Volume 48, Number 7 · April 26, 2001
You Can't Go Home Again
By Pankaj Mishra
The Atlantic Sound
Caryl Phillips
Knopf, 275 pp., $25.00
In his first book of travel, The European Tribe (1986), Caryl Phillips revealed that it was after reading Richard Wright's Native Son on a California beach that he decided to become a writer. Since Phillips was then a student at Oxford University, it is odd that he should have discovered his literary ambition in California. But then, growing up in the Britain of the 1960s and 1970s had given Phillips no 'coherent sense' of who he was and where he came from. For immigrants from the remote outposts of the British Empire like Phillips, who came from St. Kitts, it was the special vitality of American black culture that came to support their own rather lonely struggles for dignity and selfhood in Britain. Things appear to have changed little for younger British writers such as Gary Younge, who was born in 1969, and who acquired his own bearings through an obsessively pursued interest in the American South.[*]
Review, 4477 words
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