Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas in the Work of Caryl Phillips

Abstract

In this chapter, I will investigate the links forged between memories of black and Jewish suffering in the fiction and non-fiction of the British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips, one master of the genre Rebecca Walkowitz has called “comparison literature.”¹ In his novels Higher Ground (1989) and The Nature of Blood (1997), as well as in his travel book The European Tribe (1987), Phillips interweaves stories of anti-Semitic and racist violence set in many different times and places.² After illuminating the connections between the different histories established in these texts through the rhetorical tropes of metaphor and metonymy, understood not only as poetic devices but also in the extended sense of deep structures of thought that determine the way one looks at history (White), I will argue that Phillips’s work seeks to foster attunement to multiple histories of suffering and to move beyond various tribalisms by supplementing a metaphorical view of history, which, in its insistence on similarity, theatens to conflate distinct historical experiences, with a metonymical view, which places them alongside one another and thus preserves the distance between them. Dismantling anti-comparativist impulses, Phillips’s work can be seen to present a fuller picture of the dark underside of modernity and to pave the way for alliances and solidarities that transcend race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and culture.