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The Black Atlantic is both a literal and a metaphorical place. As a geographical zone, it is the body of water bounded by Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean. As a political location , it marks the historical site of the Middle Passage, the triangular routes of the slave trade. As a cultural arena, it represents the imaginative space over which artistic passages and exchanges have crisscrossed and flourished. The recalibration of the conventional dynamic of the center and the margin is exemplified in our contemporary moment by the career of Derek Walcott. His entire life's work is devoted to traversing the Atlantic. The journey is not to one destination but involves multiple directions. Of his two great epic poems, Omeros (1990) looks to Africa, while Tiepolo's Hound (2000) faces Europe.4 The latter contemplates Tiepolo's Apelles Painting Campaspe (1725-1726) with the Moor, "silent with privilege," "watching from the painting 's side" (129). The former takes its inspiration from Romare Bearden's Sea Nymph (1977), one of a series of twenty collages that reconstruct and repurpose Homer's Odyssey into Bearden's Black Odyssey.5 Walcott's trips are not one way: the ultimate goal is to return to the point of origin—the home base in the Caribbean. In his artistic evocations of the Atlantic, Walcott rejects an exclusive focus on the Middle Passage in favor of opening up new alternatives, generating new paths, new experiences , and new power. His emphasis is not only on recovering the past but also on reimagining the present. The routes may be familiar but, thanks to the creative freedom of art, the outcome can be very different. The work of the five artists in the Williamstown symposium draws inspiration from this generative , galvanic image of the Black Atlantic.6 I. Crossing the Generic Line from Derek Walcott to Isaac julien Isaac Julien resides in London, but his films register evocative transatlantic encounters. In Looking for Langston (1989), Julien looks outward to the Harlem of the African American writers Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. In Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996), Julien traces connections from Martinique in the Caribbean to Algeria in North Africa. Subsequently, the films Paradise Omeros (2002) and Encore: Paradise Omeros Redux (2003) follow Derek Walcott back to Saint Lucia, which is also the point of origin of Julien's parents. The extraordinary meeting between Walcott and Julien is recorded in Creolite and Creolization, the symposium held on Saint Lucia in conjunction with Okwui Enwezor's Documenta 11. In his contribution , "Creolizing Vision," Julien notes that the "question of creolite in my own practice" is pursued in Paradise Omeros through the "relation with the Creole cultures of England and St. Lucia."7 Julien's encounter with Walcott is explicitly incorporated in the Paradise Omeros films through the appearance of Walcott reading from his Omeros. When Walcott recites a passage beginning "because this is the Atlantic now," we are in the "Black" Atlantic. The adjective goes without saying, and Julien brilliantly "translates" Walcott's verse into a visual medium. Near the beginning of Paradise Omeros, Julien presents a triple-screen scene on the oceanside promontory with a distant shot of an older man resembling Derek Walcott, back arched like the two tree trunks behind him, on the right; the young protagonist, played by Hansil Jules, unmistakably on the left gazing outward; and the sea in the middle. Julien pauses and holds this moment to establish the figures' binding relation to the sea and to each other. Returning to this moment in the single-screen Encore, Julien first evokes the scene only through voices: we hear Walcott's reading echoed by Jules's tenor aria. But we then watch as Walcott's close-up profile slowly pivots to face the camera, and us, directly. The original moment is recapitulated when the identical image of Hansil Jules gazing intently at the ocean briefly reappears to complete the transfer from Walcott to Jules. Julien in effect starts over again where Walcott ends Tiepolo's Hound. Walcott's line of verse—"Let this page catch the last light on Becune Point" (163)—stands in parallel with the last of Walcott's...

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