Book description
A New World Order ranges widely across the Atlantic World that Caryl
Phillips has charted in his award winning novels and non-fiction during
the course of the past twenty years. He begins this collection by
establishing his belief that there is a 'new world order' of cultural
plurality, one which is being promoted by the increasingly central role
of the migrant and the refugee in the modern world. He goes on to
reflect on the work of such seminal figures as Derek Walcott, V. S.
Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, Steven Spielberg, Linton
Kwesi Johnson and Marvin Gaye. Phillips 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. He then turns the
spotlight on Britain speculating about his parents' migration in the
late fifties, the continued legacy of racism, his own helpless loyalty
to Leeds United, and his anxieties at feeling as though he both of, and
not of, Britain. Phillips was born in St. Kitts, West Indies, but grew
up in Leeds and was educated at Oxford. An established writer and
academic, he lives in New York and London.
