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  • “What We Do and Why We Do What We Do”A Diasporic Commingling of Richard Wright and George Lamming
  • Joyce Ann Joyce (bio)

From March 5, 2008, until March 8, 2008, Charles Rowell, the founder and editor of Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, invited a small number of Black multicultural and intergenerational scholars and writers to gather at Tulane University to participate in a retreat in which we gruelingly discussed for three full days the issue of how Black creative writers and scholars could effectively improve the communication between each other and how this improved communication could be used to influence the direction of Black writing or narrow the chasm between scholars and critics.

I unhesitatingly accepted Professor Rowell’s invitation because I wanted to demonstrate my appreciation to Callaloo, for its thirty-two years of publishing works by Blacks from Africa and from all avenues of the Diaspora, as well as for its inclusion of a diverse range of the works by women writers. I also, perhaps more importantly to me, accepted this invitation because had it not been for the influence of writers such as Richard Wright, whom I discovered in my last two years of my Ph.D. program at the University of Georgia, Sonia Sanchez, Eugene Redmond, Askia Touré, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Arthur P. Davis, Amiri Baraka, Addison Gayle, Ishmael Reed, John A. Williams, and E. Ethelbert Miller—all of whom I know personally—I would not understand what it means to be a Black scholar in America. In other words, my mentors, once I left the classroom, are not my teachers in my graduate program. They are the poets, critics, and novelists who share some part of their lives with me, who continue to tutor me, who challenge me to write what I really think rather than what others want to hear, and whose commitment to their aesthetic and political work shows me that I am not yet insane.

Rowell’s intellectual retreat pulled together some of the most talented, Black but ethnically diverse critics and writers, most of whom I had not met and was not familiar with their work outside the pages of Callaloo: Michelle Wright, Angie Cruz, Fred D’Aguiar, Michael Collins, Mat Johnson, Emily Raboteau, Nelly Rosario, Dawn Lundy Martin, Evie Shockley, David Chariandy, Dagmawi Woubshet, Kendra Hamilton, Christian Campbell, Suzette Spencer, Koritha Mitchell, Ivy Wilson, Shona A. Jackson, Salamishah Tillet, and Rinaldo Walcott. Joseph Skerrett, Ed Roberson, Charles Rowell, and I were the only participants whom I believe were at least fifty years old. Before this retreat, I had very little hope for the future of the political component of African-American literary criticism, though I was aware of the current connection of the intellectual and the folk and of the emphasis on Black communal survival in the poetry of young Black artists such as Tony Medina, Ras Baraka, and Samiya A. Bashir. The presentations by young scholars, at the retreat—Suzette Spencer, Koritha Mitchell, Rinaldo Walcott, Salamishah Tillet, and scholar/poet Christian [End Page 593] Campbell—emerge as responsible for my dismissal of the most recently published text Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (2008).

In his book Professor John Jackson, Jr. makes his contribution to the devaluation of racial issues in the quality of Black lives. In the chapter “Racial Paranoia’s Canonical Texts,” he uses John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am and many other invaluable historical studies, such as Carter G. Woodson’s The Miseducation of the Negro as examples of a long line of conspiracy theories that imbue Black paranoia and that retard healthy relations between Blacks and Whites. Johnson’s use of Woodson’s The Miseducation of the Negro contains a humorous ironic element. Carter G. Woodson not only details how a Euro-American education influences the thinking—and thus the methodology—of the Black intellectual, but his work and especially his success at forging the institutionalization of Black History Week, which is now Black History Month, precedes and makes the way for the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, Black Arts Movement, and thus the institutionalization of the first Black Studies Program at...

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