Making Art in the AcademyNotes from the Editor Charles Henry Rowell Click for larger view View full resolution Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014 [End Page 521] Click for larger view View full resolution Opening Reception Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014 [End Page 522] What should be the focus of our next conference? What form should it take? To whom should it be addressed? These are but three of the many questions that haunted me once I left the grounds of Oxford University and boarded my flight at London’s Heathrow Airport for my return home to College Station, Texas, by way of Houston’s Intercontinental Airport. It was late November 2013, and we had just ended our 2013 conference, our second international meeting. I had already been relieved much earlier in the year, when Natasha Trethewey, then in her last year as Poet Laureate of the United States, kindly informed me that she would host the 2014 Callaloo Conference at Emory University, where she teaches and directs the University’s Creative Writing Program. Because of our limited staff and the number of large and far reaching critical and creative projects that we sponsor through Callaloo, we have to begin planning early on. So during my waking hours on the ten-hour return flight to Houston, I ruminated on the three questions, and for two working weeks after I returned home I wrote notes as responses to them—all in terms of the original goals of our first gathering in New Orleans during the spring of 2008. The result of my post-Oxford notes was “Making Art: Writing, Authorship, and Critique,” the focus of the 2014 Callaloo Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Like most of our conferences, the ultimate purpose of the 2014 Callaloo Conference was a call to action, however indirect, to bring about positive change in the academy. And what we did at panel presentations and in keynote addresses, for example, was intended to help prepare each scholar and each artist to return to their respective institutions with a new or refueled vision that would help to marshal widespread support among their colleagues for positive progressive change in their departments or programs that practice inclusivity and academic civility. Not until this happens will the Callaloo Conference effect significant changes in the academy. In its focus, the conference we assembled at Emory University October 15-18, 2014, returned us to the concerns of our first meeting in 2008, our New Orleans retreat. As I wrote in my open letter to those attending the 2014 Callaloo Conference, We want to acknowledge that what we write, invent, create—as literary and cultural criticism, as fiction or poetry or drama, as painting or performance art, as music composition or dance—should be equally valued, supported, appreciated, and respected by our colleagues and by the administrators whose watch maintains the values and boundaries imposed by the current organizational structures of contemporary universities. We also wanted to remind departments and programs, in which literary and cultural studies reign paramount, that the attempt to continue privileging the study of writing by Europeans and their descendants over that of other peoples, especially that by people of color, is obviously a racist practice, a form of apartheid which has no place in this so-called [End Page 523] democratic society. University and college administrations allowing such must soon demand of their faculties the same ideological practices that our federal government demands of other nations the world over, the practice of democracy which also implies equal treatment and support. The program of 2014 Callaloo Conference wanted also to remind Africana studies departments and programs of the need to extend their curricula, as I wrote in my open letter, “beyond courses in literature, history, and the social sciences [to include] courses in the fine arts, such as film, creative writing, visual art, music (its history, composition, and performance), theater, etc.” And then, too, the university or college administrations should financially support Africana studies departments at the same rates that they support other similar departments and programs. I have no doubt that those academics and...