Along with Caryl Phillips’s success as an award-winning literary figure of international status and as an academic star precipitating the Ivy league steps up to tenure at Yale, he seems to have developed a decided sense of commitment to use the prominence of his voice to address some of the most unsettling questions of international politics. Of late the sense of urgency undoubtedly fostered by his residence in the post-9/11 United States has led him to explore new topics and to resort to genres unprecedented in the 25 years of his career as a writer and academic.
Although he has always been inspired by a firm belief in the power of literature as a medium of political intervention, he only recently started to lose patience with the oblique ways in which fictional writing interacts with political realities and entered new generic territories to find a framework for a more direct influence on public discourses. In the second half of 2006 he used two prominent occasions to fuse fiction, autobiography and political manifesto into a mélange unique to his multi-faceted body of work. Inspired by a new form of humanism and occasioned by national xenophobic hysteria in the United States and Great Britain, he used two keynotes at international conferences as platforms to express a stinging critique of political reactions to multicultural tensions. In my reading of the two unpublished scripts I discuss the specifics and potential risks of the new generic grounds he has set out to explore.