FROM CROSSING THE RIVER TO THE LOST CHILD: A GENEALOGY OF LIMINAL SPACE

Abstract

Reflecting his protagonists’ scattered lives and sense of displace- ment, Caryl Phillips’s proverbial spatial and temporal criss-crossing creates a liminal chronotope which shelters an assortment of exiles, refugees, outcasts, and orphans from different geographical, cultural, and historical backgrounds. His suitably compartmentalised yet cohe- sive narrative structures stray away from any traditional form of the novel, producing shifting structural arrangements and evoking con- temporary cosmopolitan redefinitions of space. This article focuses on several novels by Phillips and combines cosmopolitan theory and geocriticism, with some postcolonial theory, to trace a genealogy of global liminal space established through kaleidoscopic spatio- temporal disruptions. By adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, it hopes to show how the breadth of Phillips’s perspective reflects on the affinity between space, memory, and amnesia in nonelite forms of cosmopolitanism.