1997, iii) featuring the works of black writers who emerged in the wake of the slave trade, as well as of writers born in the British colonies and 20^th century cosmopolitan and immigrant writers. With this collection Phillips challenges the idea that foreign authors are a recent addition to the history of English literature, which, instead, has been shaped by outsiders “for at least 200 years” (iii).

4. On the influence of Jean Rhys on The Lost Child and intertextual links to her work see Buonanno (2017) and Ledent and O’Callaghan (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giovanna Buonanno

Giovanna Buonanno (Ph.D Comparative Literature, Warwick) is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She is the author of International Actresses on the Victorian Stage (Modena, 2002) and co-editor, among others, of Cross-cultural Encounters, Identity, Gender and Representation (2005), Remediating Imagination: Literatures and Cultures in English from the Renaissance to the Postcolonial (2016), and ”Transnational Revision and Rewriting in Tanika Gupta’s Theatre” (special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2022). She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on intercultural drama, Black and Asian British literature, refugee writing, and transnational women’s writing.