Reviews



Caryl Phillips. A New World Order.
New York: Vintage International Books, 2001.
T aken individually, the essays collected in Caryl Phillips' latest
 publication, A New World Order, may not seem to add up to much.
 Most of them trod well-worn ground: whether discussing O.J.
Simpson, Steven Spielberg, Edouard Glissant, or Sam Selvon, Phillips
brings extreme lucidity to the subject but generally keeps to conven-
tional wisdom. But taken as a whole, these essays chart the expanses
of the Black Atlantic. Phillips, born in St. Kitts in 1958, raised and edu-
cated in England, and resident of the United States for the past 15 years,
may be the contemporary writer most at home in the world that Paul
Gilroy describes as The Black Atlantic, a world of circulating people
and culture that once revolved around the forced transportation of
Africans to the New World and later the Windrush emigrants to Great
Britain, and now features countless daily flights criss-crossing the ocean
carrying laborers, tourists and returnees on journeys without origin
or final destination. Like Gilroy, Phillips marks the territory of the Black
Atlantic both as the geographic space between Europe, Africa, and
North America, as well as by the intellectual space blacks have carved
out in Western modernity.
 The essays collected in A New World Order are divided into four
sections: the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, and Britain. Phillips
begins with his self-identified artistic roots, the African-American liter-
ary tradition. His first essay, "Native Son by Richard Wright," reflects
on the novel which convinced Phillips that he could become a writer.
He acknowledges the irony that he, a British man, found his voice
through African-American letters, through DuBois, Baldwin, and Ellison.
Yet it is the meandering itineraries of these writers which most seems
to attract Phillips. He notes that DuBois, Baldwin and Wright all felt
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