AfroEurope in Transit: Postcolonial and Transcultural Visions of Europe in Caryl Phillips's The European Tribe and Bernardine Evaristo's Soul Tourists

The paper focuses on two Black British writers of Afro-Caribbean/African descent, namely Caryl Phillips’s The European Tribe (1987) and Bernardine
Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005), in order to demonstrate how both texts criticize Europe’s colonial and racist legacies. In the former, Phillips gives a factual account of his year-long journey through Europe in the mid 1980s. The essay collection records the author’s growing unease with Eurocentric ‘tribalism’, which he traces in the discriminatory attitudes of Europeans against religious and ethnic minorities, and reveals European history as one of exclusion, which has ignored or deliberately forgotten Black presences in Europe. Like Phillips, Evaristo ‘writes back’ against hegemonic constructions of Europe and European history and claims that redressing the continent’s manifold entanglements with the African diaspora is of vital importance for successful future re-imaginings of a ‘new Europe’. In her road novel, transculturality not only emerges on a discursive level, but also characterizes the novel’s aesthetics. In Soul Tourists, ghosts of Black Europeans who were erased from European history start haunting the novel’s Black British protagonist Stanley Williams on his journey through Europe. Instigating transcultural dialogue across time, these compulsive ghostly storytellers form a stark contrast with The European Tribe’s argumentative stance. Comparing Phillips’s counter-travelogue with Evaristo’s ‘eutopian’ odyssey, the paper explores their respective postcolonial and transcultural visions of Europe. An analysis of the two texts will concentrate on three aspects in particular: Firstly, the way in which both texts reverse conventions of, and critically re-inscribe themselves in, colonialist traditions of European travel writing will be scrutinized. Secondly, the analysis focuses on the generic hybridity of both texts. While The European Tribe turns from essayistic travelogue into fervent appeal, Evaristo’s ‘novel-with-verse’ employs a wide range of literary genres and textual modes, which predominantly serve humorous functions. Thirdly, Phillips’s rhetoric of blame will be opposed to the empowering and dialogic Afroeuropean articulation of time and space in Soul Tourists. It will be argued that, in contrast to the predominantly Black British frames of reference in The European Tribe, Evaristo’s spectral vision indicates a ‘transcultural shift’. Inviting readers to experience the struggle and tensions accompanying diasporic encounters, Soul
Tourists thus attests to the emergence of transnational identities in contemporary ‘fictions of Europe’.