Abstract
In The European Tribe (1987), Caryl Phillips’s account of his experimental tour of Europe as an Afro-European Briton, Saint Paul de Vence, James Baldwin’s new home away from home, is placed between Spain and Italy. This village in Southern France was far from the stark Parisian realities described by James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son (1955) and visiting Baldwin in this ‘very expensive kingdom’ became a ‘spiritual fix’ (Phillips 1987). The repeated tributes Caryl Phillips paid to James Baldwin in newspapers articles, a radio play and a TV documentary point to the importance of the African-American literary father figure in Caryl Phillips’s evolution as a writer. Actually, in The European Tribe, Caryl Phillips describes the formation of his writing personality as stemming mainly from two sources: Caribbean culture and the African-American literary tradition that he discovered first through Richard Wright and later through Baldwin. The fascination with Baldwin, as well as with writers Emily Brontë and Jean Rhys whose very lives and works are echoed in his own narratives, connected as they are to his concerns as an Anglo-Caribbean writer, becomes an open interrogation on The Price of the Ticket (Baldwin 1985; Phillips 2007), the price the artist has to pay if he wants to assume his share of the burden of representation.
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Ranguin, J. (2020). ‘All the Nuances of His Predicament’: Caryl Phillips on James Baldwin. In: Rensen, M., Wiley, C. (eds) Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45200-1_11
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