A flâneur in Charlestown: the postcolonial condition and the return of the migrant in Caryl Phillips’ A State of Independence

Contemporary postcolonial Caribbean literature, encompassing the late twentieth century, is indelibly marked by the vicissitudes of displacement, which precipitate an acute sense of dislocation, and existential estrangement. This pervasive malaise engenders a profound anxiety surrounding identity and cultural affinity, compelling writers to interrogate the elusive phenomenology of belonging amid diasporic fragmentation. Consequently, the motif of “home” – with its attendant desires, nostalgic reminiscences and mythic idealizations – emerges as a recurrent leitmotif, permeating the literary corpus and reflecting a broader ontological quest for rootedness in an unmoored world. This study critically examines the trope of return in Caryl Phillips’s seminal novella A State of Independence (1986), contending that repatriation from metropolitan exile proffers not cathartic fulfillment but an exacerbated liminality. Protagonists remain inexorably suspended between bifurcated domains, heterogeneous linguistic registers and irreconcilable cultural epistemes, their homecoming devolving into a spectral interstice. Employing a deconstructive hermeneutic, the analysis dismantles the architecture of diasporic Caribbean subjectivity, elucidating its inherent fissures through a nuanced reading of Phillips’s narrative against the backdrop of the archipelago’s postcolonial condition. Far from migration itself, it is the return that epitomizes the perennial homelessness of both protagonist and peripatetic author, thereby subverting teleological narratives of return and reterritorialization.