We recently returned from another exciting Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) conference, this time in stunning St. Lucia. One of my favorite events, the CSA Author Celebration, was divided into two evenings. Although it will be difficult to post about every publication, we will feature a few of the books presented at the conference. Speaking about stunning, I was lucky to get up close and personal with Maria Cristina Fumagalli’s Derek Walcott’s Painters: A Life with Pictures (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), the “first book devoted to Derek Walcott’s lifelong engagement with the Atlantic visual arts.” The book was introduced by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. A fascinating must read! Here is information from Edinburgh University Press.

• Bringing together local, Atlantic and global dimensions and putting in dialogue and contextualising Walcott’s work with the works of specific artists, it retraces Walcott’s unique, empowering, but utterly neglected ‘art history’
• Brings to the fore the importance and reverberations of interdisciplinary dialogues in the Atlantic world and in decolonising discourses and processes
• Sheds new light on the ways in which Walcott conjugated his engagement with the European, North/South American and African American traditions, envisaged their relationship with Caribbean culture and redefined the role he believed the latter should and could play on an Atlantic and global scale
• Is mindful of Walcott’s attention to painting techniques but, most importantly, foregrounds his keen interest in the multiple “narratives” that the visual works he was confronting not only explicitly revealed but also implicitly suggested
• Highlights the attention Walcott paid to the circumstances and ‘locations’ of his encounters with the works in question (i.e. local settings, metropolitan museums and artbooks).

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 Contextualising and putting in conversation Walcott’s published and unpublished writings (poems, plays, essays, journalism) and his drawings or paintings (privately owned and publicly disseminated) with specific artists from the Caribbean,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.

For more information, see https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-derek-walcott-s-painters.html