Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas in the Work of Caryl Phillips

Abstract

In this chapter I consider Caryl Phillips’s representation of diasporic subjectivity from the perspective of the metaphor-metonymy debate and in the context of the gaping disciplinary divide between Jewish and postcolonial studies, a divide that comes as something of a surprise in light of the host of shared concerns that might seem to unite them. Bryan Cheyette (2000; 2009), Paul Gilroy (1993; 2004) and Michael Rothberg (2009) have recently remarked on the conspicuous lack of interaction between the two fields, both of which grapple with the legacies of histories of violence perpetrated in the name of racist ideologies and imperialist political projects. In the introduction to a recent special issue of Wasafiri devoted to ‘Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas,’ Cheyette notes that histories of victimization such as the Holocaust and colonial oppression, and the literatures dealing with these respective histories, are being thought of in isolation as a result of ‘the narrowness and exclusions of the academy’ (2009: 2). Histories and literatures are limited to ‘separate spheres’ by ‘our professional guilds,’ as ‘[n]ew disciplinary formations — postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, ethnic studies, Jewish studies and Holocaust studies — tend to define themselves in relation to what they exclude’ (2009: 2). In his book Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race, which extends the argument first made in the last chapter of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) about the need to make connections across black and Jewish diasporic histories, Gilroy asks: ‘Why does it remain so difficult for so many people to accept the knotted intersection of histories produced by this fusion of horizons?’ (2004: 78).