Caryl Phillips' "Cambridge" and the (Re)Construction of Racial Identity

n his study of the revisiting of the form of the slave narrative by African- American authors in the 1970s and 1980s, Ashraf Rushdy argues that the primary motives for this literary disinterment were political. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s, these writers ‘wished to return to the literary form in which African American subjects had first expressed their political subjectivity in order to mark the moment of a newly emergent black political subject’ (7). A parallel movement can be seen at work in the black British writer Caryl Phillips’s fourth novel, Cambridge (1991).