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.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Seeking to navigate and explore diasporic identity, as reflected in and by transatlantic narrative spaces, this thesis looks to three very different novels birthed out of the Atlantic context (at different points of the Atlantic triangle and at different moments in history): Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint (1977) by Ama Ata Aidoo, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) by Paule Marshall and Crossing the River (1993) by Caryl Phillips. Recognising the weight of location – cultural, geographic, temporal – on the literary construction of transatlantic identity, this thesis traces the way in which Aidoo, Marshall and Phillips use fictional texts as tools for grappling with ideas of home and belonging in a world of displacement, fracture and (ex)change. Uncovering the impact of roots, as well as routes (rupta via) on the realisation of identity for the diasporic subject, this study reveals and wrestles with various narrative portrayals of the diasporic condition (a profoundly human condition). Our Sister Killjoy presents identity as inherently imbricated with nationalism and pan-Africanism, whereas The Chosen Place presents identity as tidalectic, caught in the interstices between western and African subjectivities. In Crossing the River on the other hand, diasporic identification is constructed as transnational, fractal and perpetually in-process. This study argues that in the absence of an established sense of terra firma the respective authors actively construct home through narrative, resulting in what Erica L. Johnson has described as terragraphica. In this way, each novel is perceived and explored as a particular terragraphica as well as a fictional lieux de mémoire (to borrow Pierre Nora’s conception of “sites of memory”). Using the memories of transatlantic characters as (broken) windows through which to view history, as well as filters through which the present can be understood (or refracted), are techniques that Aidoo, Marshall and Phillips employ (although, Aidoo’s use of memory is less obvious). Tapping into various sites of memory in the lives of the fictional characters, the novels themselves become mediums of remembering, not as a means of storing facts about the past, but for the ambivalent purpose of understanding the impact of the past on the present. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In ’n poging om diasporiese identiteit te karteer en te ondersoek, betrek hierdie verhandeling drie uiteenlopende romans wat in die Atlantiese konteks, naamlik vanuit die verskillende hoeke van die Atlantiese driehoek en verskillende geskiedkundige Atlantiese momente, ontstaan het. Die drie romans sluit in: Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint (1977) deur Ama Ata Aidoo, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) deur Paule Marshall en Crossing the River (1993) deur Caryl Phillips. Deur die belangrikheid van plek – kultureel, geografies en temporeel – in die literêre konstruksie van transatlantiese identiteit, te beklemtoon, spoor hierdie verhandeling die manier waarop Aidoo, Marshall en Phillips fiktiewe tekste aanwend na om sin te maak van idees oor tuiste en geborgenheid in ’n wêreld van verdringing, skeuring en (ver)wisseling. Deur die impak van die oorsprong op, asook die weg (rupta via) na, die verwesenliking van identiteit vir die diasporiese subjek te toon, onthul en worstel hierdie tesis met verskeie narratiewe uitbeeldings van die diasporiese toestand (’n toestand eie aan die mens). Our Sister Killjoy stel identiteit as inherent vermeng met nasionalisme en pan-Afrikanisme voor, terwyl The Chosen Place identiteit as tidalekties uitbeeld – vasgevang tussen westerse en Afrika-subjektiwiteite. In Crossing the River word diasporiese identifisering egter gekonstrueer as transnasionaal, fraktaal en ewigdurend in ’n proses van ontwikkeling. Hierdie studie voer verder aan dat die onderskeie skrywers tuiste aktief deur narratief konstrueer in die afwesigheid van ’n gevestigde bewustheid van terra firma, of onbekende land of plek. Die gevolg is ’n voortvloeiing van wat deur Erica L. Johnson beskryf word as terragraphica. Vervolgens word elk van die romans gesien en verken as ’n spesifieke terragraphica asook ’n fiktiewe lieux de mémoire, gegrond in Pierre Nora se konsep “sites of memory”. Die benutting van transatlantiese karakters se herhinneringe as (gebreekte) vensters waardeur die geskiedenis bespeur kan word en filters waardeur die hede verstaan (of gerefrakteer) kan word, is die tegnieke wat Aidoo, Marshall en Phillips aanwend – alhoewel Aidoo se gebruik van geheue minder ooglopend is. Deur verskeie terreine van geheue in die lewens van die fiktiewe karakters te betrek, ontwikkel die romans tot mediums van onthou, nie in die sin van feite van die verlede wat gestoor word nie, maar met die dubbelsinnige doel om die impak van die verlede op die hede te verstaan.