Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

Caryl Phillips’s novel Crossing the River deals with European colonialism and the consequences of it. Crossing the River is a novel which embraces characters from colonized cultures as well as characters from colonizing cultures. Following a timeline that begins in 1752 and ends in 1963, the novel shows slavery in progress as well as what transpires in the aftermath of slavery        In this essay I will argue that Caryl Phillips demonstrates the complexity of colonialism and slavery in his novel Crossing the River; he approaches the two concepts from different perspectives and shows us that colonialism and slavery are complicated concepts. Caryl Phillips uses narrative to demonstrate the negative sides of colonialism and slavery, to show that the negative aspects of the two concepts can affect not only the colonized people but also the colonizing people.        Colonialism, in its traditional sense, is present in some of the novel’s episodes but slavery, in different forms, appears in all episodes. Nevertheless, all episodes in Crossing the River have a common origin; which Phillips reminds us about by using the relationship between plot and story. Diversity is an important theme in the novel. From a narrative perspective, Crossing the River has a diversity of narrators who tell their stories as well as other persons’ stories. There are female narrators as well as male ones; some narrators are known while other narrators are unknown. The ways the episodes are told are diversified. Some of the episodes follow a chronological line (“The Pagan Coast” and “Crossing the River”) while other episodes jump back and forth in time (“West” and “Somewhere in England”). The forms of narration are diversified, not only between the individual episodes but also within some of the episodes. Crossing the River plays with diversity in several layers. The structure of the novel is as diversified as the number of narrators, a diversity of ways of dealing with the main themes results in a diversity of fates for Phillips’s characters. Caryl Phillips combines structure with content to demonstrate that colonialism and slavery are problematic concepts: the negative consequences of the two concepts can, in different ways and in different degrees, affect colonized people as well as those responsible for colonialism.

The aim of this essay is to explore motherhood in two postcolonial literary works by African American author Toni Morrison and British author Caryl Phillips, who was born in the Caribbean. The essay is based on Morrison’s award winning novel Beloved, which was published in 1987 and was inspired by the escaping African American slave Margareth Garner. It is set just after the American Civil War and the novels deals with the trauma of slavery from the perspective of Sethe, a slave who kills her own daughter to save her from slavery. The second novel on which this essay is based is Caryl Phillips’ novel Crossing the River, which was published 1993 and focused on the African diaspora from different perspectives. Crossing the River is a non-chronological narrative covering four different characters (three African American people and one white slave trader during the eighteenth century). This essay, however, only deals with the last of the four narratives depicting white British Joyce who mothers a child with African American soldier Travis. The hypothesis on which the essay is based is that the institution of American slavery has denied the female protagonists in the two novels, Sethe and Joyce, their maternal selves. The analysis revealed that both women suffer from racial domination, and race, or simply skin color, is what leads to the maternal loss of the two protagonists. Both authors depict the world of the colonizer and the colonized and they address the common pain and guilt shared by black as well as white people.

Through the critical discourse analysis of Anglophone Caribbean literature as a polyrhythmic performance, this research sets out to examine the claim that, in a world in a state of constant flux, emerging Caribbean voices are offering a challenging perspective on how to negotiate identity away from the binary constructs of centre and margin. It argues that the Caribbean writer, as a self-conscious producer of alternative discourses, offers an innovative and transcultural vision of the self. This research consists of three stages which integrate critical discourse and literary analysis with colonial/postcolonial and socio-cultural theories. Firstly, it investigates the power of language as an operation of discourse through which to apprehend reality within a binary system of representation. It then examines how the concept of discourse, as a site of contestation and meaning, enables the elaboration of a Caribbean counter-discourse. Finally, it explores the role, within the Caribbean text, of literary techniques such as narrative fragmentation, irony, dialogism, intertextuality, ambivalence and the carnivalesque to challenge, disrupt the established order and offer new perspectives of being. My study of Anglophone Caribbean texts highlights the power of language and the authority of the ‘book’ as subtle, insidious tools of domination and colonisation. It also demonstrates how, by allowing hitherto marginalised voices to write themselves into being, Caribbean writers enable linear narratives and monolithic visions of reality to be contested and other perspectives of understanding and of meaning to be uncovered. It exposes the plurality and the interweaving of discourses in the Caribbean text as a liberating, dynamic force which enables new subject positions and realities to emerge along the lines of similarity and difference. At a time when the issue of identity is one of the central problems in the world today, the research argues that this celebration of the plural, the fluid and the ambivalent offers new ways of being away from the stultifying perspective of essentialist forms.

The aim of this essay is to examine the tension at the heart of the British colonial discourse as it affects the relationship of Travis and Joyce in the chapter "Somewhere in England", in Caryl Phillips's 1993 novel, Crossing the River. The thesis of the essay is that the colonial discourse of the British insists on a racial signifier in the imagined community of the British, and thus resists the idea that a person can be both black and British. The postcolonial analysis shows that it is Joyce's rejection of the national discourse along with the displacement of Travis from a segregated America into a superficially kinder environment that allows their relationship to develop. Yet, along with Travis's death, the contradictions and hypocrisy of the colonial discourse serve to undermine Joyce's lack of racial prejudice and contribute to her giving up her baby at the end of the war.

This essay analyses the life of Joyce, the protagonist in “Somewhere in England”, the fourth section of Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips, using an intersectional feminist perspective. It attempts to show how patriarchy, classism, and racism intersect to shape Joyce’s life and to limit her possibilities. The essay argues that at the beginning, Joyce is too naïve to fully understand the power structures prevailing in her society, and therefore, she is different from those around her. However, she successively experiences not only patriarchal oppression but also class and race oppressions. The result is that Joyce accepts her social position when she understands that it is difficult for an individual woman to challenge the intersected multiple oppressions of the capitalist, supremacist, patriarchal society.

The father in Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips is a character burdened by guilt due to his implication in his children’s enslavement. He can be considered a supernatural being since his character transcends time. He is also connected to a supernatural essence called the “many-tongued chorus” that can be seen to represent the people of the African diaspora. The father is desperately trying to communicate with his children, and to the people of the African diaspora, but to no avail. He can, however, be interpreted as having a healing function. This essay explores this function. It analyzes how the father tries to heal the people of the African diaspora’s loss of ‘home’ and identity by looking at what he conveys in the prologue and the epilogue. The concepts of displacement, colonized minds, and roots and routes within postcolonialism is used for this purpose.

Abstract   The aim of this essay is to explain why Caryl Phillips presents Joyce as "the adopted daughter of Africa" at the end of Crossing the River (1993). This will be done by performing a close reading. This essay will focus on Joyce’s actions and behaviour. Aspects of feminism and postcolonial theory will act as the theoretic basis for the analysis. The analysis of Joyce’s character will be put in relation to the whole of Phillips’ “Black Atlantic” narrative and to gender and third wave feminist theories. The analysis will show that Joyce, by breaking racial norms, renouncing her faith, defying her mother, divorcing her husband, and falling in love with Travis, is the person who defines hope in the novel. Her character, together with her son Greer, shows a path to reconciliation between races in the aftermath of colonialism.

This thesis undertakes a critical study of ethics in the postcolonial novel. Focusing on four authors, namely Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Caryl Phillips, and Kazuo Ishiguro, I conduct a comparative analysis of the ethical engagement offered in a selection of their novels. I argue that the recognitions and related emotional responses of characters are integral to the unfolding of these novels’ ethical concerns. The ethics thus explored are often marked by the complexity and impurity characteristic of the tragic – an impurity which is productively thought together with Jacques Derrida’s understanding of “radical evil”. I arrive at this through deploying an approach to ethics in the postcolonial novel that is largely drawn from the work of Martha Nussbaum, David Scott, and Terence Cave. This approach is attentive to both the particular contexts in which the novels’ ethical concerns unfold, as well as the general ethical questions in relation to which these can be understood. Crucial to this is the concept of anagnorisis, that is, the recognition scene. Functioning as both a structural and a thematic element, it serves as a hinge between the general and the specific ethical considerations in a novel. There are three ethical themes that I consider across the thesis: the ethics of remembrance, the human, and religion. The works of these four authors cluster around these concerns to differing degrees and with differing perspectives. What emerges is that while each engagement is focused on the particular details that the novel represents, the range of perspectives can nevertheless be productively read alongside one another as interventions into these general concerns. Following from this I also conclude that as a suitable, if not privileged, form in which to engage questions of the ethical, the postcolonial novel hosts the ethical difficulty that I name as the tragic, and which is characterised by the term radical evil.