Travel Writing and Postcoloniality: Caryl Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound

Abstract

The postcolonial travelogue is one of travel writing's most prolific and innovative offsprings in the late-twentieth century. This paper examines the way this subgenre encapsulates the new developments that distinguish contemporary travel accounts from their Enlightened and Victorian counterparts. The socio-political changes brought about by the new century have dramatically altered the motivation and subject matter of a genre that has traditionally been involved in European expansionism and the construction of Europe's Other. Once vehicles for cultural prejudice serving official purposes, contemporary travel accounts have become powerful instruments of cultural critique, displaying a greater subject-orientation. My analysis will revolve around Caryl Phillips's second and latest travelogue, The Atlantic Sound (2000), with references to The European Tribe (1987), his first venture into the genre, and to his fiction. This paper also aims at directing critical attention towards Caryl Phillips's travel writing, which as yet has failed to generate as much scholarship as his fiction.