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The European Tribe
In this richly descriptive and haunting narrative, Caryl Phillips chronicles a journey through modern-day Europe, his quest guided by a moral compass rather than a map. Seeking personal definition within the parameters of growing up black in Europe, he discovers that the natural loneliness and confusion inherent in long jorneys collides with the bigotry of the "European Tribe"-a global community of whites caught up in an unyielding, Eurocentric history.
Phillips deftly illustrates the scenes and characters he encounters, from Casablanca and Costa del Sol to Venice, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Moscow. He ultimately discovers that "Europe is blinded by her past, and does not understand the high price of her churches, art galleries, and history as the prison from which Europeans speak."
In the afterword to the Vintage edition, Phillips revisits the Europe he knew as a young man and offers fresh observations.
Phillips deftly illustrates the scenes and characters he encounters, from Casablanca and Costa del Sol to Venice, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Moscow. He ultimately discovers that "Europe is blinded by her past, and does not understand the high price of her churches, art galleries, and history as the prison from which Europeans speak."
In the afterword to the Vintage edition, Phillips revisits the Europe he knew as a young man and offers fresh observations.
134 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1987
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355 people want to read
About the author
Caryl Phillips
51 books215 followers Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University.
He began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.
His novels are: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005), In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015), A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018) and Another Man in the Street (2025). His non-fiction: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), Foreigners (2007), and Colour Me English (2011). He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence.
He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. In 2002-3 he was a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he is presently Professor of English at Yale University. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford University.
A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his most recent book is, Another Man in the Street.
(taken from carylphillips.com official web site)
He began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.
His novels are: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005), In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015), A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018) and Another Man in the Street (2025). His non-fiction: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), A New World Order (2001), Foreigners (2007), and Colour Me English (2011). He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the 2013 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence.
He has taught at universities in Ghana, Sweden, Singapore, Barbados, India, and the United States, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. In 2002-3 he was a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he is presently Professor of English at Yale University. He is an Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford University.
A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his most recent book is, Another Man in the Street.
(taken from carylphillips.com official web site)
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
January 5, 2020
“I responded coldly to the aesthetics, but recognised the traditions. I could find little empathy with the cultural bravado of a Eurocentric past... Despite my education I found myself then, and still now, unable to engage with a Eurocentric and selfish history. Black people has always been present in a Europe that has chosen either not to see us, or to judge us as an insignificant minority, or as a temporary, but dismissible, mistake”.
Despite this book being first published in 1992 this is still relevant today. I happened across this book due to being continuously mentioned in ‘Afropean’ by Johny Pitts which I believe continues the conversation that was started here in ‘The European Tribe’.
Identifying commonalities amongst European ‘tribes’ (think here of imperialism, racism, fears of immigration and the struggle for economic power), Carly Phillips discusses the impact of European ideals & culture which has been exported across the world, creating people’s who have an affinity to Europe (colonialism) and, how they are then perceived when they attempt to demand a place in European Society which is either subsequently denied, begrudgingly tolerated or, a product of liberal embrace.
Throughout this book Phillips travels throughout Europe and comments on how he is received from one county to another, quite a simple book but poignant in its achievements in starting a conversation about multiculturalism in Europe.
Despite this book being first published in 1992 this is still relevant today. I happened across this book due to being continuously mentioned in ‘Afropean’ by Johny Pitts which I believe continues the conversation that was started here in ‘The European Tribe’.
Identifying commonalities amongst European ‘tribes’ (think here of imperialism, racism, fears of immigration and the struggle for economic power), Carly Phillips discusses the impact of European ideals & culture which has been exported across the world, creating people’s who have an affinity to Europe (colonialism) and, how they are then perceived when they attempt to demand a place in European Society which is either subsequently denied, begrudgingly tolerated or, a product of liberal embrace.
Throughout this book Phillips travels throughout Europe and comments on how he is received from one county to another, quite a simple book but poignant in its achievements in starting a conversation about multiculturalism in Europe.
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July 15, 2024Read this as it was the book that inspired Afropean by Johnny Pitts.
Its a good, but Johnny Pitts' book is by far the superior, in particular his poltics - even though he obviously talks extensively about racism, Phillips makes bare mention of imperialism as the underlying historical reason for the racism.
The thing I found most facnisinating about reading this was the fact that as Phillips and Pitts followed more or less the same path (Phillips visted more countries and cities, Pitts spent more time in the places he visited),albeit 30 years apart, you could get a real sense of how the palces had changed over time. The thing that stood out for me is that ultimately, there has not been anything like 'linear upwards progress', if anything there has been decay and regression.
Some striking examples: In Philips book, in France he reports spending a lively time with James Baldwin RN are coming into the scene and the threat of mass riots in response to instiutional racism. In Pitts' book Baldwin has been long dead having died in finincial difficulty his home abandoned and left to decay, france has expereinced numerous riots in the 'quartier populaires', and RN is dominant political force.
Russia in Phillips' book, Phillips has no fear walking through the streets as a black man, even being somewhat bemused at being followed by youths who wanted to speak english with him (who would have made him feel threatened had he been in the west). In Pitts' book, there is a climate of fear following decades of rising racist violence by neo nazis against black people - he reports being followed by a cab, and the feeling of fear it could be such an attack.
Ultimately its a a good book, but it is certainly strengthened it by reading it side by side with Johnny Pitts Afropean. The two destroy the liberal myth that following the collapse of the USSR we have lived through an epoch of 'progress'. If anything it has been a counter revolution, and black people, above all black working class people, have been the principle victims - not least in Europe, from the west to the east
Its a good, but Johnny Pitts' book is by far the superior, in particular his poltics - even though he obviously talks extensively about racism, Phillips makes bare mention of imperialism as the underlying historical reason for the racism.
The thing I found most facnisinating about reading this was the fact that as Phillips and Pitts followed more or less the same path (Phillips visted more countries and cities, Pitts spent more time in the places he visited),albeit 30 years apart, you could get a real sense of how the palces had changed over time. The thing that stood out for me is that ultimately, there has not been anything like 'linear upwards progress', if anything there has been decay and regression.
Some striking examples: In Philips book, in France he reports spending a lively time with James Baldwin RN are coming into the scene and the threat of mass riots in response to instiutional racism. In Pitts' book Baldwin has been long dead having died in finincial difficulty his home abandoned and left to decay, france has expereinced numerous riots in the 'quartier populaires', and RN is dominant political force.
Russia in Phillips' book, Phillips has no fear walking through the streets as a black man, even being somewhat bemused at being followed by youths who wanted to speak english with him (who would have made him feel threatened had he been in the west). In Pitts' book, there is a climate of fear following decades of rising racist violence by neo nazis against black people - he reports being followed by a cab, and the feeling of fear it could be such an attack.
Ultimately its a a good book, but it is certainly strengthened it by reading it side by side with Johnny Pitts Afropean. The two destroy the liberal myth that following the collapse of the USSR we have lived through an epoch of 'progress'. If anything it has been a counter revolution, and black people, above all black working class people, have been the principle victims - not least in Europe, from the west to the east
January 22, 2014
Caryl Phillips wonderfully writes about his travels across Europe, often in the darkest parts, with emotional depth and historical knowledge. A must read for those who are into the otherness literature.
October 6, 2023
wow, weird opinions to have about women, dude
so far this man is like... weirdly passionate about the great social harm caused by rampant tourism and how it leads to... *checks notes* people walking around in skimpy swimwear?
so far this man is like... weirdly passionate about the great social harm caused by rampant tourism and how it leads to... *checks notes* people walking around in skimpy swimwear?
February 9, 2021
A telling book, which I wish I had read 30 years ago. It is an indictment of European racism as he visits various European and American places and experiences first hand the various forms racism takes.
There have been numerous improvements in our consciousness of our racism, but it seems to me these are more superficial than real: we can't say 'wog' or 'yid' in public any more, and sportspeople take the knee: but have we done anything other than drive prejudice below the surface? The evidence of structural and cultural racism is alive everywhere.
Recommended by Johnny Pitts in his excellent 'Afropeans'.
There have been numerous improvements in our consciousness of our racism, but it seems to me these are more superficial than real: we can't say 'wog' or 'yid' in public any more, and sportspeople take the knee: but have we done anything other than drive prejudice below the surface? The evidence of structural and cultural racism is alive everywhere.
Recommended by Johnny Pitts in his excellent 'Afropeans'.
August 19, 2012
Interesting perspective which I'm not sure I totally bought into when I read it but it contains ideas which were quite radical at the time.
March 29, 2016
It was too boring...
August 22, 2021
1986 travelogue of a Black Brit through Europe. He encountered a lot of racial microaggressions, especially in "progressive" Sweden.
He mentioned feeling alienated from the art, architecture, and museums. He could recognize that they were beautiful, but they were also symbols of colonialism.
He wrote about the difficulty of life in the Communist countries, where food staples could be scarce.
He visited James Baldwin's home in France.
I found it interesting to see this perspective from the eighties.
He mentioned feeling alienated from the art, architecture, and museums. He could recognize that they were beautiful, but they were also symbols of colonialism.
He wrote about the difficulty of life in the Communist countries, where food staples could be scarce.
He visited James Baldwin's home in France.
I found it interesting to see this perspective from the eighties.
January 19, 2025
“But history is also the prison from which Europeans often speak, and in which they would confine black people. It is a false history, an unquestioning and totally selfish one, in which whites civilize and discover and the height of sophistication is to sit in a castle with a robe of velvet and a crown dispensing order and justice…
Such history involves superiority and inferiority, so that when the Japanese, who used to be inferior, began to find a voice technologically and economically, the Arabs oil, and the Jews a country, it left Europe with only the blacks and themselves to despise.”
Such history involves superiority and inferiority, so that when the Japanese, who used to be inferior, began to find a voice technologically and economically, the Arabs oil, and the Jews a country, it left Europe with only the blacks and themselves to despise.”
April 8, 2019
"Your eyesight is defective. Europe is blinded by her past, and does not understand the high price of her churches, art galleries, and architecture. My presence in Europe is part of that price. I was raised in Europe, but as I walked the tiny streets of Venice, with all their self-evident beauty, I felt nothing."
December 21, 2020
A personal journey made 30 years ago across Europe which ended with some words which still resonate today: "Europe needs yo replace her long-since-fled global economic and political sway with a moral leadership that is rooted in a tolerance of difference". Will we ever learn something?
July 29, 2021
Global Read 155: St. Kitts and Nevis
Obviously a book about Europe is a weird choice for this country but I had trouble finding anything else. This book is from 1987 and it is very dated. Casually drawn conclusions about various ethnic groups, name dropping that he had dinner with James Baldwin.
Obviously a book about Europe is a weird choice for this country but I had trouble finding anything else. This book is from 1987 and it is very dated. Casually drawn conclusions about various ethnic groups, name dropping that he had dinner with James Baldwin.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 26, 2022
The only European travelogue we really need.
June 12, 2024
morocco and poland chapters were very familiar
December 26, 2024
Brilliant polemic, and a faithful portrait of White Europe that holds up even 40 years later.
Capped off with a phenomenal final chapter that is as clear and hard as a diamond cutter.
Capped off with a phenomenal final chapter that is as clear and hard as a diamond cutter.
November 24, 2013
A must for white Europeans; probably not easy for those not aware of our ethnocentrism.
March 9, 2014
This is already good and only a few pages in.
April 3, 2015
Phillips seeks out the Black man's place among the European Tribe. Travel writing at its finest.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews