The affective dimension of Caryl Phillips's biographical radio drama

Anglo-Kittitian Caryl Phillips is the author of three radio plays giving a voice to famous artistic and intellectual figures of the African diaspora: James Baldwin in A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris, Marvin Gaye in A Long Way from Home as well as Richard Wright and CLR James in Dinner in the Village. Respectively broadcast by the BBC in 2004, 2008 and 2011, these radio dramas convey Phillips’s fascination for these four men whose writing (or music in the case of Marvin Gaye) could be described, to borrow the words of Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, as Phillips’s “sentimenthèque” -- that is works that have had a deep emotional impact on him and affected his development as a writer.
These three plays constitute intimate sonic companion pieces to the more neutral essays that Phillips has devoted to his four protagonists over the years. My aim is to examine what makes radio drama a more affective medium than non-fiction, and how this affective dimension translates, both for the writer and for the listener.