Sounding out History. Caryl Phillips'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.

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...