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  • Mutuality and StartlementLove at the 2012 Callaloo Conference at Princeton
  • Vievee Francis (bio)

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Chika Okeke-Agulu, Vievee Francis, Valerie Cassel Oliver, and Maaza Mengiste (left to right)

Callaloo © 2012

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Are we, cultural workers situated in the academy, developing a jargon about cultural production that does not allow us to “conversate and cross” these very borders that we’re talking about how cool it would be to cross?

—bell hooks on black scholarship, and quoting in brief Snoop Dog

It takes days.

It takes days.

Kiki Petrosino

Listen

One of the most important but often overlooked aspects of the Callaloo Conference is the necessary exchange between the scheduled participants. The conference seeks to provide a level space between the scholars and creative writers (and scholar/writers for that matter), where neither is privileged and all are given time to approach topics according to their primary practice. Further, while it is one of the goals to broaden the audience for such exchanges, it is as important that the conference draw not just numbers, but invested and engaged audiences. This is a rare opportunity that allows a relaxing of the boundaries between audience and participant because the participants aren’t attempting to win over the audience or simply present their material; rather, they are having an unusually open interchange between scholars and creative writers seldom experienced at such events where the audience can witness and indeed become a part of the process through the following Q&A. In other words, 1) the conference means to be a gathering place that is as supportive and attentive to the scheduled participants as it is to the audience; 2) the play between scholar and creative writer matters and the audience is enriched by hearing/watching it; and 3) an engaged audience is one from which new participants can be drawn. As a result of this approach over the course of three days opportunities for discourse abound.

Over the course of several conferences as new voices are added and as familiar voices broaden in their fields a clearing has been made that provides a safe place in which one [End Page 590] feels free to express original, challenging, and challenged ideas. Three provocative days charged with inspiration and intellectual fervor. Three equitable days to break down any false divide between scholar and creative writer. Three short days to renew and strengthen relationships between colleagues while forging new ties across disciplines and genres. There are too few spaces like these. Multiply those three days by each of the four previous conferences, and you understand that the Callaloo Conference is broadening the way we think about each other. That’s right. I am addressing this brief piece to you, the participants of the 2012 Callaloo Conference, and letting the readers listen in.

A we has been created that grows conference by conference. Slowly, but decidedly. That the conference moves university to university, city to city, region to region, even country by country means the development of sites of inquiry that don’t privilege Ivy or State, private or public, which is to say the conference cannot be reduced to an easy homage to familiar, the comforting, or the safe. It is a moveable fest: thinkfest, litfest, artfest, Sangerfest . . . that resists fixed definition.

And you need to know you are loved. And we need (as so many of us alluded) to rejoice in and revel in how much we love each other when given (at last) the space to do so. To tell each other what the presence of our respective lights does to and for us. To embrace the frightening possibility that we—despite our differences in field and genre, region and diasporic impulse, and all the other “crossings” we had and have to make; despite the corrosive message usually given to givers that what we do we do for others alone and that anything past altruism is selfish; despite our own gnawing suspicion that “love” and the academy are at odds—my friends, let me repeat, that we embrace the frightening possibility that our bright, luscious selves...

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