This book explores the articulation of the aesthetics and the politics of Crossing the River beyond the focus on neo-slave narratives and sounds out the silence purposefully left by Caryl Phillips in his revisiting of slave history Central to Phillips's novel is an indictment of Western narrative forms - in particular the travelogue and the epistolary genre - which have played a pivotal role in the shaping of Western modernity and which Phillips experiments with as part of a project to invent a form suitable for the expression of a black transatlantic modernity in the wake of the postcolonial critique of Western historiography.