WALCOTT CONFERENCE: JANUARY 13th-15th 2010

 

Overview

Poet, playwright, essayist, critic, dramatist and painter, Derek Walcott, is recognised as one of the world’s greatest living writers.

 

Among his many awards and honours is the Nobel Prize for Literature which he won in 1992. The conference Interlocking Basins of a Globe will explore the multifaceted nature of Walcott’s work. It invites reflections on his evolving thought and analyses of Caribbean civilisation – his beloved Antilles, and the cartography of its origins. His far-ranging poetic imagination gives metaphoric expression to the creative possibilities of the ambivalences that exist within the New World psyche. Its axes of loss and plenitude form the ground of unprecedented possibility, facilitating unique intersections between cultures that enable a leap into the new. Walcott theorises the world of the Americas.

Walcott’s vision evolves from a desire to inhabit and be nourished by multiple worlds simultaneously. On the one hand, this response to New World history and sensibility has been, in some measure, shaped by his lifelong dialogue with the work and theories of other Caribbean creators and thinkers; and, on the other, from his acknowledged apprenticeship to literary ancestors and his collaboration with writers from across the globe. These streams have fed debates about the nature of his relationship to the Caribbean, and to Europe, Africa and Asia. His many essays and commentaries often respond to such concerns and the politics of that relation contribute to the complex tapestry of his drama and poetry.