Derek Walcott’s Painters

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).

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIllustrationsIntroduction1. A Brief History of a Vocation in (about) Fifteen Objects2. Atelier des Tropiques: The Local Scene3. Voyages to Cythera and the European Legacy4. American Visions I - Frescoes of the New World and Black America5. American Visions II - Black Odysseys6. Painting (and) the Caribbean: The Awe of the Ordinary and the Search for Anonymity7. Poems “out of” Paintings: Towards an Ekphrasis of RelationFarewellBibliography

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.