Bøger af Maria Cristina Fumagalli

The first volume devoted to Derek Walcott's lifelong engagement with the visual arts 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 he 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 Contextualising and putting in conversation Walcott's published and unpublished writing, drawings and paintings with specific artists from the Caribbean, Europe, South and North America, Derek Walcott's Painters recalibrates and sharpens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. Maria Cristina Fumagalli is Professor in Literature at the University of Essex. Her publications include On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2015; 2018), Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa's Gaze (2009) and The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante (2001).

Taking up the challenge of redefining modernity from a Caribbean perspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view of modernity is universal, Maria Cristina Fumagalli shows how the Caribbean's contributions to the modern world not only provide a more accurate account of the past but also have the potential to change the way in which we imagine the future. Fumagalli uses the myth of Medusa's gaze turning people into stone to describe the way North Atlantic modernity freezes its "e;others"e; into a state of perpetual backwardness that produces an ethnocentric narrative based on homogenization, vilification, and disempowerment that actively ignores what fails to conform to the story it wants to tell about itself. In analyzing narratives of modernity that originate in the Caribbean, the author explores the region's refusal to succumb to Medusa's spell and highlights its strategies to outstare the Gorgon.Reflecting a diversity of texts, genres, and media, the chapters focus on sixteenth-century engravings and paintings from the Netherlands and Italy, a scientific romance produced at the turn of the twentieth century by the king of the Caribbean island Redonda, contemporary collections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a historical novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Cond a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptian rites, fairy tales, romances from England and Jamaica, a long narrative poem by the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and paintings by artists from Europe and the Americas spanning the seventeenth century to the present. Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity offers an original and creative contribution to what it means to be modern.