Southern Cross: Reflections on the Orientation of Callaloo

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 reconstructions 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 historical 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 Légitime Défense (1932) and L'Etudiant noir (1935) at the inception of the Négritude 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 Aimé Césaire and Réné Ménil 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.²

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 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...