These multi-entry novels, which span various locations and historical contexts, set the reader off on different narrative paths whilst inviting him/her to reflect on the themes which reverberate at the heart of the novels though reiterations and reworkings of common patterns.īuilt around ellipses and narrative voids they partake of an aesthetic which summons the reader into mnemon ic vigilance.Īlthough Caryl Phillips reworks the problematics of precarious narratives and subaltern histories, he refrains from substituting a fixed narrative for a void and chooses to generate pathways towards elusive trajectories which the reader has to follow. The conference proposes to look at the work of Phillips beyond the scope of traditional post-colonial themes such as identity, belonging, unbelonging, to envisage the formal characteristics of Caryl Phillips’s novels, in particular those juxtaposing various narratives, such as Crossing the River, Higher Ground, Foreigners: Three English Lives, as well as his latest novel The Lost Child. As such it invites a reflexion on the nature and workings of collective memory, and in particular the socio-histor ical workings of memory formation – which includes forced obliterations – as well as the need for mnemonic vigilance. Often labelled a neo-slave narrative, Crossing the River is emblematic of an interest in slave history and slave narratives which has manifested itself in recent decades. This two-day conference on the work of Caryl Phillips will be held in the presence of the author.
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