Reading Each Other, Writing Ourselves: Notes on CALLALOO CONFERENCES /RETREATS

I have always thought the growing divide between the creative and critical worlds to be superficial and nonproductive at best and collectively paranoid at worst.

A few months following the Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration of Callaloo in Baltimore, Maryland (October 24-27, 2007), I invited to New Orleans about thirty anniversary participants to form what I called THE CALLALOO RETREAT, a group of academics and creative writers that has agreed to continue to meet once a year at different institutions. We held our inaugural meeting in the city of New Orleans and at Tulane University for four days (March 5-8, 2008), with "Literature, Culture & Critique" as our central theme. In March 25-28, 2009, we met at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where our focus was "The Intellectual's Dilemma," and June 14-18, 2010, we will mount our third CALLALOO CONFERENCE at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, and use "(Black) Movements: Poetics & Praxis" as our angle of exploration.

Our first meeting was literally a retreat, for we all agreed to travel or to withdraw a distance from our respective institutions and homes to think and talk about, and especially to critique the work we do as artists and literary and cultural critics. Our focus was simply this: what we do, why we do it, and how we do it. Shona N. Jackson was judicious in her keynote address (see Callaloo 32.2, Spring 2009) when she proclaimed that

Our subject . . . is not only our language or style of discourse, the aesthetics of content . . . but about . . . "intellectual division of labor" . . . that produces seemingly incommensurate forms (the critical/ scholarly essay or book, for example, versus the short story, novel, poem, vignette, etc.), produces different strategies of reading . . . different spaces of articulation (such as the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, a public reading at a coffee shop, or a reading sponsored by Cave Canem), different publication venues, and finally different forms of financial and social support. Most scholarly journals such as PMLA do not print creative work. In its commitment to producing both scholarly and creative work, Callaloo, of course, is one of the exceptions, which the writer Nelly Rosario has referred to as "our very own Babel."

What Jackson did not acknowledge is what I still argue today about Departments of English, the majority of its faculty now being individuals who were trained as literary and cultural theorists who

continue to valorize the work of academics (archival, critical, and theoretical) at the expense of that of their creative writing colleagues. Academics have far too long viewed living, not-yet-canonized creative writers, as Others-a group of artists that academics, with their institution-sanctioned power, tend to marginalize and construct as mere exotics. Thinking of creative writers in this way, academics have made them an annex to English departments. That is, critical theoretical work is ranked very high in value but the work of the contemporary poet or novelist, for example, is seldom read or even given a tepid applause until the time comes for hearings on tenure or rank change. I have always viewed these circumstances as serious problems, and as a result I have tried to address them in the pages of Callaloo-that is, as they pertain to African Diaspora literatures, and African Diaspora literary and cultural studies

(Callaloo 32.2, Spring 2009).

In the pages of Callaloo, I have tried to ameliorate this growing negative circumstance by printing

the creative and critical together: by publishing, for example, poems beside theoretical and critical articles on problems in literature and culture or by printing prose fiction ..next to essays on the life of a playwright or a visual artist. I wanted the one to see/read what the other is doing. I have thought, in other words, that I could at least get the literary critic to study what some creative writers are producing, and I thought I might engage the creative writer to peruse with interest some of the rigorous texts literary and cultural critics are creating. My efforts to bring...