Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D'Aguiar: Representations of slavery

257 Pages·2011·1.58 MB·English

by  Abigail Ward

1
Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen
and Fred D’Aguiar
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C W W
ONTeMPORARy ORLD RITeRS
C
series editor john thieme
WW
already published in the series
Peter Carey bruce woodcock
Amitav Ghosh anshuman mondal
Maxine Hong Kingston helena grice
Kazuo Ishiguro barry lewis
Hanif Kureishi bart moore-gilbert
Doris Lessing susan watkins
David Malouf don randall
Rohinton Mistry peter morey
Timothy Mo elaine yee lin ho
Toni Morrison jill matus
Alice Munro coral ann howells
Les Murray steven matthews
R. K. Narayan john thieme
Michael Ondaatje lee spinks
Caryl Phillips bénédicte ledent
Salman Rushdie andrew teverson
Amy Tan bella adams
Ngugi wa Thiong’o patrick williams
Derek Walcott john thieme
C
WW
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Caryl Phillips,
David Dabydeen
and Fred D’Aguiar
Representations of slavery
ABIGAIL WARD
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan
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Copyright © Abigail Ward 2011
The right of Abigail Ward to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester m13 9nr, Uk
and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, USA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Distributed exclusively in the USA by
Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny 10010, USA
Distributed exclusively in Canada by
ubc Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,
Vancouver, bc, Canada v6t 1z2
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
isbn 978 0 7190 8275 7 hardback
First published 2011
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Typeset in Aldus
by koinonia, Manchester
Printed in Great Britain
by MPG Books Group, Uk
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—
For Adrian and Joy Ward
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1
Contents
acknowledgements viii
series editor’s foreword ix
abbreviations x
chronology xi
1 Contexts and intertexts 1
2 Caryl Phillips and the absent voices of history 25
3 David Dabydeen and the ethics of narration 82
4 Fred D’Aguiar and the memorialisation of slavery 131
5 Critical overview and conclusion 180
notes 191
select bibliography 219
index 227
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Acknowledgements
This book began life as a PhD thesis at the University of Leeds,
where I had the good fortune to be supervised by John McLeod, who
has proven to be a source of endless support and advice, and above
all else, a very dear friend.
I am especially grateful to Gail Low, for first introducing me to
the works of Caryl Phillips and Fred D’Aguiar, and to Niké Imoru,
for her early enthusiasm about this project. Thanks are also due to
Mick Gidley and Graham Huggan, and especial thanks to Shirley
Chew, Sam Durrant, Dave Gunning, Caroline Herbert and David
Richards, who all helpfully commented on earlier versions of this
work.
I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to
reprint work from the following essays: ‘“Words are All I Have
Left of My Eyes”: Blinded by the Past in J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers
Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying and David Dabydeen’s
“Turner”’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 42(1) (2007):
47–58; ‘David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress: Re-presenting
the Slave Narrative Genre’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing,
43(1) (2007): 32–44; and ‘An Outstretched Hand: Connection and
Affiliation in Crossing the River’, Moving Worlds: A Journal of
Transcultural Writings, 7(1) (2007): 20–32.
I would also like to thank John Thieme, whose editorial guid-
ance and support have proved invaluable; the team at Manchester
University Press, and David Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar and Caryl
Phillips for their kind assistance with this project.
Finally, thanks to family and friends for their love and good
humour, particularly kate Clark, whom I cannot thank enough.
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Series editor’s foreword
Contemporary World Writers is an innovative series of authorita tive
introductions to a range of culturally diverse contem porary writers
from outside Britain and the United States or from ‘minority’ back-
grounds within Britain or the United States. In addition to providing
comprehensive general introductions, books in the series also argue
stimulating original theses, often but not always related to contem-
porary debates in post-colonial studies.
The series locates individual writers within their specific
cultural contexts, while recognising that such contexts are them-
selves invariably a complex mixture of hybridised influences. It
aims to counter tendencies to appropriate the writers discussed into
the canon of English or American literature or to regard them as
‘other’.
Each volume includes a chronology of the writer’s life, an
introductory section on formative contexts and intertexts, discus-
sion of all the writer’s major works, a bibliography of primary
and secondary works and an index. Issues of racial, national and
cultural identity are explored, as are gender and sexuality. Books
in the series also examine writers’ use of genre, particularly ways
in which Western genres are adapted or subverted and ‘traditional’
local forms are reworked in a contemporary context.
Contemporary World Writers aims to bring together the
theoretical impulse which currently dominates post-colonial studies
and closely argued readings of particular authors’ works, and by so
doing to avoid the danger of appropriating the specifics of particular
texts into the hegemony of totalising theories.
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