"Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories": Cross-Culturality in Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River

Abstract

Part of my title is taken from Edward Said's already much quoted and debated study, Culture and Imperialism. One of Said's points is that, in contradiction to the monolithic and binary colonial ethos that prevailed for centuries, the empire is a quintessentially cross-cultural and hybrid domain. Thus, far from occupying distinctly separate terrains, colonizer and colonized – their histories intertwined by imperialism – have since their encounter inhabited overlapping territories. Aware of the dangers of a dogmatic, totalizing or one-sided charting of those fluctuating and interactive zones, Said invites us to take up a globalized and contrapuntal view of the colonial experience that, in his words, get[s] beyond the reified polarities of East versus West or South versus North, for that matter. Indeed,