Slavery Revisited through Vocal Kaleidoscopes: Polyphony in Novels by Fred d’Aguiar and Caryl Phillips
Year: 2005
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The history of the Caribbean and Britain has often been simplified, if not falsified, in the official records. My intention in this paper is to examine how Fred D’Aguiar and Caryl Phillips’s fiction, in particular the former’s The Longest Memory (1994) and Feeding the Ghosts (1997) and the latter’s Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993), contributes to re-visioning the history of the societies that have made them. The main focus will be on how both writers use polyphony to produce alternative historical narratives that are in turn lyrical and epic. The multiplicity of voices in the novels in question, a feature that distinguishes them from most anti-abolitionist texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, also underlies a view of slavery not only as an individual but also as a communal experience whose variegated echoes, at once harrowing and hopeful, are still with us today, as also confirmed by the rest of D’Aguiar’s and Phillips’s fiction.
Author: Bénédicte Ledent
Institution: University of Liège
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2292722011