FHI | Caribbean Poetics: Nature and the Visual Arts
A central feature of Caribbean poetics has been a pictorial mode of representing the natural landscape and the complex multicultural societies that have taken root in the archipelago. Verbal and visual arts converge in the creation of entangled ways of sensing and portraying the vulnerable yet resilient terrain of human interaction.
The Franklin Humanities Institute assembles an outstanding group of poets, artists, and scholars for a wide-ranging conversation about the interconnections between verbal depiction and visual aesthetics in the portrayal of the natural and socio-cultural worlds.
The Caribbean offers a particularly fecund eco-site from which to engage in such a conversation. Sea and land, plantation and garden, hurricane and drought, cultivation and extraction, human and more-than-human life have long shaped the region's social histories and imaginative practices. Several generations of leading Caribbean poets have continually re-imagined the terms through which landscape, ecology, embodiment, memory, violence, beauty, and survival can be perceived, represented and understood.
Across a day and a half of presentations and conversations, the symposium addresses the question of how poetry in concert with the visual arts might help us to view these relations from an entangled perspective. How do poetic and visual practices intersect to register the histories deeply layered in Caribbean landscapes and seascapes? What might Caribbean poetics contribute to our thinking about the planetary ecological crisis, racialized histories, and possibilities for living otherwise?
- Speakers:
- Canisia Lubrin (University of Guelph)
- Elizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (Vassar College)
- Ishion Hutchinson (Cornell University)
- Maria Christina Fumagalli (University of Essex)
- McMorrris, Mark (Georgetown University)
- Kei Miller (University of Miami)
- Manuel Arturo Abreu (Independent Researcher-Washington)
