“The other is the neighbour”: The limits of dignity in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore

Abstract

This article examines Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003) in light of his claim that in “the new world order” consideration must be afforded to “the dignity which informs the limited participation of the migrant, the asylum seeker, or the refugee”. Dignity here relates to the ambivalence that surrounds the question of belonging, and, after Emmanuel Levinas, of accepting responsibility for the Other. I read “the camp” in Phillips’s novel as an actual and deterritorialized presence signifying a limit, commensurate with his sense of the limitations on the refugee’s participation in the new world order, and Giorgio Agamben’s assertion that the refugee is a limit on the concept of citizenship, in order to examine what limits dignity, and places dignity at the limits of citizenship.

Keywords:

• Caryl Phillips
• Agamben
• Levinas
• refugees
• dignity
• the camp

Notes

1. Solomon’s original name is Gabriel, but I will use the former throughout except where quoting Phillips.

2. See also Otherwise Than Being 12.

3. Agamben has called the camp a “non‐place” (Remnants 48).

4. Agamben notes that the most likely inspiration for the phrase was in the literal meaning of “Muslim” in Arabic, i.e. one who submits unconditionally to God’s will (45).