Derek Walcott's Painters: A Life with Pictures

by Maria Cristina Fumagalli

Overview

Walcott’s lifelong concern with painting and painters deeply inflected his aesthetics and politics. Walcott’s interventions on the relationship between Caribbean and colonial history have been thoroughly scrutinised, but, arguably, Walcott was also keen to address and (re)write an art history "of which," paraphrasing a line from Omeros, the Caribbean "too" was/is "capable". Contextualising and putting in conversation Walcott’s published and unpublished writings (poems, plays, essays, journalism) and his drawings or paintings (privately owned and publicly disseminated) with specific artists from the Caribbean, Europe, South and North America, Derek Walcott’s Painters recalibrates and sharpens our understanding of Walcott’s articulation of his own politics and poetics and of the Caribbean’s contributions to Atlantic and global culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399512138
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	07/10/2023
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures
Pages:	504
Product dimensions:	6.77(w) x 9.61(h) x (d)

About the Author

Maria Cristina Fumagalli is Professor in Literature at the University of Essex, United Kingdom. She is the author of On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2015; 2018), the first literary/cultural history of this border region, Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa's Gaze (2009), which rethinks modernity from a Caribbean perspective and The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante (2001). She is the editor of Agenda: Special Issue on Derek Walcott (2002-2003), and co-editor of The Cross-Dressed Caribbean: Writing, Politics, Sexualities (2013) and Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio (2013).

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIllustrationsIntroduction Chapter One: A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen ObjectsChapter Two: Atelier des Tropiques: The Local SceneChapter Three: Voyages to Cythera and the European LegacyChapter Four: American Visions I - Frescoes of the New World and Black AmericaChapter Five: American Visions II - Black OdysseysChapter Six: Painting (and) the Caribbean: The Awe of the Ordinary and the Search for AnonymityChapter Seven: Poems “out of” Paintings: Towards an Ekphrasis of RelationFarewellBibliography

Editorial Reviews

An always illuminating, and often brilliant, examination of Walcott's relationship with both art and artists. Fumagalli enables us to recognize Walcott's genius writ large on a broader canvas.

Caryl Phillips

Only a true friend to the man, his verse and his visual art can understand the depth and intricacy of their connections. Fumagalli is that friend, and her rich, magnificent study brims with the light he shone from his island to the world.　 　 　

Glyn Maxwell

Fumagalli explores in dazzling detail the extraordinary range of Walcott’s connection to the world of painting and artistic creation, offering, in the process, a clear path to understanding the roots of his poetic creativity. In this inspired, painstakingly researched and persuasively argued study of the centrality of painting and the visual arts in Walcott’s life and work, Fumagalli draws on her deep knowledge and understanding of his poetry and his life to unveil before us how profoundly his poetic eloquence grew out of a sustained, lifelong dialogue with paintings and painters.

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

Fumagalli studies Walcott’s literature and painting – tracing his interests in Caribbean, European and American art and their contribution to his ‘verbal, visual’ explorations. An encyclopedic achievement.

John Robert Lee