REVIEWS


themselves to be American, yet each eventually felt compelled to aban-
don the country of their birth and cast themselves into the maelstrom
of exile. The essay on Marvin Gaye is this section's gem, allowing Phillips
to show his acuity for Gaye's diasporic perspective and the ways exile
in Europe affected his art.
 The Africa section of A New World Order is by far the shortest of the
four. The essays offer little insight into the peoples and cultures of this
vast continent, yet in these pages Phillips lays bare his own troubled
sense of unhomeliness and unbelonging. In these essays, Africa is de-
scribed from the perspective of its diaspora, by one of its children
whose inheritance is deeply problematic and whose contemporary
claim on the continent is unclear. These essays have neither the famil-
iarity nor the special perspective of the insider-outsider that Phillips
brings to other sections. Africa remains opaque to him, and he can
only visit there as a diasporic tourist making a pilgrimage to the site of
an ancient pain.
 Although Phillips is most frequently identified as a Caribbean writer,
he admits that Caribbean novels have often seemed to him "foreign,
exotic even" (129). It is this perspective, as one "of, and not of, this
place" (3), that he brings to Caribbean literature. Sometimes this leads
him into egregious errors, such as when he mentions Jamaica Kincaid's
"two autobiographical novels Down by the River and Annie John"
(144)-the first book is of course At the Bottom of the River, a collec-
tion of Kincaid's stories, not a novel. Yet despite his "foreignness," he
finds Caribbean literature-the novels and travelogues of Kincaid and
Naipaul, the historical-theoretical reflections of Glissant and James, or
the poetry of Derek Walcott-to be the writings of the insider-outsider
like himself.
 The introductory essay places all four of these sites on equal foot-
ing, as places that are homes, but not home. The chapter on Britain
shows a fondness and understanding for that culture which betrays
that this site is more home than any of the others. The essays on Brit-
ish literature and the legacy of Windrush have a mix of subtlety and
insight missing from the other sections. Phillips takes the contentious
premise that the most innovative British literature has been, since at
least the 19th century, written by outsiders to English society, whether
Thackeray, Conrad, Orwell, and Wyndham Lewis, or Wilson Harris,
Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro. He poignantly describes the pain
and pleasure of his allegiance to the Leeds football club, a cultural tie
that has lasted throughout his life. As a whole, this section paints a
multicultural Britain to which West Indians, South Asians, and other