Identity, trauma and exile: Caryl Phillips on surviving

Aleid Fokkema

European Review, 2005, vol. 13, issue 2, 283-292

Abstract: The painful, unrepresentable event of the holocaust is one of the most salient and defining features of the history and identity of Europe. Its suitability for artistic representation has been the focus of intense debate, largely conducted within Europe (Adorno, Steiner, Ricoeur, Kertész), and fictions about the holocaust were, until recently, the domain of European (and Israeli) authors. In his novel on identity, The Nature of Blood, Caryl Phillips –a British author originating from the Caribbean island St. Kitts, and currently living in the USA, appears to defy this tradition and claims the holocaust as a natural subject for his seemingly disparate narratives that are also concerned with the first ghetto in Europe, the character of Othello, and Zionism in Israel. This unlikely mixture is not a mere postcolonial appropriation of metropolitan history, and cannot be explained by the mechanism of ‘the empire writing back’ that characterizes so much postcolonial fictions of the 1970–1990s. Rather, it explores some of the ideas developed in Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masque blancs, which in its rhetorical linking of the holocaust with racism and imperialist repression is in turn indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:eurrev:v:13:y:2005:i:02:p:283-292_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().