His first story, “Heartland,” is a chilling, Kafkaesque parable about the slave trade. As his friend James Baldwin, he is cosmopolitan, his artistic approaches are varied, and his over-riding theme is the exploration of oppression in both the public and private realms. By placing himself firmly within the protest tradition of Pan-Africanist literature, Phillips is obliged to write as a world citizen, one as politically concerned about neo-colonialism in Morocco as anti-Semitism in Amsterdam, and the censorship of writers in the Soviet Union. In “The European Tribe,” his last book, which won the 1987 Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, Phillips went Alexis de Tocqueville’s odyssey across America one better by traveling for a year through Europe and Africa to examine racism and persecution on a global scale. It will come as no surprise to fans of Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips that his latest work, a triptych of stories called “Higher Ground,” shifts in setting from Africa to America, and finally to England, because Phillips, despite his young age, (31) writes as if he was raised everywhere.
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