History and Race in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood

History and Race in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood

Author: Maria Festa

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2020-10-20

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 3838214331

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This monograph examines Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997), a novel exploring recurring expressions of exclusion and discrimination throughout history with particular focus on Jewish and African diasporas and the storytelling of its migrant characters. Particular attention is given to the analysis of characters revealing different facets of the Jewish question. Maria Festa also provides a historical excursus on the notion of race and considers another character alluding to Shakespeare’s Othello to expose the paradoxes of the relationship between subjugator and subjugated. The study makes the case that among the novel’s most remarkable achievements is Phillips’s effort to redress the absence of the Other from our history, that by depicting experiences of displacement, and by confronting readers with seemingly disconnected narrative fragments, The Nature of Blood is a reminder of the missing stories, the voices—marginalised and often racialized—that Western history has consistently failed to include in its accounts of the past and arguably its present.


The Nature of Blood

The Nature of Blood

Author: Caryl Phillips

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-09-23

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0307488594

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A German Jewish girl whose life is destroyed by the atrocities of World War II . . . her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood . . . the Jews of a 15th-century Italian ghetto . . Othello, newly arrived in Venice . . . a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel. These are the extraordinary people who inhabit Caryl Phillips' eloquent and moving new novel, and whose stories are connected by circumstance, spirit, and blood across the centuries.


The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction

The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction

Author: Naghmeh Varghaiyan

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2021-04-20

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 3838215036

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In this study of three of Barbara Pym’s novels, Naghmeh Varghaiyan, drawing on examinations of women’s humour by Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, and others, shows how the humorous female discourse in Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, and Jane and Prudence undermines patriarchal culture and subverts both female and male stereotypes such as that of the spinster and of the Byronic hero. Varghaiyan reveals how the rhetoric of women’s humour enables Pym’s female characters to survive in the patriarchal culture and to unsettle it.


Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature

Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature

Author: Dave Gunning

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 184631853X

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Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural impact of the politics of race and antiracism in recent novels by black British and British Asian writers. It examines works by Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips, Nadeem Aslam, Ferdinand Dennis, and others, arguing that an understanding of how race and ethnicity function in contemporary Britain can only be gained through attention to antiracism and the ways it conditions racial categories, identities, and models of behavior. Looking at topics such as the role of Africa, the reception of Islam, and the meaning of multiculturalism, Dave Gunning offers a detailed engagement with the nuances of antiracism and their effects on British literature and culture.


The Final Passage

The Final Passage

Author: Caryl Phillips

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2017-09-13

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0525562818

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From the British-West Indian novelist who is rapidly emerging as the bard of the African diaspora comes a haunting work about “the final passage”—the exodus of black West Indians from their impoverished islands to the uncertain opportunities of England. In her village of St. Patrick’s, Leila Preston has no prospects, a young son, and a husband, Michael, who seems to prefer the company of his mistress. So when her ailing mother travels to England for medical care, Leila decides to follow her. As Caryl Phillips follows the Prestons’ outward voyage—and their bewildered attempt to find a home in a country whose rooming houses post signs announcing “No vacancies for coloureds”—he produces a tragicomic portrait of hope and dislocation. The Final Passage is a novel rich in language, acute in its grasp of character, and unforgettable in its vision of the colonial legacy. “Like Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, Phillips writes of times so heady and chaotic and of characters so compelling that time moves as if guided by the moon and dreams.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review


The Reeducation of Race

The Reeducation of Race

Author: Sonali Thakkar

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2023-11-28

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1503637344

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World War II produced a fundamental shift in modern racial discourse. In the postwar period, racism was situated for the first time at the center of international political life, and race's status as conceptual common sense and a justification for colonial rule was challenged with new intensity. In response to this crisis of race, the UN and UNESCO initiated a project of racial reeducation. This global antiracist campaign was framed by the persecution of Europe's Jews and anchored by UNESCO's epochal 1950 Statement on Race, which redefined the race concept and canonized the midcentury liberal antiracist consensus that continues to shape our present. In this book, Sonali Thakkar tells the story of how UNESCO's race project directly influenced anticolonial thought and made Jewish difference and the Holocaust enduring preoccupations for anticolonial and postcolonial writers. Drawing on UNESCO's rich archival resources and shifting between the scientific, social scientific, literary, and cultural, Thakkar offers new readings of a varied collection of texts from the postcolonial, Jewish, and Black diasporic traditions. Anticolonial thought and postcolonial literature critically recast liberal scientific antiracism, Thakkar argues, and the concepts central to this new moral economy were the medium for postcolonialism's engagement with Jewishness. By recovering these connections, she shows how the midcentury crisis of racial meaning shaped the kinds of solidarities between racialized subjects that are thinkable today.


Crossing the River

Crossing the River

Author: Caryl Phillips

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2011-02-15

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1409016943

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Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction Caryl Phillips’ ambitious and powerful novel spans two hundred and fifty years of the African diaspora. It tracks two brothers and a sister on their separate journeys through different epochs and continents: one as a missionary to Liberia in the 1830s, one a pioneer on a wagon trail to the American West later that century, and one a GI posted to a Yorkshire village in the Second World War. ‘Epic and frequently astonishing’ The Times ‘Its resonance continues to deepen’ New York Times


Holocaust Literature: Lerner to Zychlinsky, index

Holocaust Literature: Lerner to Zychlinsky, index

Author: S. Lillian Kremer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 778

ISBN-13: 9780415929844

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Review: "This encyclopedia offers an authoritative and comprehensive survey of the important writers and works that form the literature about the Holocaust and its consequences. The collection is alphabetically arranged and consists of high-quality biocritical essays on 309 writers who are first-, second-, and third-generation survivors or important thinkers and spokespersons on the Holocaust. An essential literary reference work, this publication is an important addition to the genre and a solid value for public and academic libraries."--"The Top 20 Reference Titles of the Year," American Libraries, May 2004


Trauma Fiction

Trauma Fiction

Author: Anne Whitehead

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2004-05-27

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 074866601X

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The literary potential of trauma is examined in this book, bringing trauma theory and literary texts together for the first time. Trauma Fiction focuses on the ways in which contemporary novelists explore the theme of trauma and incorporate its structures into their writing. It provides innovative readings of texts by Pat Barker, Jackie Kay, Anne Michaels, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, W. G. Sebald and Binjamin Wilkomirski. It also considers the ways in which trauma has affected fictional form, exploring how novelists have responded to the challenge of writing traumatic narratives, and identifying the key stylistic features associated with the genre. In addition, the book introduces the reader to key critics in the field of trauma theory such as Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman. The linking of trauma theory and literary texts not only sheds light on works of contemporary fiction, it also points to the inherent connections between trauma theory and the literary which have often been overlooked. The distinction between literary theme and style in the book opens up major questions regarding the nature of trauma itself. Trauma, like the novels discussed, is shown to take an uncertain but productive place between content and form.Key Features*Idenitifes and explores a new and evolving genre in contemporary fiction*Thinks through the relation between trauma and literature*Produces innovative readings of key works of contemporary fiction *Provides an introduction to key ideas in trauma theory


The European Tribe

The European Tribe

Author: Caryl Phillips

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2017-09-13

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 052556280X

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In this richly descriptive and haunting narrative, Caryl Phillips chronicles a journey through modern-day Europe, his quest guided by a moral compass rather than a map. Seeking personal definition within the parameters of growing up black in Europe, he discovers that the natural loneliness and confusion inherent in long jorneys collides with the bigotry of the "European Tribe"-a global community of whites caught up in an unyielding, Eurocentric history. Phillips deftly illustrates the scenes and characters he encounters, from Casablanca and Costa del Sol to Venice, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Moscow. He ultimately discovers that "Europe is blinded by her past, and does not understand the high price of her churches, art galleries, and history as the prison from which Europeans speak." In the afterword to the Vintage edition, Phillips revisits the Europe he knew as a young man and offers fresh observations.