A Veritable Literary and Cultural Center: The Editor's Notes

As we move toward the close of the 2010 calendar year, I write these notes as a public accounting of Callaloo, as a kind of annual report on the doings of the quarterly journal for the past academic year, 2009–2010, through the fall term of 2010. To readers who are uninitiated in the editing and publication of journals of the kind that Callaloo has become, our job must seem simple. Some might think, for example, that we receive myriad publishable manuscripts that we send out to referees who, in a day or week or so, write back to the editor telling him to publish certain texts. The only truth or reality of such thinking is that manuscripts published in each issue of Callaloo are refereed. The creative writers and academics who review and evaluate manuscripts for the journal are not only devotees to their respective fields; they are also well-established peers in their chosen genres. In an effort to treat the work of each author fairly and critically, our referees, who carefully read and evaluate Callaloo's blind manuscripts, take the necessary time to write critical notes on each manuscript; our referees, in other words, create reports that advise the editor. When the referees return the manuscripts, the editor uses their reports to decide whether the manuscripts, which two or more readers must recommend for publication, should be published in Callaloo. All of that, too, sounds simple. Why? Because, fearing to drive you into a state of ennui, I left out the many other steps and procedures necessary to receiving, screening, revising, returning, copyediting, proofreading, and shepherding through to publication those manuscripts that the referees and, finally, the editor think worthy of publication in Callaloo. Then, too, there are allied projects that the editor and his excellent, enterprising staff must address during a given year. As this annual public accounting of Callaloo will demonstrate, to conceive, organize, and execute a year's work for this quarterly journal is not a project that focuses on publication alone; working in the office of Callaloo also involves conceiving, planning, organizing, and coordinating a number of allied projects which, in import and significance, are national and international.

Although I have referred to Callaloo as "a quarterly journal," I should describe our forum as an ongoing project that plans, organizes, and coordinates a variety of literary, fine arts, cultural, and intellectual activities, as well as the publication of a journal. That is, in terms of the work that engages our staff, and as a result of the local, national, and international activities that derive from that work, Callaloo is—and should be referred to as—more than a quarterly journal. Collectively, what we do in the Callaloo office is best described as the work of a literary center. As quietly as it is kept, Callaloo is a veritable African Diaspora cultural center that serves not only Texas A&M University in College Station but also literary America and other writing, literary, arts, and cultural communities in various parts of the world.

The communities that Callaloo directly serves, supports, and promotes are the sites where millions of West and Central African captives—from the mid-fifteenth century into the mid-nineteenth century—were taken in chains, enslaved, and "reinvented" as another people to work as free labor forces for Europeans, European Americans, and their descendants. These forced migrations from native lands to unknown locations in the Americas and Europe evolved as the African Diaspora, where enslaved Africans and their descendants existed as living property, as chattel, at the beck and call, the domination, of their European and European American captors. During the latter period of those four or more hundred years, the descendants of Africans in different sites of the Diaspora underwent various forms of "emancipation," only later to encounter new forms of domination that forced them to live as marginalized groups—in the United States, for example, to live as a detested and dismissed group, controlled and manipulated by Jim Crow laws and their legacies. And, under the economic, political, social, and cultural domination of the descendants...