In 1993, Paul Gilroy published The Black Atlantic, a book that discusses cultural
elements from African, American, British and Caribbean cultures. This course will focus
on two books on black identity, one a memoir by US writer John Edgar Wideman, which
reflects on personal, familial and black identity in the USA, the other a novel by British-
Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips which also reflects on personal and national identity,
and on being “riddled with the confusion of being black and British”.
In spite of belonging to different genres, the two books share, beyond a strong thematic
connection, their fragmented narratives and diversity of points of view, a formal
element which will be discussed at length in both classes.
Cours assuré par le Prof. Sophie Vallas.
Brothers and Keepers is a memoir about John Edgar Wideman’s
younger brother, Robbie, who was convicted to life
imprisonment after participating in a robbery during which a man
was killed. The book is both biographical and autobiographical
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as Wideman, who regularly visits Robbie in jail, questions his
own place as a failing older brother, as a man who slowly drifted
away from his family and from Homewood, his childhood
neighborhood in which much of his fiction is set, to become a
successful university professor and writer. As he slowly
rediscovers his sibling, Wideman invites him into the text, giving
him a voice sometimes challenging his own. He also addresses
his country, raising the issue of black people and more
particularly of the black youth left to themselves, targeted by a
ruthless legal system and composing such a large part of US
inmates. The memoir thus offers a reflection on personal, familial
and national identities.
Cours assuré par le Prof. Marie Hédon.
Caryl Phillips is a British writer born in St Kitts who emigrated to
Leeds with his parents in the early 1960s. He wrote an essay
entitled “the uncomfortable anxieties of belonging and not
belonging” (Phillips 2002), and in another essay, he explains, “I
grew up riddled with the confusion of being black and British”
(The European Tribe 1987)
Crossing the River, which he published in 1993, is set in 3
different places and historical periods: it follows Nash, an
educated and religious slave, who travels from America to Africa
as a Christian missionary; Martha, an elderly slave who escapes
from slavery and attempts to travel from Virginia to California to
live as a free woman, and Travis, a U.S. soldier who goes to
England during World War II.
The novel, which was awarded the 1993 James Tait Memorial
Prize for fiction, deals with slavery as well as the myth of origins
of the Afro-Caribbean people of Britain. It also deals with the
history of slavery, the middle passage, triangular trade, from an
unusual perspective.
Formally, it presents fragmented narratives of broken lives, and
tackles the themes of displacement, exile, diaspora, a sense of
ambiguous belonging, transculturality, history and identity, and
the central question of responsibility, which are all key questions
of Phillips’s output.
