Radio drama and its avatars in the work of Caryl Phillips

[en] Between 1984 and 2016 Caryl Phillips wrote nine radio plays which were all broadcast on the BBC. Meant for a different circuit of communication than his novels, essays and published stage plays, Phillips’s radio plays might be dismissed as minor writing, yet they constitute a fascinating, under-investigated body of texts which are worth exploring alongside the rest of his work. Thematically, Phillips’s radio drama covers similar ground to his fiction and essays. Starting from this sense of familiarity, this article examines the formal and communicative specificities at play in Phillips’s contributions to the radio drama genre. Focusing on two radio plays entitled Crossing the River (1985) and A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris (2004), this piece discusses which features of this marginal genre inform Phillips’s radio-dramatic characterization of protagonists with complex identities, but also, more generally, how these aspects infuse his formally experimental fiction.

Research Center/Unit :

CEREP - Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Études Postcoloniales - ULiège

Disciplines :

Literature

Author, co-author :

Ledent, Bénédicte ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de langues modernes : ling., litt. et trad. > Langue et linguistique anglaises modernes

Language :

English

Title :

Radio drama and its avatars in the work of Caryl Phillips

Publication date :

2018

Journal title :

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

ISSN :

1744-9855

eISSN :

1744-9863

Publisher :

Routledge

Volume :

Issue :

Pages :

32-42

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2017.1417761

Available on ORBi :

since 15 January 2018

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Bibliography

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