“She lives now in two worlds": Re-placing the embodied other in Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child

As the idea of vulnerability being the constitutive condition of the embodied self’s worldliness has gained currency, postcolonial studies have readily grasped what its ethico-political implications may be for those who ‘have their involvement in the world called into crisis’ on account of gender, sexuality, ethnicity or ‘race’. And yet, precisely the vulnerable materiality of embodied life ensures that spaces are shaped by the bodies that inhabit them, just as ‘histories surface on the body, or even shape how bodies surface’ when they are most emphatically ‘out of place’. Echoing the AIA Conference’s chosen metaphor, ‘Thinking Caryl Phillips Out of the Box’ was the title of a special issue of ariel (2017) which challenged Phillipsian critical orthodoxies, both the ‘deterritorialising tendencies of diaspora discourse [...] that situates migrant subjectivities outside locality, region and nation’ and the weaknesses of Paul Gilroy’s transnational ‘Black Atlantic’ model (1993). Assuming ‘the temporally noncoincident ontology of the flesh’ to be ‘implicated elsewhere from the start’, Phillips’s 2015 novel The Lost Child interrogates the local and global alignments between ‘race’ and place that allow occluded colonial histories to reappear across time and space in the British literary imagination. Phillips’s novel materialises this inheritance of ‘loss’ out of the (un)written lines of Wuthering Heights. Inverting the ‘nesting’ procedure of the Victorian classic by starting from a temporally and spatially distant narrative of slavery and then zooming in onto a modern ‘Yorkshire noir’, The Lost Child denaturalises notions of proximity and distance spatializing the heterological interferences of its ‘polytemporal’ intersections unto Brontë’s ‘unforgiving setting’, stripped of its Victorian ‘heritage’ aura through its recursive proximity to the twentieth-century narrative of violation and disappearance. Ahmed’s phenomenological hermeneutics, Butler’s ‘relational ontology’ and the affect-driven art of black Britons from the North will guide my reading of Phillips’s novel ‘out of the familiar critical box’ by first examining the ways in which it reconnects the broken lines of unrealised solidarities through shared vulnerability and then considering how mixed inheritances might re-articulate ‘loss’ as contingent upon contact through the recognition that ‘contemporary mode of proximity reopen prior histories of encounter’