Caryl Phillips's interstitial poetics

Abstract

ABSTRACT The “spatial turn” in literary studies has challenged the perception that time is the fundamental organising principle of fiction and has drawn attention to the ways in which writers create literary cartographies. In a similar vein, postcolonial critics have foregrounded the role of “contact zones” and investigated the “third space” in between cultures as productive sites of interconnectedness, while also simultaneously laying bare the “labour of translation” that takes place in the territories reconfigured by the colonial domination. This article highlights the centrality of space in Caryl Phillips’s novels on transatlantic slavery and argues how, through a meticulous exploration of multiple spaces of transit and of the characters who inhabit them, the author suggestively lays out an interstitial poetics. Within Phillips’s composite oeuvre, the investigation of transatlantic slavery and its legacy is a pivotal, recurring theme. In his works, Phillips dwells on the liminal spaces that emerged in the context of the Middle Passage and the institution of slavery. As this article will argue, by reimagining the Black Atlantic as contiguous to the imperial centre, Phillips complicates the geography of colonial and imperial Britain.