![]() ![]() ![]() As a result, his work resonates with Caruth’s understanding of history and trauma as inherently relational: “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own.… istory is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (Unclaimed 24). ![]() However, Phillips does not treat these individual histories in isolation but lets them address one another. In his novels Higher Ground (1989) and The Nature of Blood (1997), Phillips excavates histories of both black and Jewish suffering: all of his protagonists struggle with traumatic memories of racist or anti-semitic violence and oppression. The work of the British-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips provides a notable literary instantiation of Cathy Caruth’s claim that “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures” (“Trauma” 11), a claim that, though central to trauma theory’s ethical agenda, is hardly borne out by the practice of the field, which is still largely Eurocentric. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |