Distant Shore Research Articles

Caryl Phillips and the Heroic

This article explores the notion of the heroic in fictional and non-fictional work by Black British writer Caryl Phillips. Taking a point of departure in an ambivalent Caribbean longing for heroes, the piece discusses hero-theory and its usefulness for the types of heroes found in in Phillips’ writing. It focusses in particular on Crossing the River, The Atlantic Sound and A Distant Shore in its elaboration on what constitutes a Phillipsian heroic and how and where to locate these heroes. Traits such as dignity, courage, the clarity of no-saying and global ways of being and seeing emerge as heroic traits and are discussed with references also to some of Phillips’ essay from both A New World Order and Colour me English

Strangers on the Doorstep: Hostility and Hospitality in A Distant Shore

Abstract This article focuses on the rising hostility against immigrants / refugees and growing demand for hospitality, in both regional and transnational senses, in Caryl Phillips’s novel A Distant Shore, set in a local place in North England. I think that the author, in examining the parallel conditions of being a stranger in a village and an outsider to the nation, shows that the demands of hospitality are similarly urgent whether sought by nationals or foreigners though these are calibrated differently in terms of scales of belonging. My broader argument is that hospitality is an ethical practice of everyday life that requires continual renegotiation. Inspired by Levinasian ethics, I turn to Derrida’s and Rosello’s meditations on hospitality, which emphasise the metaphorical nature of the host-guest relationship and the tension it inscribes between the finiteness of politics and the infinity of ethics. By exploring the complex relationship between politics and ethics as this is made manifest in the literary representations of ordinary British citizens’ everyday practices, I suggest that this novel not only deals with the UK’s domestic tensions of multiculturalism and ethnic conflict, but also critically reflects on its bewildered (but hardly new) attitude toward the ongoing transnational integration of the new Europe in the postwar period.

TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES AND IMAGINARY LANDS

The conception of identity has been studied through many different branches of humanities, in terms of language, ideology, psychoanalysis, sociology or history just to name a few. All theories come close in defining identity as an ever transforming, fluctuating and instable concept.. The term multiculturalism, which is usually preferred in trying to define the state of different cultures in the attempt of existing together, seems to be insufficient when it comes to the globalized world of the twenty-first century. Even though transnationalism was introduced by Randolph Bourne in the early twentieth century, its broader significance did not reveal itself in English literature until the final decades of the century. This study aims to explore the concept of transnationalism and its effect on the process of identity formation within different novels to demonstrate how individuals living in a globalized world construct a unique sense of identity while carrying certain features in common through this process. Within this frame, I intend to refer to Meera Syal’s Anita and Me, Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore, Deborah Maggoch’s Hot Water Man, Ruth Prawer Jhabvola’s Heat and Dust and Hanan Al-Shayks’s Only in London to exemplify how transnational identities are narrated in English novels.

„Polish up yourself and be no drag”. O anglojęzycznej literaturze karaibskiej po polsku

It is clear that in 2017, 25 years after Derek Walcott received the Nobel Prize for Literature and over a decade after V.S. Naipaul’s accolade, the observation of Montserratian E. A. Markham (2001) that Caribbean authors “no longer have to put the old case that the[ir] work is invisibilised” (13) seems even more justified than in 1989 when it was originally made. However, Caribbean literature is still under-represented in Eastern Europe, an error of exclusion that the present paper ventures to discuss. For decades Polish publishers have been understandably replicating metropolitan canons, zig-zagging between European and American bestsellers. It is only when a Caribbean or Caribbean-British writer gains an international distinction (Walcott, Naipaul) or becomes a worldwide publishing sensation (Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy) that their books are translated. Exceptions to this rule, such as the solitary Polish editions of Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore (Muza, 2006), Monique Roffey’s The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Nasza Księgarnia, 2011) and Kei Miller's The Last Warner Woman (Świat KsiÄ Å¼ki, 2012), or single Francophone Caribbean novels, are few and far between. Arguably, it seems that this politics of translation and publishing stems from the systemic, colonially foisted peripherality of West Indian literature, its being sidelined by the cultural production of the UK as well as the USA, which in turn dominates the curricula of English departments in more culturally homogeneous countries such as Poland. However, what constitutes a major problem for the dissemination (and popularity) of Caribbean Creole literature in Polish is exactly what makes West Indian writing so engaging, multi-layered, polyphonous and intertextual – it is the cultural component (for instance, the translation of “Creole folkways”) that is often misread, misconstrued and, as a consequence, mis-rendered. For that reason, using a number of literary sources, the present paper will attempt to showcase a selection of translatological strategies of coping with, to quote Benjamin Zephaniah, “decipher[ing]/de dread chant” into Polish.

“They are us”: Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore and the British transnation

This article discusses Caryl Phillips’ novel, A Distant Shore (2004), in the light of recent work by John McLeod and Bill Ashcroft’s notion of the transnation to describe a revised sense of the British nation within which new resemblances gesture towards the potential for a post-racial society. These ideas will be applied to Phillips’ sense of himself as occupying an ontological mid-Atlantic location in relation to recurring images and concerns to be found in his collected essays in A New World Order (2001) and Colour Me English (2011). The article does not argue that Phillips’ novel depicts the success of a post-racial transformation, but rather, one that shows the individual struggles through which such transformation may be possible.

ON THE CLIFF EDGE OF ENGLAND: TOURISM AND IMPERIAL GOTHIC IN CORNWALL

The final chapters of Bram Stoker's novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) are set in a house on the “very verge” of a cliff in Cornwall, the peninsula located at the far south west of England. The narrator, Malcolm Ross, travels overnight from London to Cornwall, then describes his first sight of the house, and a little later the position of the dining-room, its walls hanging over the sea: We were all impressed by the house as it appeared in the bright moonlight. A great grey stone mansion of the Jacobean period; vast and spacious, standing high over the sea on the very verge of a high cliff. When we had swept round the curve of the avenue cut through the rock, and come out on the high plateau on which the house stood, the crash and murmur of waves breaking against rock far below us came with an invigorating breath of moist sea air . . .We had supper in the great dining-room on the south side, the walls of which actually hung over the sea. The murmur came up muffled, but it never ceased. As the little promontory stood well out into the sea, the northern side of the house was open; and the due north was in no way shut out by the great mass of rock, which, reared high above us, shut out the rest of the world. Far off across the bay we could see the trembling lights of the castle, and here and there along the shore the faint light of a fisher's window. For the rest the sea was a dark blue plain with here and there a flicker of light as the gleam of starlight fell on the slope of a swelling wave. (195–96; ch. 17) In this liminal place, there is a confusion of categories: the sea not only crosses the boundary into land (the sound of its “murmur” and its moistness in the air) but seems itself to become land (a “dark blue plain”). The actual land is in contrast invisible from the house, being shut out by a mass of rock that rears high above. From the far distant shore, on the other side of the bay, the lights vibrate across both land and sea, further collapsing the sense of a distinction between them: from the “trembling lights” of the castle to the intermittent “flicker of light” on the waves.

Long range sound propagation over a sea surface

This paper describes methodology and results from a model-based analysis of data on sound transmission from controlled sound sources at sea to a 10-km distant shore. The data consist of registrations of sound transmission loss together with concurrently collected atmospheric data at the source and receiver locations. The purpose of the analysis is to assess the accuracy of methods for transmission loss prediction in which detailed data on the local geography and atmospheric conditions are used for computation of the sound field. The results indicate that such sound propagation predictions are accurate and reproduce observed variations in the sound level as function of time in a realistic way. The results further illustrate that the atmospheric model must include a description of turbulence effects to ensure predicted noise levels to remain realistically high during periods of sound shadow.

Postcolonial routes and diasporic identities: Belonging and displacement in Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage and A Distant Shore

This article discusses Caryl Phillips's novels The Final Passage (1985) and A Distant Shore (2003), with reference to the displacement and hybridity of the diasporic subject. In Phillips's concept of the “new world order” hegemonic borders are crossed through migration, enabling negotiation and interaction between different cultures. The study examines how Caryl Phillips's novels show his displaced characters in the imperial metropolis coming to redefine their identity in terms of their diasporic black British experience. In this way they contribute to the exploration of new routes in postcolonial studies.

Stories and Portraits of the Self (review)

Reviewed by: Stories and Portraits of the Self Deborah Reed-Danahay (bio) Helena Carvalhão Buescu and João Ferreira Duarte, eds. Stories and Portraits of the Self. Amsterdam: Rodolfi, 2007. 332 pp. + notes. ISBN 978-90420-2328-4, $97.00. This edited collection cuts a broad swath in dealing with autobiography and visual portraiture from the nineteenth century to the present, and includes twenty-three short chapters. In their insightful introduction to the volume, the editors point to what they label "a democracy of representation" in displays of lives, which began in the nineteenth century and emerged from earlier preoccupations with paradigmatic or exceptional life narratives. Drawing upon Zygmunt Bauman's book Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), Buescu and Duarte point to the growing dissolution of the boundary between public and private spheres, and a commodification of the selves of not just the rich and famous, but virtually anyone who can attain "celebrity" status through media outlets. A major theme of this collection is to examine critically the relationship between "the political" and forms of confession and self-representation in contemporary contexts. The editors cite Foucault in pointing to the paradox inherent in confession: "the more you report about yourself the more you give in to someone else's authority" (9). Here politics is defined as "the public discourse of democratic societies" (5). The essays in this book are revisions of papers presented at a 2005 seminar with the same title as the book, "Stories and Portraits of the Self," which was sponsored by the HERMES network and took place in Cascais, Portugal. Universities in the UK, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, and the Netherlands participate in this network. Because there is no biographical information for the authors of the chapters, little is known about whether they are students or faculty, or what else they may have published, although their institutional affiliations are listed. It would have been helpful to readers to [End Page 542] include such information. Because this volume results from seminar presentations, the chapters vary a great deal in quality, and most of the essays display the unfinished, suggestive nature of conference papers. They vary in length from about five to twelve pages. However, taking this into account, and reading the volume in the spirit of exposure to short yet often suggestive and provocative essays, the reader can gain a wealth of perspectives on contemporary examples of self-portraiture across a variety of literary and visual genres in several different national contexts. This book is organized into three sections: "The Representational Dilemma," "Signalling Identity," and "Images of the Self Across the Arts." Although these lack their own introductions within the text, the editors explain this organization with a brief overview of the sections in the introduction to the book, which is called "Signposts of the Self in Modernity." The chapters deal with the work of novelists (ranging from Balzac to Henry James and Guimarães Rosa), playwrights (from Shakespeare to Strindberg), poets (from Rimbaud to Coleridge and Emily Dickinson), autobiographers (from Lena Christ to George Steiner), and artists (from Giacometti to Bruce Nauman). Many of the essays embody the overall synthetic approach of the volume quite successfully, but I have space to mention only three (one from each section) here. In an essay on the novel A Distant Shore by Caryl Phillips in Part I, Jan Rupp explores postcolonialism, migration, and English national identity through the notion of "plural selves." Rupp points to receding and emerging selves in metaphorical border zones. Peter Brooks' essay in Part II on "The Identity Paradigm" examines (albeit too briefly) the eruption of both finger printing and photography in the nineteenth century and their links to a criminology that required the uncovering of identity in an urbanizing world where this was increasingly difficult. By using Balzac's novel Le Colonel Chabert as a lens, Brooks shows the novelist as chronicler of new technologies related to changing notions of individual identity. In Part III, Anke Brouwers writes about the mythology of silent film star Mary Pickford, in an essay that draws upon Barthes and Lévi-Strauss to see the construction of a "democratic individualism" in Pickford. Brouwers sheds light on Pickford as...

Single‐minded about heart failure

Single‐minded about heart failure

The middle passages of black migration

In characterizing the desperate journeys undertaken by African and Haitian refugees as today's “middle passages,” Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Edwidge Danticat's “Children of the Sea” complicate the idea of a single origin to a transatlantic black Diaspora. If, during an era of black power and nation building, the middle passage signified a fundamental connection with Africa, the term is more recently used to describe multiple crossings that transform the meaning of Diaspora into a vital and ongoing process. These crossings do not coalesce into a single narrative of black migration in which the trauma of slavery has been overcome. Rather, the temporal simultaneity of past and present suggests a narrative of history as repetition. Both works of fiction transform received images from a slave past in order to critique the present treatment of black asylum seekers. A Distant Shore deploys the stalled temporality of the middle passage for staging the impossibility of diasporic community in post 9/11 Britain. However, even as this novel redraws the oceanic map of the transatlantic slave trade to include continental Europe and Great Britain, Africa exists outside of that imperial history and geography. “Children of the Sea” uses the simultaneity of past and present and the symbolic value of the middle passage as a space of death to critique an oppressive Haitian regime and the treatment of Haitian boat people by their Caribbean and American neighbors. It also interrupts a stalled temporality with the prophetic time of vodou beliefs for shifting the meaning of the middle passage from death to life in a Haitian Diaspora that stretches across the Caribbean Sea.

“The other is the neighbour”: The limits of dignity in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore

This article examines Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003) in light of his claim that in “the new world order” consideration must be afforded to “the dignity which informs the limited participation of the migrant, the asylum seeker, or the refugee”. Dignity here relates to the ambivalence that surrounds the question of belonging, and, after Emmanuel Levinas, of accepting responsibility for the Other. I read “the camp” in Phillips’s novel as an actual and deterritorialized presence signifying a limit, commensurate with his sense of the limitations on the refugee’s participation in the new world order, and Giorgio Agamben’s assertion that the refugee is a limit on the concept of citizenship, in order to examine what limits dignity, and places dignity at the limits of citizenship.

Musings from a Distant Shore: The Nature and Destination of the Uluburun Ship and its Cargo

In the following article, using both the Amarna letters and the slightly later Egyptian story of Wenamun as comparanda, we suggest that the Uluburun ship's cargo may have been comprised of goods ordered, bought and paid for by an Aegean polity. The Uluburun and its cargo, accompanied by two Aegeans, perhaps Mycenaeans, who may have served as the purchasing agents, were probably en route to their Aegean destination when the ship sank; this destination would most likely have been either Kommos on Crete or Tiryns on the Greek mainland, although Mycenae, Thebes, Pylos or Knossos are also possibilities.

Musings from a Distant Shore: The Nature and Destination of the Uluburun Ship and its Cargo

In the following article, using both the Amarna letters and the slightly later Egyptian story of Wenamun as comparanda, we suggest that the Uluburun ship's cargo may have been comprised of goods ordered, bought and paid for by an Aegean polity. The Uluburun and its cargo, accompanied by two Aegeans, perhaps Mycenaeans, who may have served as the purchasing agents, were probably en route to their Aegean destination when the ship sank; this destination would most likely have been either Kommos on Crete or Tiryns on the Greek mainland, although Mycenae, Thebes, Pylos or Knossos are also possibilities.

Family and Identity in Caryl Phillips’s Fiction, in particular A Distant Shore

Family relationships are central to the way Caribbean writers define their identities. This is particularly the case of Caryl Phillips. Most of his fiction presents the family as a site of disruption, but also includes examples of surrogate parenthood, which reflect the complexity of the writer’s identity conundrum. The discussion focuses on Phillips’s 2003 novel A Distant Shore.

Diaspora in Caryl Phillip's "Crossing the river" (1993) and "A Distant shore" (2003)

Diaspora em Crossing the river (1993) e A distant shore (2003) de Caryl PhillipsInvestigam-se no contexto da literatura caribenha os dois tipos de diáspora, ou seja, a antiga que compreende os escravos e os trabalhadores asiáticos contratados, e a moderna que abrange os refugiados, o tráfico de mulheres e imigrantes procurando trabalho. Os romances Crossing the River e A Distant Shore, de Caryl Phillips, publicados respectivamente em 1993 e 2003, tratam dos dois tipos de diáspora. Enquanto a primeira analisa as diferentes trajetórias de um ex-escravo estadunidense repatriado a Libéria e de uma mulher negra em sua viagem ao oeste dos Estados Unidos, rumo à liberdade, a segunda discursa sobre os problemas diaspóricos de um Africano contemporâneo que foge de seu país para afastar-se da guerra civil e para achar emprego num país democrático. Os resultados da pesquisa mostram que numa economia transnacional as pessoas da antiga diáspora tendem a encontrar a liberdade e a subjetividade mais do que aquelas envolvidas na diáspora moderna. Nesse último caso a frustração e a solidão são factíveis.---Artigo em inglês

Missionaries on the Move: A Pastoral History of the Scalabrinians in Australia and Asia 1952-2002 (review)

Australian and Asian Missionaries on the Move: A Pastoral History of the Scalabrinians in Australia and Asia 1952-2002. By Desmond Cahill. (New York: Center for Migration Studies. 2004. Pp. xviii, 504. $29.95 paperback.) In 1878 Giovanni Battista Scalabrini was appointed Bishop of Piacenza, where he was to remain until his death at the age of 65 in 1905. He was a pastorally minded bishop who focused much attention on catechetical formation, which led to his convening of the First National Catechetical Congress in Italy. His pastoral strategy also centered on a systematic visitation of the 365 parishes that made up his diocese. It was during the first of his visitations in 1876-77 that he became aware of a troubling statistic: 11 percent of his flock for whom he was pastorally responsible had emigrated to overseas destinations. This reality was accompanied by a Damascus-like experience, when at the Milan railway station he was moved by the sight of so many of his fellow countrymen preparing themselves to emigrate to distant shores. He described his thoughts and how he was deeply moved by this sight in his diocesan weekly, and in 1887 he would put his concerns into practical effect through the foundation of the Congregation of the Missionaries of Saint Charles Borromeo for the Emigrants, better known by the name taken from the founder, the Scalabrinians. From its beginnings in 1887 the new Congregation had experienced many difficulties and in the 1920's had come close to extinction, but this was overcome through the wise oversight and guidance of Cardinal De Lai, secretary of the Sacred Consistorial Congregation, whom Pius XI appointed as their Superior General. In 1951 the Congregation became independent of the Consistorial Congregation and able to independently elect their superior general. This present book, which traces the Scalabrinian mission in Australia and Asia from 1952 to 2002, thus opens at a significant moment in the Congregation's overall history, a year after it regained its independence. It says something of the spirit and courage of the Congregation to embark on a new mission to such a distant shore in the form of four Scalabrinians-three priests and a lay brother. The challenges they faced just over fifty years ago are considerably different from those faced by the present members of the Scalabrinians working in the Southern Hemisphere, and one of the many positive aspects of this book is to trace those challenges as the Congregation gradually spread to various parts of Australia and in recent years to the Philippines. …

A Distant Shore: The Holocaust and Us

Is the history of the Holocaust useful to us as we negotiate the world in which we live today? Many scholars have maintained that the Holocaust was an extension of modern development. Others hold that the Holocaust signified an utter rupture in western civilisation. But if the past is identical to the present, it lacks context and specificity. If the past is only and solely past, it has nothing to say about the present and future. In this article, the authors present an alternative to this bipolar scheme, and they explore questions about the Holocaust and its significance that their construct lays bare.

A distant shore: Irish migration and New Zealand settlement. Edited by Lyndon Fraser. Pp 196. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. 2000. NZ$39.95 paperback. - Bishop in the dock: the sedition trial of James Liston. By Rory Sweetman. Pp viii, 327. Auckland: University of Auckland Press. 1997. NZ$39.95 paperback.

A distant shore: Irish migration and New Zealand settlement. Edited by Lyndon Fraser. Pp 196. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. 2000. NZ$39.95 paperback. - Bishop in the dock: the sedition trial of James Liston. By Rory Sweetman. Pp viii, 327. Auckland: University of Auckland Press. 1997. NZ$39.95 paperback.

Review: A Distant Shore: Irish Migration and New Zealand Settlement

Review: A Distant Shore: Irish Migration and New Zealand Settlement