- Postcoloniality, Atlantic Orders, and the Migrant Male in the Writings of Caryl Phillips
In his review of anglophone Caribbean literature, "The Novel in the British Caribbean," A. J. Seymour looks specifically at the representation of the exile's return in order to imagine the future trajectory of Caribbean letters.1 Seymour laments the common thread that emerges in the novels of writers such as V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, andJohn Hearne—the negative depiction of the migrant male. The male heroes in these works return to the Caribbean after having lived in exile in order to participate in or incite political change, only to emerge at the end of their struggles as tragic failures. Seymour figures these pessimistic plots as symptomatic of a residual anticolonialist attitude among Caribbean writers still obsessed with resistance: "I have the impression that the British Caribbean novelist is still writing from a position of opposition to the powers that be, and has not yet seen the region making an act of possession of its political powers."2 Ultimately, Seymour sees this oppositional stance as passé in view of the "new political independence for national units" in the Caribbean. For Seymour, the [End Page 17] moment of independence figures as a complete break from the colonial hold of empire in terms of economics, politics, and culture. With the postcolonial moment defined by full independence, Seymour calls for the colonial thematics of resistance to be replaced by a nation-building aesthetic, one that is "optimistic in a forward-looking sense."3
Caryl Phillips forms part of the postcolonial generation of Caribbean writers; however, there is a distinct difference between Phillips and the nation-building novelists imagined by Seymour. While Phillips's work does depict the challenges faced by the Caribbean in a postcolonial age, his texts "are not sweeping calls to social action."4 Phillips's more recent writings, The Atlantic Sound (2000) and A New World Order (2001), consistently refute the possibility of solidarity, rejecting the idea that a community with shared cultural values could emerge from and be united by the horrors of slavery, colonialism, and migration. Phillips's writings allude to a postcolonial problematic outside of the logic of Seymour's consideration. Rather than conceiving of the postcolonial moment in terms of full independence, Phillips's postcolonial is defined by neocolonial relations of power. In turn, Phillips alludes to a shift in the formulation of politics itself such that the primacy of political freedom is no longer a privileged concept within the public sphere. In its place emerges the centrality of the individual body as commodity within an Atlantic order of globalization. In this article, I will discuss how Phillips narrates the persona of the isolated migrant male as the representative subject of the neocolonial Caribbean. Beginning first with Phillips's recent travel writing, in which he represents collective political movements as impossible, I will then examine his early novel, A State of Independence (1986), as Phillips's closest engagement with the literary project of nation building. Phillips's turn towards nonfiction writing in the later half of his career can be understood in terms of the development of the migrant male persona in A State of Independence, as well as in terms of the challenges faced by the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism in the Caribbean as the foreclosure of political freedom with the emergence of a biopolitical new world order.
Caryl Phillips has commented that all of his writing takes as its subject the intersection between travel, history, and identity: "It is the same story rewritten in many ways. I feel it is my duty to tell the story and I can't stop telling it."5 Phillips regards himself as [End Page 18] "a writer and traveler observing the residue of empire."6 This detached stance facilitates a certain critical position as well. The traveling subject in Phillips's nonfiction texts, The Atlantic Sound and ANew World Order, is overwhelmed by the historicity of his travels. This historicity includes the remnants of the transatlantic slave trade, the migrations that followed the dismantling of the colonial system, and the shifts in global labor, which affected Phillips's...