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Accepted Paper:
"The Prison from which Europeans Speak”: sketches of Europe in Caryl Phillips’ essays
Peter Simatei
(Moi University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reads Caryl Phillips’ explorations of Europe’s racialization of Black presence and how the cultural institutions that rationalize it limit Europe’s appreciation of an emergent new world order of cultural plurality imagined in the writings and presence of diasporic peoples.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reads Caryl Phillips’ explorations of Europe’s racialization of Black presence and how the cultural institutions that rationalize this racialization limit Europe’s appreciation of an emergent new world order of cultural plurality imagined in the writings and presence of diasporic peoples. I argue that in these essays—(auto)biographical and non-fiction—Phillips’ project entails not only a reversal of the colonialist European gaze at the ‘Other’ but more significantly the push to unsettle and reconstitute knowledges that prop relationships of domination. In this sense, this paper will explore the intersections of Phillips’ project with other current interventions—such as the decolonial project—that unearth and contest configurations of spaces of inequality, exclusion, and social injustice. I will refer to Caryl Phillips’ three non-fiction works, namely The European Tribe (1987), A New World Order (2001), and Colour Me English (2011).