“Looking across the Atlantic” in Caryl Phillips's In the Falling Snow

Abstract

Caryl Phillips's novel In the Falling Snow (2009) explores a spectrum of black British diasporan positions, moving from the early optimism and subsequent disappointment of the Windrush generation of migrants to encounter the difficulties facing second- and third-generation black Britons in a sometimes inhospitable and turbulent country. This article argues that In the Falling Snow is especially interested in the lasting relationship between black America and black Britain – evidenced not least of all by the novel's intertextual relationship with works by Richard Wright. Critics have mentioned the significance of Wright's novel Native Son (1940) to Phillips's choice of career, and it is clear that the concerns of this novel with the politics of mixed-race relations finds commonality with Phillips's works. However, the connections between Wright's haiku and Phillips's In the Falling Snow are equally important, and reveal an evolving, and reflective, relationship with Wright. Although the associations between Phillips and Wright suggest a continuation of Phillips's interest in the relationship between black Britain and black America, the black British identity explored in In the Falling Snow is both crucially informed by, but also different from, black American identifications.