Love It Is: Introduction to the 2012 Callaloo Conference

Please allow me to begin by thanking Eddie Glaude for kindly hosting this annual conference here at Princeton University—under the aegis of the University’s Center for African American Studies. I want also to thank his faculty, along with Wallace Best, and his staff, especially Jennifer Loessy, for agreeing with you, Professor Glaude, and for supporting your efforts to make sure that our visit here is cordial, joyous, and memorable, and I also want to thank the discerning, efficient, diligent, and supportive Callaloo staff, two of whom travelled here to work with me: David Johnson and Óscar Berrío.

The path to New Jersey from Texas is long—to Princeton from Houston. Yes, Houston where, in October 2011, we discovered the theme, the focus, of this conference: love. Imagine the scene a year ago in my suite in Houston’s Hotel ZaZa, where some fifteen or more members of the 2011 Callaloo Conference group gathered at the very end of our official activities. Half way through our two hours of conversation over wine, we witness what can be described as “a Zora Neale Hurston moment”: Olympia Vernon, our visiting novelist, enters the room and, loud enough for all to hear, she, for no reason I could discern, personally challenges me with what seems to be endless questions about “love”—my life and love. What for my ever-present Southern politeness, let us place a lacuna here in this my manuscript on the occasion of this conference. The revelry in my suite is ending, and there are only four people left—Dagmawi Woubshet, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Olympia Vernon, and Scott Heath. As they were standing at the door to leave my quarters, Scott Heath asks, “Why don’t we focus the next conference on love?” For more than ten more minutes they stand almost like an ancient Greek chorus to Scott’s lead line at my door imploring me to make love the theme of our next conference—thus indirectly telling me to forget the topic that the larger conference group had selected three hours earlier over dinner. Our meeting here tonight is chapter three of the Houston-night narrative, which here I have abridged. For love it is—one year later here at Princeton, with a gathering of distinguished scholars and creative writers to talk about love in its multiple manifestations: Agape and Eros, sacred and profane love, and sub categories of each in innumerable places in our daily lives.

The long distance from Houston to Princeton, I mentioned earlier. But in time there is even a longer distance between the now of here and the past of there in New Orleans. I am referring to March 2008, when I summoned some twenty-five to thirty writers and scholars to meet me in the Crescent City, where we collectively gave birth to the idea of an annual Callaloo Conference, which was conceptualized shortly after the Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration of Callaloo. The purpose of our meeting in New Orleans—and that purpose remains so today—was, simply, to acquaint creative writers and literary critics with each other’s work by asking these simple questions: as professionals what is it we do, how do we do it, and why do we do it. Whether we center our collective attention on Love, Translation, Pan Africanism, or the Dilemma of the Black Intellectual, these annual conferences bring creative writers and literary and cultural critics together to talk with each other. And today I still consider our gatherings, however directly or indirectly, to be transgressive and transformative. I remember writing somewhere that “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.” Let me add that, through these conferences, I also want to change Eurocentric English departments and their respective universities to begin to look anew—with respect and support—at the culture workers in Africana Studies and at the work they produce. Actually, all of what I have cited as my...