2001
Secker and Warburg (UK)
Vintage (US)
A New World Order
Phillips begins this distinctive collection of essays by establishing his belief that there is a "new world order" of cultural plurality, one which is being promoted by the increasingly central role of the migrant and the refugee in the modern world.
A New World Order ranges widely across the Atlantic World that Caryl Phillips has charted in his award-winning novels and non-fiction books during the course of the past twenty years.
Phillips begins this distinctive collection of essays by establishing his belief that thre is a "new world order" of cultural plurality, one which is being promoted by the increasingly central role of the migrant and the refugee in the modern world. He goes on to reflect on the work of such seminal figures as Derek Walcott. V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. But this rich harvest of essays is not simply limited to the literary: Phillips goes in search of Steven Spielberg, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Marvin Gaye. He writes about the moment when St. Kitts, the small island of his birth, became independent and talks about the role and responsibility of being a writer born into a postcolonial world who lives on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the final section of this ground-breaking collection he turns the spotlight on Britain and examines the country that formed and educated him, speculating about his parents' migration to Britain in the late nineteen-fifties, the continuing legacy of racism, his own helpless loyalty to Leeds United, and his anxieties at feeling as though he is both of, and not of, Britain.