Callaloo

Welcome, everyone. We want to begin today with three speakers who will discuss the significance of the occasion, and I am honored to be the first speaker. I’m Margo Crawford, professor of English at Cornell University. As I think about the significance of the occasion, the 40th anniversary of Callaloo, and these difficult times, I want to begin by thinking about Lucille Clifton and her words about Callaloo. Lucille Clifton wrote: “In this time in need of peace, healing, and intercultural understanding, Callaloo is clearly even more important to our spirit. Essential.” After the founding of Callaloo in 1976, Callaloo is now forty years old. Can we stop right now and applaud Callaloo and applaud Dr. Charles Rowell? [Applause] Charles Rowell, as Editor of Callaloo, has shaped it into the most acclaimed journal of black diasporic literature and culture.

The Callaloo Conference, moving widely from places like Atlanta, Providence, and New Orleans to Addis Ababa and Oxford, has been as pivotal as the journal in the shaping of black diasporic literature and criticism. In an essay entitled “Making Callaloo: Past, Present, and Future,” Charles Rowell explains, “Callaloo has become more than a literary journal, growing into a de facto literary and cultural center.” Callaloo itself is that literary and cultural center. I love those words. It matters that one of the panels in this 40th anniversary conference is entitled “The Future of Callaloo.” I believe each thick issue of Callaloo lets us feel black aesthetics unbound. We feel the power of black aesthetics as the power of the not-yet-finished. In these forty years, Charles Rowell’s editorial practice has been the practice of diaspora. As we know, the practice of diaspora is the practice of translation and assemblage, and it is the practice of continuity and rupture. So many issues of Callaloo give us a sense of tradition, literary and cultural, and a sense of the call and response that shapes black diasporic aesthetics, but Callaloo has also taught us how to hear rupture, the surprise of new voices, and new visual images that make call and response a little too linear. The very paradigm of call and response to me becomes a little too linear when you think about what Callaloo is doing. In Callaloo, we hear so many calls and responses echoing and so many multidirectional flows as Callaloo gives us a diaspora without a center, a diaspora that is the rhizome (the web of roots) that Édouard Glissant taught us to see, not a diaspora with a totalitarian root. During this 40th anniversary conference, we ought to celebrate Callaloo’s ability to be diasporic and local. Callaloo’s original 1976 “Black South” [End Page 99] frame has not been erased by its current position as our consummate “African Diaspora Arts and Letters.” In the masthead, when I read these words, “founded in 1976, Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” I’m always reminded of the wondrous way in which each issue of Callaloo lets the “Black South” rub in such a generative way against those words “African Diaspora.” The tension lets us feel the diaspora embedded in the Black South, and any latent, imagined tension between these different frames, Black South/African Diaspora, reminds us that the practice of diaspora is the practice of letting frames cut frames and keep cutting (as Fred Moten writes in In the Break). Callaloo is the poetics of diasporic motion.

Charles Rowell’s body of interviews produced throughout these forty years is a vital part of the poetics of Callaloo. The first interview I read was Charles Rowell’s interview of Keorapetse Kgositsile. In this interview, Kgositsile explains the movement of African American literature through South Africa. He tells a story about the circulation of one copy of Richard’s Wright’s Black Boy:

Somebody in Capetown ran into a brother from here who was a seaman. The brother had a copy of Black Boy which...