A New World Order: Essays [Paperback]

Caryl Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2002

The Africa of his ancestry, the Caribbean of his birth, the Britain of his upbringing, and the United States where he now lives are the focal points of award-winning writer Caryl Phillips’ profound inquiry into evolving notions of home, identity, and belonging in an increasingly international society.
At once deeply reflective and coolly prescient, A New World Order charts the psychological frontiers of our ever-changing world. Through personal and literary encounters, Phillips probes the meaning of cultural dislocation, measuring the distinguishing features of our identities–geographic, racial, national, religious–against the amalgamating effects of globalization. In the work of writers such as V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, and Zadie Smith, cultural figures such as Steven Spielberg, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Marvin Gaye, and in his own experiences, Phillips detects the erosion of cultural boundaries and amasses startling and poignant insights on whether there can be an answer anymore to the question “Where are you from?” The result is an illuminating–and powerfully relevant–account of identity from an exceedingly perceptive citizen of the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Exploring issues of colonialism and race in literature, novelist Phillips (The Nature of Blood) here brings together 32 essays, book reviews, articles, interviews and introductions, divided into four sections the "Africa" of his ancestry, the "Caribbean" of his birth, the "Britain" of his upbringing and the "United States" where he now resides. The American writers he treats (Baldwin, Wright, Wideman) are well-known, and Fanon, Gordimer and Kincaid have been widely read here, but most of Phillips's attention is given to less popular writers from his other homes the French- as well as the English-speaking Caribbean: Glissant, Chamoiseau, along with Walcott and Lamming; the South African Coetzee and the Nigerian Soyinka; from Britain, the 18th-century Sancho and the 21st-century Zadie Smith. Usually collegial in tone and fresh in language ("a `broken-backed' novel which has the feel of two books"), the essays incorporate biographical sketches and concise detail, along with ruminative commentary. Phillips breaks out of the review mode with treatments of three disparate figures who are "of and not of" where they find themselves: C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul and Marvin Gaye. Here, as in his introductions, his evocative and provocative ("Race posturing in the United States is now the national sport") voices have freer play. Phillips emended most of the essays, many of which appeared in periodicals not easily available in the U.S. If a new world order doesn't quite emerge, a nuanced set of literary and cultural engagements does.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Phillips writes of the African diaspora in trenchant novels, including Crossing the River (1993), involving works of nonfiction such as The Atlantic Sound (2000), and superbly incisive essays. This fresh, robust, and cohesive collection kicks off with a powerful parsing of a "new world order" of migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers in which "nobody will feel fully at home." This sense of dispossession is central to Phillips' life and outlook. In resonant personal essays and brilliant literary and artistic analyses, he examines his four "homes"--the U.S., Africa, Britain, and the Caribbean, which, with its cultural and racial hybrids, foreshadows the new world order. Phillips' keen cultural and aesthetic radar picks up postcolonial fallout regarding race, sexuality, class prejudice, and self-image, and that perception, coupled with moral fortitude, enables him to write vigorously about artists ranging from James Baldwin to Steven Spielberg, Jamaica Kincaid, and Nadine Gordimer. This is an altogether bracing volume, with two outstanding works: Phillips' extended, frank, and groundbreaking studies of singer Marvin Gaye and new Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First US edition. edition (April 30, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375714030
• ISBN-13: 978-0375714030
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,150,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. His novel A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and his other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars New World Writer, November 24, 2008

By 

David Schweizer "Almawood" (Kansas, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A New World Order: Essays (Paperback)

Phillips is the next thing, all right, right up there with the most exciting young intellectual novelists, very much like Coetzee, but black and lacking Coetzee's Eurocentric sensibility. The perspective is that of an Englishman from the colonies, a bit like Orwell, Naipaul, or Lessing. Phillips is, in fact, a Caribbean author, with African roots and an education rooted in the fields of Eton. He is a gentlemen scholar, an amateur, if you will, and not an academic. In this regard he reminds one of Sontag or Vidal, perhaps even of Camus. Unlike Sontag and Coetzee, however, his center of gravity is post-colonial rather than central European. He doesn't reveal an affinity for Kafka, as much as for American jazz and an affection for Marvin Gaye. He is very good, however, on major literary figures such as James Baldwin, Gordimer, and Derek Walcott. Clearly, he is drawn to African -American lit and culture, but this collection's greatest contribution may be in his appreciations of lesser known figures such as Glissant, James, and Chamoiseau. He is well-read, witty, even erudite, but he can be tough and penetrating, harsh, but never mean. His dissection of V. S. Naipaul is hard-going but persuasive. These are well-written essays, a fine collection of pieces from a versatile, generous writer who loves literature.