摘要：Several of Caryl Phillips’s novels focus on slavery in the British Empire in the eighteenth century, and among the intertexts he has used in his reconstruction of the evil institution we find the writings of the English slaver John Newton (1725-1807) in Crossing the River (1993) and the African former slave Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745-1797) in Cambridg e (1991), as well as the ghostly presence of Francis Barber (c. 1735-1801) in Phillips’s last novel to date, Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007). Newton and Equiano left behind ample written evidence of their experience and their texts offer invaluable insights into slavery and the slave trade in the British Empire, while Francis Barber, the Jamaican who was Samuel Johnson’s manservant for over thirty years, remains a silent figure in history, whose life has come to us through the indirect evidence of contemporaries that interacted with him. The present paper explores the presence of Newton, Equiano and Barber in these three novels, which present slavery and the African diaspora in the eighteenth century as a crucial part of British history, and highlight the consequences and reverberations of the history of slavery in the twentieth century.
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