| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 外國語文研究所 === 101 === Abstract
African victimization plays an important part in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River. With his unique fragmented writing style, Phillips retells the slavery history with four different stories in different periods of time and each story shows the African victimization. After the shameful discourse between the African father and the slave trader, the tragic lives of Nash, Martha and Travis can be seen as the continuity of African victimization. Phillips reveals the fact that both the white and the black share the same responsibility of the slavery history. By adopting Benjamin Mendelsohn’s and Hans von Hentig’s victim typology, I discover that these characters separately fall into different victim types according to their situations. Their victimization can be divided into the active victimization and passive victimization based on the sources of victimization. If the oppression comes from the internal thought, it is called active victimization. If the oppression comes from the external world, it is called passive victimization. Nash and Martha belong to the type of active victimization. Travis and the slaves on Hamilton’s slave ship belong to the type of passive victimization. By comparing the passive victimization, I find that Phillips brings up the idea that the white in the racial mix-up family can be the victim, instead of the oppressor. My purpose is to demonstrate that African victimization is not equal to the unwritten rule that the white one-sidedly oppress the black. Through analyzing the types of African victimization, I consider that Phillips points out the importance of humanity which people need in the future.
Keywords: Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River, African victimization
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