Letter to the Readers

Abstract

Letter to the Readers Charles Henry Rowell, Editor & Founder of Callaloo Dear Readers, Please receive this number of Callaloo as our print effort to share with you some of the moments of the two events we staged, during the fall of 2016, to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Callaloo in the United States and in the United Kingdom. As you read through the various selected texts presented here, we hope you, too, will look backward and forward in joyous celebration and in hopeful meditation, as we did during our forward-looking engagements at New York University and Oxford University. These were, indeed, historic gatherings, marking the national and international importance of recording, documenting, and distributing in print the literary, cultural, and other intellectual and creative developments in the United States and in a number of other sites of the African Diaspora. The celebration of Callaloo’s fortieth birthday, hosted by New York University’s Creative Writing Program, was a two-day gathering (October 28–29, 2016) that featured presentations by creative writers, academics, and independent intellectuals. Anthony Bogues and Howard Dodson gave keynote addresses that eloquently reminded all attending the celebration of the origin and development of Callaloo, its past and present-day positions among other journals of its kind, as well as Callaloo’s meaning to readers and contributors inside and beyond the academy. The defining aesthetics, originality, and very “well-wrought” lines that mark the poetry of Carl Phillip and Yusef Komunyakaa were palpable, in individual ways, during their readings at the New York celebration. In their provocative and exploring presentations, Margo Crawford, Brent Hayes Edwards, Cheryl Wall, Phillip Brian Harper, and Dagmawi Woubshet affirmed much of what the keynote speakers proclaimed, but, by precept and example, the panelists—and many others who also spoke or performed—offered critical discourses that accounted for and elaborated on Callaloo as the incontestable forum which, since its inception in 1976, has served the African Diaspora in the Americas and in Europe. In their work as artists, academics, and public intellectuals, the large group of participants at the Oxford University celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Callaloo (November 23–26, 2016) examined and critiqued subjects, as well as raised questions similar to those we encountered at NYU. Unlike our celebration in New York, however, our Oxford University gathering was not only a celebration; it was also one of the meetings of the Callaloo Conference, whose international body gathers annually in different sites of the African Diaspora. Unlike the conferences, however, the 2016 Oxford gathering focused on Callaloo—its origins, its development, and its future—in the context of not only the quarterly literary and cultural journal as a forum of the African Diaspora, but also as a quarterly publication with allied supporting projects, such as the annual international Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the annual Callaloo • Art, and a monograph project, The Callaloo African Diaspora Series, which is, like Callaloo, also published by the the Johns Hopkins University Press. [End Page 1] Like the annual meetings of the Callaloo Conference, the Oxford celebration of Callaloo’s 40th birthday reflected the collective visions of the native homelands of the presenters, who were born in and now live and work in such countries as the Netherlands, Ghana, Grenada, Surinam, South Africa, France, Greece, Nigeria, Jamaica, and the United Kingdom, as well as the United States. The collective cultural and aesthetic traditions that inform the fiction and poetry, respectively, of Karin Amatmoekrim (b. Surinam) of the Netherlands and that of Nick Makoha (b. Uganda) of the UK differed distinctively from that of such US American writers as Jacinda Townsend, Nathaniel Mackey, and Janice Harrington. And yet the voices and concerns of the scholars echoed each other. I am thinking of the presentations of Joan Anim-Addo (UK), Jean-Paul Rocchi (France), Mina Karavanta (Greece), Rizvana Bradley (USA), Marlon Ross (USA), and Robert Reid-Pharr (USA). I cannot imagine anyone present who has lived in the African Diaspora but did not understand or was not thoroughly informed, as well as challenged, by the provocative and seminal exchange between Anthony Bogues and John Akomfrah, who...