Sounding Out History: Caryl Phillip's Crossing the River

This book explores the articulation of the aesthetics and the politics of Crossing the River beyond the focus on neo-slave narratives and sounds out the silence purposefully left by Caryl Phillips in his revisiting of slave history. Central to Phillips’s novel is an indictment of Western narrative forms – in particular the travelogue and the epistolary genre – which have played a pivotal role in the shaping of Western modernity and which Phillips experiments with as part of a project to invent a form suitable for the expression of a black transatlantic modernity in the wake of the postcolonial critique of Western historiography.

Table of Contents 

Introduction
Part I: Writing ‘Into the face of History’
— Chapter I. Sketching a genealogy of parallel histories
— Chapter II. Sounding out the voids of history: the slave trade and its ‘ghost narratives’
— Chapter III. Historical amnesia and prosthetic memory
Part II: The Generic and Aesthetic Make-up of Crossing the River
— Chapter I. Literary Filiations
— Chapter II. Voicing history
Part III: Post-Genealogies
— Chapter I. Precarious homes
— Chapter II. Of grafted limbs and post-genealogies.
Conclusion. Inhabiting the Voids of History
Bibliography
Index

Order at the Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre website.

Date de publication : 2017
174 pages
Format : 17×23 cm
ISBN : 978-2-84016-282-7  
Prix : 12€