Postcolonial flânerie in Caryl Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound and Ferdinand Dennis’s Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain

ABSTRACT

This article explores how Caryl Phillips and Ferdinand Dennis embody the contested figure of the postcolonial flâneur in their travel narratives. Movement is integral to the practice of flânerie, and therefore the figure has close associations with the notion of travel. Despite this, the figure has been largely neglected in travel writing studies as scholarship has chiefly focused on the depiction of the flâneur in fiction. As black travel writers moving through British cities, Dennis and Phillips offer fresh and ex-centric perspectives of urban space in their travel literature. Both authors contest the dominant and often univocal representations of these places by foregrounding their forgotten histories, by platforming marginalized voices, and by revealing how black urban wanderers and residents experience, read and traverse city space in a different way to their white counterparts.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial flânerie
• postcolonial flaneur
• psychogeography
• urban
• travel writing
• Britain

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my supervisors, Professor Tim Youngs, Dr Jenni Ramone and Dr Nicole Thiara for their encouragement, and to Connor Murphy and Veronika Schuchter for their advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Dennis and Phillips describe themselves walking through many other cities in their respective texts, but I concentrate on their time in Liverpool because this is a destination they share.

2. The concept of the flâneuse – the flâneur’s female counterpart – is being developed by critics such as Lauren Elkin (2016). Elkin challenges the idea that a female flâneur cannot exist and draws on writers such as Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf to exemplify this in addition to her own experience. Elkin’s conceptualization of the flâneuse is not intersectional, as her text chiefly focuses on the experience of socio-economically privileged white women. Subsequently, it is important to acknowledge that a flâneuse’s or a flâneur’s race and class will impact the extent to which they can wander through the city. The experience of a postcolonial flâneur will be different from a postcolonial flâneuse, for example.

3. Although “blaneur” or “Afraneur” are appropriate in this context because they describe Phillips’s and Dennis’s subject position more accurately than “postcolonial flaneur”, I will continue using the broader term because many of the authors’ experiences occur due to their hypervisibility – a plight that would extend to anyone racially Other within European space, not just black wanderers. This deliberate linguistic distinction aligns with Anna-Leena Toivanen’s problematization of the concept of Afropolitanism, which she suggests “risks promoting territorial and even racial biases” (2017, 190). Hence, by using the term “postcolonial flaneur” rather than “blaneur” or “Afraneur”, I hope to avoid the territorial and racial biases to which Toivanen alludes.

4. Elkin (2016, 286–287) also describes how the city space is divided along gendered lines for the flâneuse.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Sofia Aatkar

Sofia Aatkar is a PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. Her research is funded by Midlands4Cities and focuses on Caribbean British travel writing. She is the co-founder of the PGR-led network, New Voices in Postcolonial Studies, and she is a postgraduate associate of Nottingham Trent’s Centre for Travel Writing Studies and Postcolonial Studies Centre.