Description:
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 Contextualising and putting in conversation Walcott's published and unpublished writings (poems, plays, essays, journalism) and his drawings or paintings (privately owned and publicly disseminated) with specific artists from the Caribbean,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.
Brief description: 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).
Review Quotes: This hefty, impeccably researched volume gives us insight into much more than "Derek Walcott's painters," providing a remarkable analysis of a career "sustained by the aim to forge a vision where paint and words would [in Walcott's words in Another Life] 'cohere / and finally ignite' " (p. 34). A masterful celebration of Walcott's work, a true gift to Caribbeanists.--Sally Price, Coquina Key "New West Indian Guide"