2009 Callaloo Conference: A Participant's Report

While the first CALLALOO RETREAT met in New Orleans in March 2008, the second collection of scholars and creative writers summoned by Charles Rowell, founder of this historical journal, met March 25-28, 2009, at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The subject of the retreat was "The Intellectual's Dilemma: Production and Praxis in the Twenty-First Century."

Our improvised dialogue began with recognition of the need for the creative writer and critic to find a direct approach to discuss each other's work. We raised issues, such as the need for our retreats to impact English Departments and the importance of a search for historical models for the kind of work we seek to conduct at the retreats. Michael Eric Dyson was the keynote speaker. He was introduced by Salamishah Tillet, who was his teaching assistant when she was a student at The University of Pennsylvania. Her introduction captured the heart of Dyson's unique delivery technique. His address was indeed "intellectually fluid," "ambidextrous," "accommodating," and "nurturing." Dyson discussed the "New Crisis of the Negro," echoing Harold Cruse's seminal text and explaining that the twenty-first century has thus far proven to be a perilous time to speak about race. According to Dyson, we face a crisis in the limitations to speak about Black intelligence. Black humanity is now at odds with Western humanity. Africa represents the undoing of the notion of African savagery. Some Black academics do not engage in abstract reasoning. He explained that when we become Black intellectuals we are automatically engaged in a fight. Talking frequently with his eyes closed, his delivery was embracing as he challenged Bill Cosby's remonstration of Black youth and as he reminded his audience that good faith as opposed to bad faith applies to Obama just as it does to a president of any ethnicity.

Dyson described his second issue as the crisis of location, asking, "Where are we, and what are we doing?" He said we have much conversation evolving into divisions of the public intellectual versus the private intellectual. Of course, very well known as a public intellectual, Dyson with much decorum and intellectual respect subtly responded to Houston A. Baker's book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era, which includes Dyson. He explained that he walks in the world of the classroom as well as that of the factory. Being a public intellectual does not undermine rigor. His students are real people who pay real money to be educated at the same time that they face real or challenging problems at home. Thus "they need the real time and the privacy of the classroom." He clearly stated that he stresses to his students that they must always do their best and that he applies the same principle to his own work, by paying attention to who he is and to how he became who he is. We cannot, according to Dyson, pretend that we are not a citizen of the world and that we are not implicated in change. Our location, the location of the professor, is "planted deeply in the student's mind.

Dyson's third crisis is the crisis of literacy. He asked, "What are we reading?" He proposed that if we read works several times this re-reading process will force us to see how political corruptions are formed. He challenged all teachers when he asserted that we have a crisis in literacy because we are not listening to our young people or to poor people. Though his rhetorical style was humorous, his points made a deep impact. For instance, he explained that our system of teaching is antiquated by citing an example from youth vernacular: "We gon George Bush the buddy."

The final point Dyson raised he called the crisis of loyalty. He urged the group to contemplate for whom and to whom we intellectuals are speaking. He asked, "Are intellectuals committed to those people [they] claim to speak to?" "Are we loyal enough to notice the absences of references to race in Obama?" Reminding us that...