Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics

5. Imaginary Citizenship: Caryl Phillips’s Atlantic World

5 Imaginary Citizenship: Caryl Phillips’s Atlantic World Born in the Caribbean, raised in England, and now mainly resident in the United States, the writer Caryl Phillips is an interesting figure through whom to examine the contradictions of belonging in this age of unsettled nationality. ἀ ese contradictions manifest themselves not just in Phillips’s life. His writings, fictional and nonfictional, explore what it means to be in, but not of, a society, to belong legally to a country but feel excluded from it because of its history of treating one and one’s kind, whether racial, cultural, economic, or sexual, as outsiders. In this chapter, however, the focus of discussion will be on Phillips ’s nonfictional writings, primarily ἀ e Atlantic Sound, a hybrid account of the author’s travels to three of the prime sites of the Atlantic slave trade, which was published in 2000. ἀ e book culminates an exploration of issues that Phillips had conducted in other works of nonfiction, particularly ἀ e European Tribe, his first published book (1999; originally published in 1987), and A New World Order, a collection of essays (2002; originally published in 2001). F ocusing on these works, I think, will show that there is a structural connection between nonfiction as a literary form and the situation of artists who produce their works in the general institutional context of diasporicity, cosmopolitanism , and expatriation. ἀ ese three concepts have gained currency in cultural theory in recent times, although literary critics formerly discussed them under the rubrics of exile and alienation.1 Moreover, they pertain to the condition of most people in the world today; indeed, in this chapter, I contend that the large-scale migration to the West from Africa, South Asia, and the rest of the postcolonial world that began in the mid-1980s is an intensification of the earlier experiences of displacement that framed exile as a historical concept. As I argued in the conclusion of chapter 1, it was in the context of their “homelessness” that twentieth-century Caribbean intellectuals were able to work for African political and cultural independence . However, given the institutional changes wrought by technology and migration in the past several decades, this homelessness has acquired a different kind of importance. ἀ e cultural deracination experienced by these exiled figures is now a global pattern. ἀi s pattern, at once cultural and economic, is best captured in the idea of the polyforum, “the public square where everyone has a right to be heard, but 134 Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics no one has the right to exclusive speech,” according to the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes (2006, 612), or, as Phillips himself puts it, “a new world order in which there will soon be one global conversation with limited participation open to all, and full participation available to none” (2001, 5). ἀi s premise is underscored by the striking encounters between Phillips and his interlocutors in ἀ e Atlantic Sound, both because and in spite of the author’s self-consciousness as a writer with specific aims. In the three texts produced between 1989 and 2001, the period when Phillips’s career as a novelist could be said to have crystallized , the author moves from the frustration of being in, but not of, Europe to the awareness of alternatives to Europe, which is not to say that he no longer experiences the frustration. ἀ e ethnically and socially marginalized populations of twentieth-century Europe were in that continent but not of it, enduring a cultural exclusion that was determined on the basis of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and Phillips first addresses this dilemma in ἀ e European Tribe. However, fourteen years after this work’s first publication, global capitalism has become so corporatized and transnational as to render the idea of belonging, of well-defined cultural boundaries, complicated for a significant and increasing number of people in the world, irrespective of other, older forms of identity. Phillips’s nonfictional works move between two poles—Europe’s disconnection from the lived experiences of its minorities, and the changed notions of contemporary identity represented in the cultural pluralism of the United States. My argument in this chapter relies on the tension implicit in this move. ἀ e conditions of ethnic minorities have improved not only in Europe but also in the rest of the world since the publication of ἀ e European Tribe, as Phillips himself acknowledges in the afterword to the 1999 edition of the book. Associated with this progress is the presence of what he calls “alternatives...