The Narrative Of Home In Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge

Caryl Phillips is a leading novelist in contemporary British literature and acclaimed by New York Times as one of the great literary giants of our time.Cambridge,Phillips,fourth novel published in 1991,is universally regarded as one of his most representative works.It is because of this novel that Phillips was recognized as the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 1992 and listed among Granta’s Best Young British Novelists of 1993.It is also because of this novel that Phillips began to gain more attention in North America.At present domestic and overseas critics mainly focus on the themes of history,identity,belonging and displacement inherent in the novel,or its artistic skills of fragmented narrative,inter-textual allusions,and polyphony in their analyses,certain attention is also paid to the comparative study between Cambridge and other works.Home,as a recurrent theme in Phillips’ works,is still not focused in academic papers or monographs on Cambridge yet.By employing Rosemary George’s politics of home and Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity,this thesis sets out to reveal the postcolonial ethnic and historical connotation of "home" by focusing on Phillips’ narrative of home of the two protagonists in Cambridge.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is introduction,which offers a brief introduction of the author and the work to be studied,presents a review of existing research literature relevant to the work both at home and abroad,and explains the theoretical terms involved in this study,and the structure and main contents of the thesis.The second chapter lays emphasis on exploring the causes of protagonists’ dislocation and their anxiety over homelessness.Both Emily and Cambridge are exiled for slave trade and suffer from home anxiety for identity crisis.To be specific,Emily’s home anxiety is mainly resulted from her confusion with her English identity,while Cambridge’s home anxiety is mainly due to the exclusion from him being identified as an English by racial discrimination.The third chapter focuses on Emily’s relief from home anxiety after Creolization.There are two factors driving Emily’s Creolization:first,the hypocrisy of whites on the island prevents Emily from identifying herself with those whites,her female identity and declining wealth also lead to her marginalization in the Caribbean white society;second,attracted by the virtues of blacks and their freewheeling lifestyle,Emily grows increasingly intimate with blacks on the island.The fourth chapter explores the key elements of Cambridge’s "happy" life in England and his struggle for "home" as well as his role as a leader of black community and a mediator between blacks and whites after his second sale into slavery.After being sold to England,under the help of white maser and his wife Anna,Cambridge gradually gets a sense of security and belonging,and becomes a free Englishman legally.However,due to the deep-rooted racial prejudice,England would not be Cambridge’s home forever.After being recaptured as a slave to West Indies,by virtue of his command of English and Christian knowledge,Cambridge earns the respect from his peers and poses a threat to the dominant power and position of white slave owners.The last chapter is conclusion,through Emily’s and Cambridge’s loss of home and construction of home,we can find that the history of balcks and whites are not separated,but closely interrelated.In the context of globalization,only by interracial communication and integration can people from different races establish a shared and harmonious community in one place.