The revisionary potential of Phillips’s literary work is twofold: it has a retro- active dimension, mainly aiming at a reinterpretation of the past through the introduction of fictional voices, and a proactive one, calling for a reinterpreta- tion of the present through an increased awareness of the historical founda- tions of contemporary phenomena within the diaspora. Whereas the former dimension has been frequently analyzed in postcolonial studies, the latter de- serves to be investigated in more detail. In what follows, I shall first sketch how spatiality influences culture in diasporic communities, and then focus on the way in which the reinterpretation of the past influences present processes of cultural positioning.
Arguably, the Middle Passage as an instance of traumatic deterritorializa- tion constitutes the founding episode of the African presence in the New World. The cultural uprooting by violent force created a sense of community in an otherwise highly heterogeneous group of enslaved Africans. Several literary depictions of the Middle Passage suggest that a new sense of identity emerged already on board the slave ships, fed by an imaginary representation
of Africa which changed with the distance from its referential source.2 In the everyday life of the colonial slave societies, Africa remained an important imagined homeland, helping the severely traumatized Africans to endure the hardships of their existences in the New World. The fact that the dissociation of culture and territory – which today is regarded as one of the defining para- meters of globalization – already occurred in early modern times in African diasporic communities had massive consequences for the importance of nar- rative representations of the shared history. Discursive self-articulation partly compensated for the loss of the habitual emplacement in a material African environment. Thus, from the time of the very beginning of the African pres- ence in the New World, the perpetuation of African traditions, which Stuart Hall described as a “vector of […] continuity,”3 depended on shared ways of
thinking.4 I would argue that the crucial importance that Phillips attributes to the role of the storyteller in communities which were founded on traumatic dislocations, and whose voices were systematically written out of dominant history, can at least partly be explained by the specificities of diasporic spatiality.
In order to gain a more complete understanding of the effects of the violent dissociation of African diasporic identity from its territorial anchorage, it is helpful to look at the descriptive categories used in transnational theory. The groundbreaking work of Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson is an important ex- ample of a radical reinterpretation of culturality in the light of contemporary global developments:
‘Multiculturalism’ is both a feeble recognition of the fact that cultures have lost their moorings in definite places and an attempt to subsume this plurality of cultures within the framework of a national identity. Similarly, the idea of ‘subcultures’ attempts to preserve the idea of distinct ‘cultures’ while ac- knowledging the relation of different cultures to a dominant culture within the same geographical and territorial space. Conventional accounts of eth- nicity, even when used to describe cultural differences in settings where people from different regions live side by side, rely on an unproblematic link
2 Interesting examples are John Hearne, The Sure Salvation (London: Faber & Faber,
1981), Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), and Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding
the Ghosts (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997).
3 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990), in Colonial Discourse and Post-
Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia U P, 1994): 395.
4 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
between identity and place. While such concepts are suggestive because they endeavor to stretch the naturalized association of culture with place, they fail to interrogate this assumption in a truly fundamental manner. We need to ask how to deal with cultural difference, while abandoning received ideas of (localized) culture.5
Their convincing approach succeeds in dissolving the apparent paradox be- hind the rise of nationalism that accompanies the increasingly obvious col- lapse of territorially anchored nation-states. Their thesis that imagined spatial- ity functions as a crucial surrogate for the loss of naturalized placedness in material space provides a basis for my interpretation of diasporic identities:
But the irony of these times is that as actual places and localities become ever more blurred and indeterminate, ideas of culturally and ethnically distinct places become perhaps even more salient. It is here that it becomes most visible how imagined communities (Anderson 1983) come to be attached to imagined places, as displaced peoples cluster around remembered or ima- gined homelands, places, or communities in a world that seems increasingly to deny such firm territorialized anchors in their actuality. In such a world it becomes ever more important to train an anthropological eye on processes of construction of place and homeland by mobile and displaced people.6
I wish to argue that the importance of imagined homelands discussed by Gupta and Ferguson is echoed in the literary representations of the New- World African community’s colonial past and current postcolonial predica- ment. More specifically, I shall attempt to demonstrate that the literary images introduced in Crossing the River highlight the importance of spatiality in the negotiation of cultural identities within the African diaspora.