Callaloo Conference Reflection

In his reflections on the genesis of the Callaloo Conference, Charles Rowell writes, “I intended the [first] New Orleans gathering as a call to action: a collective effort to begin changing the current ways artists and critics respond to each other’s work” (330). The third annual Callaloo Conference in Addis Ababa exemplified this effort and amplified the need for such a call to action. As the theme of the conference, “(Black) Movements: Poetics and Praxis” suggests, these gatherings help to map the flow of ideas between individuals, between genre and form, between disciplines, between countries, traditions, languages, and continents. The notion of movement underscores that the Callaloo Conference is not only about the exchange between creative writers and academics, but about the ebbs and flows that characterize creating and thinking about the arts and letters of the African Diaspora. Moving outside of the United States, across the Atlantic, into East Africa, to land in Addis Ababa—the movement marking this gathering was both literal and figurative. As a first time participant in the Callaloo Conference, my experience at “(Black) Movements” moved me in particular ways that are intellectual, emotional, creative, activist, and spiritual, beyond what I could reasonably capture in the spatial parameters of this essay. Here I want to offer some reflections on the relationship between the form and the content of the conference theme, and think through what makes the Callaloo Conference such a unique space.

At first the title “(Black) Movements” struck me as too nebulous or too vast as the theme for a small conference. The parenthetical use of Black conjures the multiple belongings of diasporic identity by centralizing yet subordinating racial identity. What interests me even more than the use of (Black) here is the idea of movement. In fact movement, as its critical and creative articulations confirmed throughout the gathering, is an apt term to convey what we do as academics and artists of the African Diaspora. For a people on the move, the notion of movement is foundational whether in the transatlantic slave routes that lie at the root of Black identity in the Americas, or the deeply embedded traditions of dance and sound that coarse through cultural histories. Movement directly evokes praxis; when modified by “activist” movement means Civil Rights, anti-apartheid, ti-legliz, and “back to Africa.” Movement is artistic as in Negritude, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts, indigenisme; political as in Black feminism and Black Power, spiritual as in Rastafarianism and rara, and all of those other literary, political, and artistic flows that help to mark the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the diaspora.

Given the myriad connotations of “(Black) Movements,” the task before conference organizers Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis, Dagmawi Woubshet, and Salamishah Tillet was a daunting undertaking similar to what they name in their introduction to the volume dedicated to Ethiopia that preceded the conference. They write, “Appraising the literature, life, and culture of Ethiopia is a daunting undertaking. Like its history, Ethiopia’s literary and cultural traditions are so vast, and so rich, that they exceed the grasp of a single volume” (8). Perhaps this might be the best way to characterize the Callaloo Conference itself, an initiative on the move, still subject to change and dynamic in form, that ultimately exceeds the grasp of a single gathering. To participate in a Callaloo Conference is to search for possibilities, to innovate, to imagine and dream of better spaces for creative expressions and intellectual thought and sometimes with no resolution. In this particular case, the “(Black) Movements” rubric combined with the Ethiopian context presented a challenge as to how to engage the scope of literature, culture, history, politics, and art with depth and rigor. That challenge was met through a dizzying array of panels, activities, and events. There was geographical movement from Addis Ababa to Axum and Lalibela, where conference participants visited ancient churches. There was physical movement in the traditional troubadour dances that conference members participated in as well. There was intellectual movement in the dynamic back and forth...