Home/lessness, Exile and Triangular Identities in the Drama of Caryl Phillips

Radio drama and its avatars in the work of Caryl Phillips

“…3 Touching a different circuit of communication from his novels, essays and published stage plays, Phillips's radio plays constitute a compelling, underexplored body of texts that are worth studying alongside the rest of his work, a type of investigation that has so far been carried out by a limited number of scholars. In a chapter devoted to Phillips's drama, his script The Wasted Years has been read alongside his first play Strange Fruit (1981; see Scafe 2015), while, more recently, Phillips's 1993 novel Crossing the River has been discussed in relation to his archives, which include three radio plays exploring, like the 1993 novel, transatlantic slavery and its aftermath (Ledent 2017). Like Phillips's stage drama, his radio plays indeed cover similar ground to the rest of his non-dramatic works, addressing the connections and disconnections engendered by the Middle Passage, the historical and cultural currents that bind Europe, Africa and the Americas, and the often ambiguous exchanges that took place in the wake of colonial encounters and still reverberate in our present lives at both the private and the institutional levels.…”

Caryl Phillips’s drama: Liminal fiction under construction?

“…(2001);Scafe (2014);Schäffner (1999).3. I would like to thank Suzanne Scafe for commenting on an earlier version of this article and for suggesting this idea of a difference of tone between Phillips's plays and In the Falling Snow.…”