A New World Order: Selected Essays

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Secker & Warburg, 2001 - Literary Collections - 309 pages
"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 by introducing us to books by authors such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Joseph Conrad. He goes on to reflect on the work of such seminal figures as Derek Walcott, V.S.Naipaul, J.M.Coetzee and Nadime 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 fifties, the continued 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."

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Contents

A New World Order
1
The Burden of Race 9 a
18
Marvin Gaye
35
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

Caryl Phillips, 1958 - Author Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts on March 13, 1958. He received a B.A. with honors from Oxford University and soon after began his writing career. He is now professor at Yale University and a visiting professor at Barnard College of Columbia University. Phillips has received many awards and fellowships and was appointed to the post of chief editor of the Faber and Faber Caribbean writers' series. Phillips' writing explores the challenges of dealing with such divisions as race and heritage, and investigates how they were created in the first place. In "Cambridge," he presents his characters confused identities and frequently compares their personal histories and questions the process of how stories become known as history. He draws links between groups, like the Jews during the Holocaust or Victorian women, to make analogies for the West Indian situation.

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