Land of the Lost

photo: John Biggins

Caryl Phillips uncovers some startling new wrinkles in the record of African bondage.

Details

The Atlantic Sound
By Caryl Phillips
Knopf, 275 pp., $25
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More About

• Caryl Phillips
• Liverpool
• Phillip Quaque
• Charleston (South Carolina)
• Duke Ellington

Phillips should know how consistent such a move is with the improvisatory nature of Black American identity. In what appears a syncretism as profound as any of Duke Ellington's, the Hebrew Israelites have developed a religious community that sees no contradiction in sustaining Black American cultural practices as orthodox holy-land Jews. You can only wish there was as much judgment-free detail on them as the author provides on Judge Waring or the slave fort chaplain, and that his revised Middle Passage accounts came without an ax to grind about quixotic American Africanists.