Derek Walcott Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The Oceanic Turn: We are witnessing an interdisciplinary transition to what might be called " critical ocean studies " that reflects an important shift from a long-term concern with mobility across transoceanic surfaces to theorizing oceanic submersion, thus rendering vast oceanic space into ontological place. This has much to do with a new oceanic imaginary emerging in the wake of the knowledge of anthropogenic climate change and sea-level rise. This turn to ontologies of the sea and its multispe-cies engagements are the focus of this paper, particularly their implications for temporality and aesthetics in the Anthropocene. The oceanic turn of the twentieth century issued from geopolitics as well as new interdisciplinary groupings in the humanities and social sciences. It can be traced to the 1945 Truman Proclamation — the most significant, and yet largely unre-marked, twentieth-century remapping of the globe — which extended U.S. territory to include a two-hundred nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) (see DeLoughrey, Routes). This created a scramble for the oceans, catalyzing EEZ declarations by nations all over the world and a U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea that effectively remapped seventy percent of the planet. Although largely unnoticed by new disciplinary groupings such as the " Blue Humanities " (Mentz), Cold War geopolitics had a decisive influence in configuring a new understanding of the terraqueous globe. The second catalyst for the rise of critical ocean studies was the post-1970s " spatial turn, " which led to the emergence of globalization and diaspora studies. Marx-ist geography was integral to defining the post-Fordist era of global capitalism and relations of labor to space. This loosening of nationally-bounded modes of thinking about capital and space led to an unprecedented number of transoceanic studies, notably the work of Marcus Rediker, which helped to inspire Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, a text that inaugurated a new generation of thinking about race in transoceanic ways.

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- Latin American Studies, Art History, Postcolonial Studies, Caribbean Literature

Stuart McPhail Hall, FBA (1932 – 2014) was a Jamaican-born cultural theorist, political activist and Marxist sociologist (Encyclopædia). He worked on different ideas of contemporary cultural studies. He also widely discussed notions of cultural identity, race and ethnicity, particularly in the creation of the politics of Black diasporic identities.
The objective of this paper is to present a critical analysis of Stuart Hall’s idea of “Diasporic Identity” and locating the practice of this idea in Caribbean poetry. This paper is an attempt to answer a few questions – what diaspora is, and what “diasporic identity” means; what definition of cultural identity Hall provided in his work; how Hall located the idea in Caribbean and other contexts, and what his standing was regarding this idea; what Caribbean poetry is; and if Caribbean poetry holds Hall’s idea of diasporic identity and what treatment this idea gets in this tradition.
The first part of this paper will define diaspora and diasporic identity in brief. In the second part it will put effort on understanding the definitions of cultural identity provided by Stuart Hall. It will also try to understand Hall’s description of diaspora identity, particularly the Caribbean identity after knowing the etymology of the term “Caribbean”. The third section will briefly explore Caribbean literature and poetry. Finally, this paper will study a few notable works of some Caribbean poets and try to locate Hall’s idea of diasporic identity in them.
The general theme of this paper is the diasporic identity of Caribbean people and its recognition in Caribbean poetry.

- by Sudipta Mukherjee
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- Diaspora, Derek Walcott, Stuart Hall, Caribbean poetry

This paper attempts to explore the notions that the two Caribbean poets namely, Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite endorse on Caribbean history in their poems. Though both of these poets hold almost the same notion regarding history but their approach is totally different from one another. Coming from a 'hybrid' race, Walcott is aware of the history and he acknowledges it and therefore, he writes in 'mulatto of style'; whereas Brathwaite is enraged by it and attempts to sublimate it to erect a history of the new world. It is Walcott’s view to rise above the delusion and hatred and engulf the world of literature with creativity. On the other hand, Brathwaite holds the grudge which helps him not to forget and forgive the past experience but to transform that very experience into something positive which may help the Caribbean to transform their frustration into something creative and to help the Caribbean to overcome the present struggle against the legacy of colonization. Following discourse analysis, this paper seeks to identify if it is possible to rewrite and re-‘right’ the Caribbean history which has been lost in the route and analyze Walcott and Brathwaite’s attitude towards that very history which has been implemented through their poetry.

- by Gopashis B. G.Son
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- Hybridity, Derek Walcott, Caribbean poetry, Kamau Brathwaite

Caribbean Decolonisations: Derek Walcott's Narrative Rewritings and Artistic Encounters

- by Mattia Mantellato
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- English Literature, Dance Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Derek Walcott

In Walcott's epic Omeros Major Plunkett is the model of white inclusion in Saint Lucia's national identity-the creative identification and construction that is the underlying principle in the book. All new political structures have the need to create "national mythology" to legitimize themselves as independent political nations. The process of national legitimization can be done in different ways: the creation of national symbols such as flags, coat of arms, or national animals; the instrumentalization of history to create narratives with a clear purpose of portraying the national enemy in an exaggerated way; or the use of mythology to codified the new social, political, and cultural structure of the new nation. Is not arbitrary the fact that Omeros is an epic poem, a genre that has been fundamental for the construction of a unifying identity: the Iliad and the Odyssey for the Ancient Greeks, the Aeneid for Rome, The Song of My Cid for Spain, and now Omeros for Saint Lucia , all of them have been imperative aspects of the creation, identification, and construction of a national ethos in their respective nations. This question of identity suggests a process of both exclusion and inclusion that determines the "Us" from the "Others" in relation with who are the individuals that are going to participate or not in the construction of national identity. This process of differentiation is where Dennis Plunkett is situated. Major Plunkett is a WWII veteran from Great Britain that moved with his wife, Maud Plunkett, to Saint Lucia, an island from the Caribbean that was previously colonized by both the French and the British, a colonial past filled with struggle, pain, slavery, and genocide

Comparative analyses of poetry by German Sarah Kirsch, Emirati Ahmed Rashid Thani, and St Lucian Derek Walcott identify three distinct ecopoetic elements their work has in common. The three poets, born before the origin of ecocriticism, favour metaphors that represent natural landscapes. These metaphors express a certain "nature-centrism," and explicit references to environmental threats provoke approaches informed by ecocriticism to the oeuvres of all three poets alike. While the analyses highlight stylistic and culture-related differences, they manifest the urgency of an awareness for the global in the context of sustainability.

- by Doris Hambuch
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- Comparative Literature, Derek Walcott, Ecocriticism, Ecopoetics

I investigate Walcott's dynamics of textualized orality, in which print is disguised as speech so as to erase itself. Using the visual to suggest the oral, the poet deploys a range of rhetorical figures whose resemblances of sound and form alter meaning. I show how Walcott performs a seamless collaboration between word as text and word as sound, and generates meaning through musication all the while emphasizing the iconic variations of the page.

- by Marta Dvorak
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- Literary Stylistics, Caribbean Literature, Rhetorical Criticism, Postmodernism

Ormerod d’Édouard Glissant peut se lire comme une forme de réponse à Omeros de Derek Walcott, relation que nous analysons à travers un motif central aux deux œuvres, celui du voyage aux enfers. L’analyse de la réécriture et de la réinvention de ce motif par les deux auteurs permet d’interroger la façon dont les deux œuvres se construisent face au canon européen, et plus précisément face à la tradition épique. Les voyages ou descentes aux enfers dans Omeros et Ormerod se présentent comme des parcours initiatiques, mais également comme des lieux privilégiés de questionnement du rapport entre écriture et récit historique et du rapport entre la littérature et le monde. L’étude de ce topos permet ainsi de voir comment deux auteurs caribéens majeurs situent leur écriture l’un face à l’autre tout en situant leurs œuvres au sein de l’espace littéraire mondial.

- by Marco Doudin
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- Caribbean Literature, Intertextuality, Derek Walcott, Epic poetry
- by Rachel Friedman
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- Homer, Derek Walcott, Classical Reception Studies, Homeric poetry
- by George Handley
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- Derek Walcott, Ecocriticism
- by Kübra Vural Özbey
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- Postcolonial Studies, Schizophrenia, Derek Walcott, Psychological Studies
- by Annalisa Volpone
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- James Joyce, Derek Walcott, Omeros, James Joyce's Ulysses

For his poetic endeavour, Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel prize in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot prize in 2010. Postcolonial literary critic Jahan Ramazani appreciates his longest work, the narrative poem Omeros (1990), as being “perhaps the most ambitious English language poem of the decolonized Third World”. Although the critic believes it is based on the “radiant metaphor of the wound” as a “resonant site of interethnic connection”, the poet avoids advocating other Caribbean writers’ anchoring into a discourse of suffering. He proposes instead one of the most dramatic histories of the Caribbean by craftily employing war tropes from elsewhere – Europe, Africa, North America – to rewrite the inner war of the contemporary man who faces a multitude of cultural forces. His work was published when multiculturalism had already become a dominant paradigm in American universities and at the beginning of what James Hunter called the “culture wars” of the 1990s. Taking into consideration that the postcolonial concept of creolization proposed by the Barbadian poet and historian Edward K. Brathwaite was considered by Robert J. C. Young (1995) an unconscious, organic form of cultural hybridity, my argument is that Walcott’s epic poem has transformed the perspective upon creolization by revealing its intentionality. One of the reasons resides in the use of war tropes as sources of symbolic violence, which helps fleshing out a history predominantly characterized by plunder, absence and loss, a view which critics such as Paul Breslin hint at. This essay examines how some of these tropes appear in the poem and with what specific purposes.

- by Monica Manolachi
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- Cultural History, Poetry, War Studies, Caribbean Studies
- by Scholar Pakistan
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- English Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Pakistan, Derek Walcott
- by Emily Greenwood
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- Derek Walcott, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Black Classicism, In the Wake
- by Angelica Fei Barberini
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- Derek Walcott, Creolization, Caribbean Theatre
- by John Thieme
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- World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Literature, Poetry

This book explores the representation of the gods in Greek hexameter poetry in its many forms, including epic, hymnic and didactic poetry, from the archaic period to late antiquity. Its twenty-five chapters, written by an international team of experts, trace a broad historical arc, reflecting developments in religious thought and practice, and ongoing philosophical and literary-critical engagement with the nature and representation of the divine and the relationship between humans and gods. They proceed from the poems ascribed to Hesiod and Homer and the so-called Cyclic epics, via the Hellenistic poets Apollonius, Callimachus, Aratus and Moschus, to the poets and poems of the third to sixth centuries CE, including Quintus of Smyrna, Triphiodorus, the Cynegetica, Nonnus, Eudocia, Colluthus, the Argonautica of Orpheus and the Sibylline Oracles. An epilogue explores the reception of the Greek "epic" gods by the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid, and by the English poets Tennyson, Walcott and Oswald.

- by Martine Cuypers
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- Homer, Derek Walcott, Hesiodic Poetry, Nonnus

This essay examines the representation of working class characters, subversive protests against the imposition of European languages, and a creative reflection of the region’s transculturation, along with the tribute to oral tradition and folklore, as main inspirations for the use of vernacular in Anglophone Caribbean poetry. Selected texts by Lorna Goodison, Louise Bennett, Kendel Hippolyte, and DerekWalcott are analyzed to illustrate the argument.

- by Doris Hambuch
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- Poetry, Caribbean Literature, Derek Walcott, Vernacular
- by Rachel Friedman
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- Homer, Derek Walcott, Classical Reception Studies, Homeric poetry

This community has lost not just its identity but also its culture. They “trace” out their names on the sand only to watch it be “erased” by the sea. A new identity is given to them each time they are displaced. This has resulted in the people becoming “indifferent” as they have lost their sense of self, along with their roots. These communities which were brought over to new land as slaves have lost their original names as well as their culture and history.

- by Muskan Jaiswal
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- Translation of Poetry, Derek Walcott, Latin American Poetry

Salman Rushdie being one of these theorists coined the phrase: “The Empire writes back to the centre”. Walcott’s play is an embodiment of this phrase as he creates a counter colonial discourse writing back to one of the canonical texts: Robinson Crusoe. Let it be known that contrary to popular belief Walcott does not attempt to rewrite Defoe’s book but rather writes back to it as he creates a play which reverses the roles of the stereotypical ‘black’ man and ‘white’ man or as Edward Said would term them: the orient and the occident. (Said ).

- by Samaria Deonauth
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- Caribbean Literature, Post-Colonialism, Derek Walcott, Daniel Defoe

Discuss Brathwaite's explorations of history and race. In the course of your essay make comparisons with the treatment of these matters in the work of one other writer on your course. " To know where you are, but not who you are; to struggle with the present while still not being able to fully comprehend the past-this, too, is a form of exile. " Walcott (Castaway 52). Historically, the Caribbean has been marred by the hands of slavery and colonization resulting in a fragmentation of the psyche of its people which is mirrored in the life and literature of the region. The impact of these psychic wounds has been so profound that over the centuries, the Caribbean people have been afflicted by the crisis of identity. Indeed, it is this very crisis that basically informs the creative imagination of the average Caribbean artist. Issues along the lines of race, wealth, class and political affiliation have caused the alienation felt by the African people in the Caribbean. It is worthy to note that this alienation felt by the African in the Caribbean has become the burden of the West Indian writer attempting to capture the complexity of his society. In doing this, as one would expect, that there would be areas of common interest among the writers, just as there would be dissimilarities among them. But one thing they have in common is the need felt by the West Indian writer to recreate and redefine the essence of his/her black colour and West Indian experience – the need to capture the reality of the people who appear to be rootless. From the inception, Caribbean poetry has engaged the chaos and violence of the history that has given it life. The poetry of Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, two of the Caribbean's most prominent poets, emerge from this centre. Both poets confront

- by Janine Williams
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- Caribbean Literature, Derek Walcott, E. K. Brathwaite

Dream on Monkey Mountain, by Derek Walcott (born in St. Lucia in 1930), takes place in a prison in a West Indian island in the Victorian Era where Felix Hobain spends a night for wrecking a local cafe. He spends the night hallucinating and dreaming of becoming a healer, moving from village to village, then an African king. Shocked by the corruption of his only friend, Moustique, and the bloody opportunism of his newly converted jailer, Lestrade, he turns into a figure-head to be manipulated. The protagonist Makak, who suffers of a degraded self-image dictated by decades of colonization and subjugation, says in the “Prologue” of the play: “Is thirty years now I have look in no mirror,/ Not a pool of cold water, when I must drink,/ I stir my hands first, to break up my image.” (226) Makak, which means monkey, (Hogan 112) cannot look at his own reflection out of self-loathing. He is an anti-narcissus in that he hates himself that he cannot look at his own reflection in a pool when he wants to drink water. Using the arguments of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, the researcher attempts to prove that Makak has lost his identity and is self-loathing because of the effects of colonialism on him, and that he only regains his identity after he sheds the trappings of colonialism.

- by Ra'ad Abd-Aun
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- Postcolonial Studies, Drama, Post-Colonialism, Derek Walcott

I read both Walcott's "Dream on Monkey Mountain" and Triana's "The Criminals" as plays which deal with the dismantling of binary oppositions in favour of the concept of hybridity, fundamental to the Caribbean context. Considering Hegel's and Fanon's theories on master/slave dialectic, I therefore interpret these two papers as pushing for more post-modern interpretations of identity.

- by Eleonora Colli
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- Caribbean Literature, Caribbean Studies, Derek Walcott, Post-Colonial Literature
- by Arushi Bahuguna
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- Postcolonial Studies, Hybridity, Caribbean Literature, Racial Identity
- by Monika Keska
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- Derek Walcott, Derek Jarman, Arte contemporáneo, Historia del Cine

Nel poema Tiepolo’s Hound (Il Levriero di Tiepolo) Derek Walcott sovrappone la storia di Camille Pissarro, pittore francese di origini caraibiche, a quella di un suo alter-ego che, tormentato dalla “vampa di luce” sulla coscia di un levriero intravista in un quadro in esposizione al Metropolitan Museum of Art, non riesce a ricordare se è da attribuire a Tiepolo o a Veronese. Le vicende offrono lo spunto per riflettere su temi cari alla poetica walcottiana, quali l’esilio, l’idea di rappresentazione identitaria e il ruolo e il significato dell’arte e del processo artistico nel “nuovo” e nel “vecchio mondo”, e quindi nei Caraibi e in Europa.
Fine ultimo di questo intervento sarà quello d’indagare, in un primo momento, quel particolare rispecchiamento che Walcott suggerisce tra il proprio percorso artistico e quello di Pissarro per poi passare all’analisi della de-strutturazione di forme e strutture poetiche operata in relazione all’organizzazione e alle tematiche delle tele che lo ispirano. Infine si esamineranno gli itinerari di riflessione identitaria che l’autore propone nel tentativo di “rappresentare” una regione che non può esimersi dal trascurare i fardelli del passato coloniale, ma neppure il presente, contraddistinto da popoli dai retaggi plurimi ed eterogenei.

- by Muneeza Rafiq
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- English Literature, Derek Walcott, Contemporary Poetry, Postmodern Literature

Many women in a figure, many narrations in a myth, Helen is more than a mythological figure in our culture, she is a shadow looking for a body, a blank point to be filled. Along the centuries from Homer’s poems to Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Helen has been invested with different meanings, she has been variously thematised. In a continuing confrontation with the narrations made of her in the ancient Greek world (Homer, Stesichorus, Aeschylus, Euripides, Gorgias, Isocrates), the article explores what happens to the character when it enters the post-colonial world of St. Lucia, the Caribbean island where the author comes from, and the post-colonial epic of Walcott’s poem. She seems to be, both concretely and symbolically, the reason and the final destination of everything which happens in the poem, both in the past and in the present; the object of desire to be rejected or to fight for; the centre around which everything moves. She is the incarnation of the desire which holds together all the threads of the narration.

- by Francesco Giusti
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- Homer, Reception Studies, Narrative, Postcolonial Studies

In order to answer questions about the nature, viability and shape of what would constitute a modernist epic, this thesis explores three very different twentieth century writers, Hart Crane, David Jones and Derek Walcott. Rather than being a narrowly genre based study, however, I argue that in
the twentieth century the ‘epic’ mode has become a malleable form with which to explore troubling legacies of history, empire and, to exhibit a dimension of the sacred in modernity. All three poets penned challenging epic poems (The Bridge, The Anathemata and Omeros respectively) in a
condition of modernity. Haunted by the ruptures of history, in various ways, Crane, Jones and Walcott attempted to create an aesthetic which seeks cultural reintegration, recovery and reconciliation with the past. I analyse the formal experimental modernist aesthetic of each poet as
they are anxiously and sometimes ambivalently influenced by the increasingly dominant institution of a particular form of metropolitan high modernism. This allows for a critique of modernity whilst contextualising a modernist inscription of imperialism. Finally, I show that the spiritual and religious concerns of these writers are essential in the recuperative or compensatory ideals of the epic. I argue that far from being an obsolete and impossible genre, for poets the epic is the very mode which best captures the transitions and conditions of an uneven and unequal modernity. I seek to show how through the trope of place (bridge, city, ruins, sacred sites and island), journey and the sea and other aesthetic devices, Crane, Jones and Walcott attempt to re-enchant emptied and
destroyed cultural heritages.

- by Matthew Rumbold
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- American Literature, English Literature, Poetry, Caribbean Literature
- by George Handley
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- Postcolonial Studies, Derek Walcott, Ecocriticism, Postcolonial Ecocriticism

This article focuses on the interactions, connections and parallels
in literary texts addressing Haiti by Anglophone Caribbean
writers C.L.R. James and Derek Walcott, and Francophone writers
Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. Primary materials considered
include: C.L.R. James’ 1934 playscript, Toussaint Louverture, which
had been lost for many years until recently; two plays by Derek
Walcott, Henri Christophe and Drums and Colours; Aimé Césaire’s
book-length poem, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land and
his theatrical work, The Tragedy of King Christophe; and Édouard
Glissant’s single published play, Monsieur Toussaint. Collectively,
this corpus of primary materials demonstrates parallels and
connections within literary efforts at decolonization across the
Caribbean and reveals Haiti as a principle of coherence, and of
hope.

- by Philip Kaisary and +1
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- Postcolonial Studies, Caribbean Literature, Haiti, Haitian Revolution

Written in the late reaches of a dominant colonial tongue, the plays of J.M. Synge and Derek Walcott have created spaces of linguistic autonomy in English for minoritarian expression. Famously, Walcott has commented that he feels close to Irish writers, especially Synge, because “they were also colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean” (1979, 288). Following this connection and the accumulating scholarly work connecting these cultural traditions, this paper examines how Synge’s early play Riders to the Sea (1904) and Walcott’s The Sea at Dauphin (1954) adopt mourning and ghosts to intensify and change language. I argue that the plays’ ghosts emanate from the unreadable archive of the ocean as figures of unforgotten absence. Their hauntings provoke a mournful linguistic renewal but, crucially, provide characters no consolatory recompense. In other words, language emerges new but empty-handed from mourning beside the haunted sea; it expresses nothing but its own survival in the face of a memento mori and, in so doing, changes immeasurably.

- by Leif Schenstead-Harris
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- Irish Literature, Caribbean Literature, Ghosts, Derek Walcott
- by John Thieme
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- Postcolonial Studies, Caribbean Literature, Derek Walcott, Postcolonial Literature

This essay explores the centrality of Derek Walcott’s poetics of nature to his creative imagination. Forensic attention to language illustrates how connections between the mind and its environments engage critical work at the intersection of ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Poetry’s contribution to a resolution of these discourses’ conflicting concerns is revealed, in a fresh analysis of Walcott’s poetic ecology.

- by Emma Trott
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- Derek Walcott, Contemporary Poetry, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Ecopoetry & Poetics

In this essay we make two seemingly contradictory arguments regarding the relationship between trauma and postcolonial theory: trauma theory has always been postcolonial, and it is not yet postcolonial. By highlighting the similarities between Cathy Caruth's and Edward Said's readings of Freud's Moses and Monotheism, we argue that trauma theory, much like postcolonial critique, is centrally concerned with the undoing of identitarian binds. We therefore suggest that Caruth's theory of implicated subjectivity, which she pulls from Freud, is more in line with postcolonial theory than critics of her Eurocentrism (who often hinge their argument on identity politics) have recognized. At the same time, her theory of implication must become more postcolonial, we argue, by moving beyond its anthropocentric coordinates. As authors such as Derek Walcott and Uzodinma Iweala demonstrate, a postcolonial approach to trauma studies must begin by apprehending the cosmological damage wreaked by colonial modernity, which implicates not only humans, but entire systems of relations amidst the cosmos. By placing Walcott's and Iweala's writings in dialogue with Freud's reading of Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated, we propose our concept of cosmological trauma, which names the rupture in relational networks central to colonization. The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism. Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this essay we make two seemingly contradictory arguments. Our first thesis is that trauma theory has always been postcolonial. We thus place Cathy Caruth's and Edward Said's readings of Freud's Moses and Monotheism in dialogue, suggesting that both trauma theory and postcolonial theory have been centrally concerned with the traumatic origin of racial and cultural difference. Our second thesis is that trauma theory is not yet postcolonial. We thus also argue that Caruth's concept of traumatic implication must be extended to the more-than-human world 24

- by Sam Durrant and +1
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- Sigmund Freud, Derek Walcott, Literature and Trauma, Animism
- by Joe Moffett
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- Caribbean Literature, Derek Walcott, Postcolonial Literature, Omeros
- by John Thieme
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- Caribbean Literature, Caribbean Studies, Derek Walcott, Literature and Visual Arts
- by Joe Moffett
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- Homer, Caribbean Literature, Derek Walcott, Postcolonial Literature