The Atlantic Sound

The Atlantic Sound is a 2000 travel book by Caryl Phillips. In the words of the Publishers Weekly review: "Journeys, as forces of spiritual and cultural transformation, bind this trio of nonfiction narratives, which explores the legacy of slavery in each of the three major points of the transatlantic slave trade."[1]

Exploring what constitutes "home", Phillips repeats a journey he made as a child in the late 1950s on a banana boat from the Caribbean to Britain, then visits three cities pivotal to the African diaspora: Liverpool in England, developed through the transatlantic slave trade; Elmina on the coast of Ghana, site of the most important slave fort in Africa; and Charleston in the US south, where one-third of African Americans were landed and sold into bondage,[2] and where Phillips makes a pilgrimage to Magnolia Cemetery to lay flowers at the grave of Julius Waties Waring, a white judge who played an important role in the early legal battles of the American Civil Rights Movement. Writing in The Guardian, reviewer Maya Jaggi notes: "It is characteristic of Phillips's vision that, in excavating the hidden history of this antebellum tourist centre, he draws imaginative links between diasporic wanderers and a white man whose moral stand made him an outcast in his own hometown."[3]

References

  1. ↑ "The Atlantic Sound" (review), PW, 10/02/2000.
  2. ↑ "The Atlantic Sound" page, Caryl Phillips website.
  3. ↑ Maya Jaggi, "Rites of passage", The Guardian, 3 November 2001.

External links

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