‘This was a Conradian world that I was entering’

Abstract

The British-Kittitian novelist Caryl Phillips is well known for his writing about transatlantic journeys. As Yogita Goyal notes, his 1993 novel Crossing the River 'has been received as a paradigmatic Black Atlantic text' ('Theorizing Africa' 15). Whilst Crossing the River creates a moving reflection on the Middle Passage and black people's subsequent migrations, some scholars argue that the novel stereotypes Africa. Goyal, for example, finds that it 'consigns Africa to the realm of myth' ('Theorizing Africa' 14). She states that Phillips, like Paul Gilroy, is guilty of excluding Africa from modernity and of focusing on slavery at the expense of the traumas of African colonisation. If crossing the Atlantic in the hold of a slave ship is a profound historical trauma for black people in North America and the Caribbean, then the voyage up a West African river is an archetypal journey of European exploration, which brought European 'imperial diasporas' (Cohen 68-80) and colonialism to Africa. Gilroy's black Atlantic suggests maritime migration, racial hybridity and

Travel Writing and Rivers

“…The desire to reimagine these many lost journeys is one defining aspect of postcolonial travel writing. 41 Danger has long been important to many voluntary journeys on rivers, too.…”