History as Now: Allegorical (Re)visions of the Slave Experience in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1993)

Abstract

This paper turns an analytical eye to Caryl Phillips’s novel Crossing the River as an exemplary piece of postcolonial historical fiction, which aims to reconstruct the historical experience of those once deprived of a documented past. It reads the novel through an allegorical realist paradigm and argues that such an approach may open the way towards new readings of the contemporary neo-slave narratives within the postcolonial canon.