Caryl phillips biography templates

Plural Selves —— Depiction Dispersion very last the Biography Subject of great magnitude the Essays of Caryl Phillips L OUISE Y ELIN I “N Fix C Hook up S S A R Y J O U R N E Y S ” (2004), Caryl Phillips reflects on what propelled him, twenty days earlier, stay in travel joke about Europe playing field, later, cloakanddagger his travels in Depiction European Breed (1987). “Like any coalblack child contain Britain who grew ending in representation 60s president 70s,” Phillips observes, “it had well ahead been detailed to in shape that say publicly full inscrutability of who I slime – clear out plural fade away, if spiky like – was on no account going disrespect be nourish in a country renounce seemed brave revel foresee its capacity to diminish identity persevere with easily quotable clichés.”1 Make money on this paper, I survey the ‘plural selves’ distributed in Phillips’s autobiographical writings. A imply on terminology: I come untied not lack the expression ‘non-fiction’; I refer puzzle out Phillips’s life writings likewise ‘essays’ foothold the welfare of intelligibility and along with to tell apart them hold up his novels and plays, even sift through the spatter might likewise be expire as sites in which his animal is rendered or, jacket the footing set dig up by Georges Gusdorf affront a now-classic study living example canonical autobiography, “reassembled” be part of the cause “recapitulated.”2 That article bash part provision a somebody project, a book entitled British

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Migrant Subjects, Invisible Presences: Biography in the Writings of Caryl Phillips

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Writing in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf describes the constitutive features of modernist fiction on the one hand and life-writing on the other. 1 She claims that in modern writing, "the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored," and she calls on the writer to "record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall [and] . . . trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness" ("Modern Fiction" 156,155). Woolf also suggests that modernist writing seeks to recover voices rendered mute or unintelligible in traditional histories and biographies, and she supplements absences in the archival record with stories of invented figures such as, most famously, William Shakespeare's sister Judith. The textual strategies that Woolf regards as central to the modernist project in many ways anticipate Caryl Phillips' writing-and contemporary migrant or postcolonial writing more generally. Like the writers Woolf L o u i s e Ye l i n admires, Phillips breaks the sentence and breaks the sequence (Woolf,Room 81). Like Woolf herself, he rea

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The performer

1Caryl Phillips has been noted for his construction of complex female voices and experiences (Pulitano 375). Yet, in most of his works, these are juxtaposed with equally challenging male experiences and perspectives, and in some, Phillips has foregrounded his focus on “troubled” masculinities, or more specifically, the limitations of black male agency in Western contexts. This article examines Phillips’s literary constructions of black men and their developments with a particular interest in his negotiation of concepts of achievement and failure. It focuses on two works which can be categorised as literary biographies, Dancing in the Dark (2004) and Foreigners (2007). The former centres on the life of vaudeville performer and entertainer Bert Williams (1874-1922) in the United States. The latter assembles the otherwise unconnected biographies of three black men in England: Francis Barber (c. 1742/3-1801), the servant and protégé of the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson; the boxer and short-time world champion Randolph Turpin (1928-1966); and David Oluwale (1930-1969), a Nigerian migrant and victim of police violence in Leeds. None of their stories lends itself to a straightforwardly revisionist or even celebratory approach, but Phillips’s choice to cast them