Haunting the African Diaspora: Responsibility and Remaining in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River

In Crossing the River, Caryl Phillips explores African complicity in the transatlantic slave trade and white exploitation of the children of the African Diaspora in order to model how those who initiated and benefit from this history can take responsibility for their treatment of its victims, restore their humanity through representation, and celebrate their survival. Refusing to offer easy solutions for this complex history, Phillips places his black characters in a precarious space between trauma and death and challenges his readers to enter that space and reckon their responsibility to carry this history forward.