Reading "Callaloo"/Eating Callaloo: A Special Thirtieth Anniversary Issue || Southern Cross: Reflections on the Orientation of "Callaloo"

Southern Cross: Reflections on the Orientation of "Callaloo"Author(s): Brent EdwardsSource: Callaloo, Vol. 30, No. 1, Reading "Callaloo"/Eating Callaloo: A Special ThirtiethAnniversary Issue (Winter, 2007), pp. 43-47Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30135863 .

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SOUTHERN CROSS Reflections on the Orientation of Callaloo

by Brent Edwards

It has occurred to me only recently what a great pleasure and rare opportunity it is to write about a journal during its lifetime, from within its field of influence-still under its

spell, as it were-rather than historically, in the tentative and generalizing archival recon- structions of print culture I am much more accustomed to attempting. It is more tricky than it might seem to take account of the "anniversary" of a periodical, since it would demand a great deal of work to theorize questions of longevity and duration in a particular histori- cal context. As Perry Anderson has recently commented, "the life-span of journals is no warrant of their achievement. A couple of issues, and abrupt extinction, can count for more in the history of a culture than a century of continuous publication."1 If one can cite, as Anderson does, examples in European modernism (the seven issues of the Russian journal Lef, the two extraordinary years of Documents in Paris), one can just as easily turn to the meteoric instances of the African Diasporic tradition: the single issue of Fire!! published in November 1926, during the Harlem Renaissance; or the one-time eruptions of Legitime Defense (1932) and L'Etudiant noir (1935) at the inception of the Negritude movement; or the short but crucial runs of Challenge, published under the editorship of Richard Wright and then Dorothy West in the 1930s, or Tropiques, "animated" (as one puts it in French) by Aime Cesaire and Rene Menil from 1941 until 1946, or Negro Quarterly, directed by Ralph Ellison and Angelo Herndon for two years during the second World War.

To discuss the "duration"-which is also to say the durability-of Callaloo would mean to historicize the context of its appearance, in order to flesh out the full significance of the particular and unprecedented constellation that it has articulated over the past thirty years. Subtitled "A Black South Journal of Arts and Letters" for its second issue in 1978, Callaloo was conceived in the wake of the Black Arts Movement, and it is expressly a response to the cultural conditions at that point in the 1970s, which allowed (however precariously) both a certain extension of some of the institution-building efforts of the 1960s, and a critique of the failings and myopia of the Black Arts project. In the preface to the first issue, Tom Dent announced that Callaloo was intended as a response to the

disappearance of "many of the community-based magazines which sprung up in the late sixties & early seventies," and specifically to the 1976 demise of Black World, the journal that had been founded in 1942 as Negro Digest, and which (along with W. E. B. Du Bois's

Phylon) was one of the key organs for black cultural criticism and creative expression in the decades after the war.'

Callaloo's rather pointed regionalism (its "Black South" orientation) is both a product of and a critique of the ways black literary creativity in the 1960s was linked to issues of

Callaloo 30.1 (2007) 43-47



CALLALOO

urban politics in the Northern United States. Many of the key initial figures in the journal were refugees or returnees from the North: one thinks not just of Dent, but also of Lorenzo Thomas, who contributed a fine history of the Umbra Workshop on New York's Lower East Side to the fourth issue of the journal.3 In other words, it might be useful to track the direct filiation between Callaloo and a specific set of small publications in and around New York in the previous decade, including Umbra, published in 1963 and then revived in 1967 and 1968, The Liberator, which lasted through the 1960s, and Amiri Baraka's The Cricket, published out of Newark from 1967 to 1970.

There is certainly reason to frame the emergence of Callaloo-as do both Tom Dent and the journal's founder and editor, Charles Rowell-in relation to what one might call its immediate peers, whether journals oriented more pointedly towards black creative expression, such as Obsidian (founded in 1975) and Hambone (which commenced publication in 1974), or journals more oriented towards contemporary criticism on black U.S. literature, such as African American Review, which was founded as Negro American Literature Forum in 1967 and then reborn as Black American Literature Forum in 1976 before taking its present title in 1991. But it is equally important (and, to a certain degree, more illuminating) to comprehend the journal's emergence in terms of broader trends in academic and literary periodical publishing in the 1970s. Without tracking this history throughout the entire century, one might note the peculiarities of the crucial and exceptionally active period when Callaloo was born. A surprising number of the still-prominent publications associ- ated more or less formally with the New Left and with "new social movements" and with the aesthetic issues and innovations they engendered-commenced publication in the mid-1970s, including Feminist Studies (founded in 1972), Critical Inquiry (1974), Radical History Review (1975), Signs (1975), October (1976), and Social Text (1979).

If they differ widely in terms of coverage and ideological positioning, these publications share (and share with Callaloo) a similar approach to certain issues of knowledge production. On the one hand, they share a commitment to collaboration, dialogue, and various models of working collectives (in this connection it is important to note Charles Rowell's uncommon generosity and humility in working with a large number of associate editors and special issue / special section editors over the years). These journals also have in common a commitment to interdisciplinarity. Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Annette Michelson announced in their introduction to the first number of October that the aim of the journal was to provide both a "framework for critical exchange" and a forum for "present artistic practice," in order to track the ways that American "cultural life [. 1 has been powerfully transformed over the past decade and a half by developing interrelationships" among the arts.4 Much later, in 1993, Charles Rowell introduced a new section of Callaloo called "Cultural Politics," designed to focus a "long-desired goal" of the journal: "to bring together what appears, on surface level, to be disparate voices as they intersect in the general cultural arena. In short, 'Cultural Politics' is about intellec- tual borders-and about our need to abolish them."5 One might account for this editorial gesture as part of a broader shift in the early 1990s among a number of journals, some with much longer tenures (including Transition, South Atlantic Quarterly, and boundary 2) to make space for certain kinds of cultural studies scholarship. But Rowell's phrasing may also be misleading because it elides the fact that Callaloo had fulfilled that "long- desired goal" from its inception, striving for disciplinary and generic boundary-crossing

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by publishing visual art next to fiction, interviews next to cultural and literary criticism, memoir next to contemporary poetry. Indeed, placed in this larger context, one might argue that Callaloo has offered a mix of visual art, literature, and critical prose that is as

impressive and as innovative as any similar effort in U.S. journal publishing. Juxtaposed to the late-1970s peer journals I mentioned earlier-all of which have primarily focused on new scholarship-Callaloo is exceptional in its insistence on the centrality of the "present artistic practice" to any understanding of contemporary culture.

A related component of Callaloo's editorial posture has been its longstanding commitment to the Diasporic contours of black culture. It has often been noted, by Rowell himself

among others, that in the mid-1980s the journal broadened its purview to take stock of contemporary black culture and criticism from around the world, often publishing exten- sive selections in facing-pages translation.6 It may be worthwhile to offer here a few words

concerning the history of this transformation or expansion in the journal, which I would

suggest might be located even earlier. Tom Dent, calling for a southern U.S. regionalism in the initial preface, writes that "one of the things we are about is redressing the balance between so-called advanced, progressive NY & the backwards, countrified South."' One might say, then, that such a project of re-theorizing a rhetoric of "development" in elabora- tions of a black aesthetic (undoing the stereotype of an "overdeveloped" urban North and

"underdeveloped" rural South) comes to be repositioned over the next few years toward a project that reads the Black South not just as the Black Belt but instead as a transnational South: a field that foregrounds and explores the links among black expressive practices in the United States, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa itself.

In the first issues, the editorial stance is infected with a certain U.S.-centered vanguard- ism, a view that might be said to be a legacy of the Black Arts moment. Dent writes of a needs to look "closely and without fear at our history" especially in the ways it leads to "our African & Caribbean origins."' Likewise, Rowell, in an extended and trenchant

critique of the Black Arts legacy also in the first issue, argues that the "history and culture of the rural and urban South" must be seen as a "passage to Africa, our bridge to cross over to find the original foundations of the Aesthetic."9 At the same time, though, Rowell sets the stage for a Diasporic orientation-the recognition that Africa stands not just as "original" or "foundational," but as equally present and participant in the elaboration of any black aesthetic-by insisting (as did Audre Lorde in the same period) on redefin-

ing the aesthetic with an attention to difference. He draws our attention to the risks of

instantiating any predetermined or codified notion of the black community as a "mass" that the artist would metonymically "speak for." As Rowell phrases it, "when we say the

people or the community, we cannot speak of one kind, type or class of people. The Black

community is made up of many.', to

It is useful to recall that in 1976-in a gesture perhaps more radical than it might ap- pear today-Rowell's critique of Black Arts draws on extended citations not only from

James Weldon Johnson and Gwendolyn Brooks, but also from contemporary Caribbean and African writers such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Ezekiel Mphahlele.11 This constitutive theoretical and referential breadth sets the tone for Callaloo's content not only in the past fifteen years, but as early as the February-October 1980 triple issue, which included two groundbreaking special sections: "South of the South: A Special Section from the Caribbean and Latin America," edited by Melvin Dixon, and "African Literature," edited by David Dorsey. Dixon explains that

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South of the South here means that the vast region of the Western Hemisphere beyond Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, even Florida. It is the south of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico and the awesome South Atlantic; the region of the Carib and Arawak Indians; countries of Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonial settlements; fruit of their interaction; land where African civilizations burst into a diaspora and into the various languages, literatures, histories, and folklore of New World diversity.12

It is difficult-and lamentably uncommon-for literary critics to evaluate the work of an editor, to take stock of the extremely time-consuming and energy-draining labor of

publishing a small independent periodical: the daily bureaucratic grind; the scramble for

funding and distribution; the networking for contributors; the constant and vigilant search for "emerging" writers and artists; the pursuit of qualified and constructive manuscript reviewers; the task of making editorial suggestions for revisions; the need to massage fragile if hefty contributor egos; the hunting down of reproductions and the gathering of necessary permissions; the orchestration of various voices in the production of a new

book-length collection every few months. Beyond simply noting the full range of labor that goes into journal editing, I would like to underline-again, because it marks the ini- tiation, very early on, of a Diasporic orientation-just one facet of Charles Rowell's direct contributions to Callaloo. Rowell is quite simply the single most important and prolific interviewer in African Diasporic literary and visual culture in the past thirty years.13 This, too, is delicate and underappreciated work. A talented interviewer can elicit, cajole, subtly reframe, and open avenues of reading and genealogy in ways that no other literary mode can approach. The first interview Rowell published in Callaloo, interestingly enough, was a conversation with the exiled South African writer Keorapetse Kgositsile-in the second issue of the journal, which also included E. Ethelbert Miller's eulogy for Leon-Gontran Damas, the Negritude poet who from the mid-1930s on, served as a key point de repere or fulcrum between writers in the Francophone world and African American writers in Harlem and Washington, DC.14

One gauge of Callaloo's success is the degree to which its conjunctions evoke a diaspora effortlessly, without need for comment or justification or disclaimer. One alphabetically arranged issue from a few years ago positions Edmilson de Almeida Pereira next to Carl

Phillips, follows Nancy Morejon with Harryette Mullen (who stands before Albert Murray), contrasts Rene Depestre with Toi Derricotte, slips Wilson Harris alongside Charles Johnson.15 It is Callaloo, and Callaloo alone, that has made such a speaking community possible-and, by now, even familiar. That such extraordinary constellations do not seem startling is, I think, the strongest testimony for the accomplishments of the journal over the past three decades. This is not to say that the connections and conversations the journal suggests are without tension. For the work of a journal is not conflation, not some hallucination of unanimity.16 On the contrary, a periodical's impact on the development of a culture is predicated on the ways it allows new dialogue, shifts and mixes readerships, channels influence beyond the usual barriers of discipline or medium, precisely by constellating discrepance: by counterposing voices in a telling structure, in a provocative, provisional firmament past the given field of vision-that is, south of the south.

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NOTES

1. Perry Anderson, "Editorial: Renewals," New Left Review new series 1 (January-February 2000): 5. 2. Tom Dent, "Preface," Callaloo 1 (1976): v. 3. Lorenzo Thomas, "The Shadow World: New York's Umbra Workshop and Origins of the Black Arts

Movement," Callaloo 4 (October 1978): 53-72. 4. Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Annette Michelson, "About OCTOBER," October 1 (Spring

1976): 3, 4. 5. Charles Rowell, "Editorial Note," Callaloo 16.2 (1993): v. 6. It is eye-opening simply to list the titles of the special issues that the journal has featured on trans-

national or extra-U.S. topics: "The Literature of Guadeloupe and Martinique," Callaloo 15.1 (Winter 1992); "Haitian Literature and Culture, Part 1," Callaloo 15.2 (Spring 1992); "Haitian Literature and Culture, Part 2," Callaloo 15.3 (Summer, 1992); "Puerto Rican Women Writers," Callaloo 17.3 (Summer 1994); "Wilson Harris: A Special Issue," Callaloo 18.1 (Winter 1995); "Maryse Conde: A Special Issue," Callaloo 18.3 (Summer 1995); "African Brazilian Literature: A Special Issue / Literatura Afro-Brasileira: Um Niimero Especial," Callaloo 18.4 (Fall 1995); "Eric Williams and the Postcolonial Caribbean: A Special Issue," Callaloo 20.4 (Fall 1997); "Carribean Literature from Suriname, The Netherlands Antil- les, Aruba, and The Netherlands: A Special Issue," Callaloo 21.3 (Summer 1998); "Dominican Republic Literature and Culture," Callaloo 23.3 (Summer 2000); "The Contemporary Diaspora: A Special 25th Anniversary Issue," Callaloo 24.4 (Fall 2001); "The Literature and Visual Art of Veracruz, Mexico / La Literatura y Artes Visuales de Veracruz, Mexico," Callaloo 26.4 (Fall 2003); "Faces and Voices of Coyolillo, An Afromestizo Pueblo in Mexico / Rostros y Voces de Coyolillo, un Pueblo Afromestizo en Mexico," Callaloo 27.1 (Winter 2004); "Derek Walcott," Callaloo 28.1 (Winter 2005).

7. Dent, "Preface," v. 8. Dent, "Preface," v. 9. Rowell, "Diamonds in a Sawdust Pile: Notes to Black South Writers," Callaloo 1 (December 1976):

5.

10. Rowell 6. I am thinking of Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (1979) and "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference" (1980), collected in Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 110-113 and 114-123, respectively.

11. Rowell 7, 8. 12. Melvin Dixon, "South of the South: Introduction," Callaloo 8-10 (February-October 1980): 16. 13. The enormous list of artists and intellectuals Rowell has interviewed is remarkable: it includes poets

(Aime Cesaire, Lorenzo Thomas, Derek Walcott, Michael Harper, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, Toi Der- ricotte, Sterling Brown, Nathaniel Mackey), fiction writers (Gayl Jones, Xavier Orville, John Edgar Wideman, Chinua Achebe, Maryse Conde, Leon Forrest, Samuel Delany), and visual artists (Romare Bearden, Lois Mailou Jones, Harold Baguet, Roy De Carava).

14. Rowell, "'With Bloodstains to Testify': An Interview With Keorapetse Kgositsile," Callaloo 2 (February 1978): 23-42; E. Ethelbert Miller, "In Memoriam: Dr. Leon Gontran Damas (1912-1978)," Callaloo 2

(February 1978): 61. 15. See Callaloo 24.4 (Fall, 2001). 16. In another context, I have written at greater length about the politics of scholarly journal publish-

ing, in an argument that closely echoes much of what I suggest here. See Brent Hayes Edwards and

Randy Martin, "Editorial: Rallying Social Text," Social Text 70 (Spring 2002): 1-9.

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