Word: slave
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Caryl Phillips' work, people are rarely at home. Caribbean citizens go to England in search of employment; British people tour the empire; Africans travel in the holds of slave ships to be deposited in West Indian plantations. Their displacement makes them uneasy storytellers and unreliable narrators, but it also heightens their awareness of their surroundings. They pay close attention, and even when they misinterpret what they see, their observations have a nervous, vibrant edge...
...early 19th century, the book narrates the journey of the Englishwoman Emily Cartwright to an unnamed Caribbean is land to look after affairs on her father's plantation estate. Part of the book is told from her point of view, part from that of an educated, African-born Christian slave named Cambridge...
...slave Cambridge, Phillips realized, simply could not accommodate contemporary conceptions of Black assimilation and resistance. "If you were a slave in the nineteenth century and you had the power of self-expression and self-insight that would be necessary to write the way Cambridge does, there was a good chance you'd acquired those skills from the Bible. [So] there was a damned good chance you were a dyed-in-the-wool Christian, and [that] you had a very strange and haughty and self-regarding view of yourself vis a vis the other slaves. You would think you were better...
...constancy of human nature, on proving that people "back then" were "just like you and me." Emily and Cambridge are indeed recognizable human characters, but they remain largely locked in the ideologies of their time. Emily considers herself a liberal even as she casually spews racist rhetoric; the proud slave Cambridge despises his African birthplace and views his own unconverted wife as a degenerate. Phillips' almost brutal insistence on historical accuracy renders these characters at once alien and sympathetic. It is this combination which makes Cambridge so disturbing and powerful...
Take the coalition's original flyer, which declared that the sins of a "Peculiar Institution" thrive at Harvard. Coalition members should try to focus on reality. If they believe that the racism that accompanied the slave system is really alive at Harvard, then they will be surprised at the injustice and racial inequality that exists in the real world. Harvard is far from the "plantation" and would be even farther if these minority students helped to unify the student body...