The Atlantic Sound

by Caryl Phillips (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.34

  The Atlantic Sound is a travel book that is also a passionate argument with history: a personal quest to explore and fully understand the painful, ongoing legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. Phillips cruises through the Caribbean, observing everywhere the patronage of the United States. He explores Liverpool, constructed on the slave trade, now denying that history; Elmina in Ghana, site of a slave fort, now a tourist spot for black Americans; and Charleston in the American South, where one-third of black Americans were bought and sold. And Phillips retraces the journey he made to England from the Caribbean, as a child in 1958.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.34

  In The Atlantic Sound Caryl Phillips explores the complex notion of what constitutes 'home'. Seen through the historical prism of the Atlantic Slave trade, he undertakes a personal quest to come to terms with the dislocation and discontinuities that a diasporan history engenders in the soul of an individual. Philips journeys from the Caribbean to Britain by banana boat, repeating a journey he made to England as a child in the 1950s. He then visits three pivotal cities: Liverpool, developed on the back of the slave trade, Elmina, on the west coast of Ghana, site of the most important slave fort in Africa; and Charleston in the American South, celebrated as the city where the Civil War began - not for being the city where fully one-third of African-Americans were landed and sold into bondage. Finally, Phillips journeys to Israel where he encounters a community of two thousand African-Americans, whose thirty-year sojourn in the Negev desert leaves him once again contemplating the modern condition of diasporan displacement.