New Ways of Identification: Black Diaspora and Memory in Caryl Phillips's In the Falling Snow

Abstract

As a second-generation immigrant author Caryl Phillips often depicts the distress of black British people of Afro-Caribbean descent in Britain in his works. His novel In the Falling Snow, published in 2009, illustrates the evolution of the notion of black Britishness through the memory of the post-war generation and more recent transcultural connections. A network of transcultural connections involving the black diaspora and the immigrants from Eastern Europe characterize contemporary England described in the novel. This article argues that the novel gestures towards a more inclusive society through transcultural memory that moves across generations and different immigrant communities. The experience of Eastern Europeans as immigrants echoes the memories of the post-war generation and opens up a space to discuss post-racial possibilities. Thus, the novel provides a perspective to observe the transmission of memory over a couple of decades and the role of migration as a site of transcultural memory.