Love: The 2012 Callaloo Conference

Dear Colleagues & Friends,

Welcome to the 2012 Callaloo Conference, our fifth annual gathering, which focuses on Love—its different meanings and various manifestations.

For the 2012 Callaloo Conference, we have invited distinguished academies and artists to make presentations on Love and to engage with members of the conference group and with the general audience in discussions about Love. We are inviting you to join in the discussions, which are offered for your benefit as well as for ours. As the program that follows will indicate, we are also organizing one evening of poetry and fiction readings by prize-winning North American and African writers. You are invited to attend the evening event, during which you will witness other examples of the forms of Love. The Callaloo Conference, in short, offers a mixture of the creative and the critical.

By bringing together the creative and the critical, we are following a long-standing principle of the literary and cultural quarterly Callaloo, which, during its thirty-five years of existence, has published the work of creative writers along-side that of academics and other intellectuals. Our aim has been to encourage, however indirectly, literary critics and creative writers to stay abreast of and read—and study and critique—each other’s productions. However, in 2007, it became markedly clear at the Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration of Callaloo at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that our publication strategy had only made a minimal impact, if any; the divide between the two groups of cultural workers—the creative and the critical—was continuing to widen, thus causing the one not to understand the important productions of the other. This startling discovery is the origin of what is now simply called the Callaloo Conference.

To address the widening gap between creative writers and literary and cultural critics, a select group of about twenty-five poets, novelists, and professors of literature and culture met in New Orleans (March 2008) for a retreat under the general theme of “Literature, Culture & Critique.” Our first engagements were heated, closed-door discussions that focused on the specific topic “What We Do, and How and Why We Do It.” We later engaged the public in discussions on the problem, and we also offered literary readings at Tulane University and other sites, including jazz and blues clubs, in the Crescent City. In March 2009, when we met at Washington University in St. Louis, we approached the problem of the divide from the angle of “The Intellectual’s Dilemma: Production and Praxis in the Twenty-First Century.” In July 2010, at the invitation of the Director of the Institute for Ethiopian Studies, we met at Addis Ababa University. With mutual exchange and cooperation among intellectuals and artists from Africa and North America on the theme of “(Black) Movement (s): Poetics and Praxis,” the 2010 three-day gathering in Ethiopia was both national and international in scope and purpose. We held our most recent annual gathering in October 2011, at Texas A&M University (College Station), the home site of Callaloo, where we focused on “Translations” as it relates to critical and creative writing and to visual culture. And this year here at Princeton University we offer “Love,” another encompassing subject through which artists and academics will engage each other in discussions and performances of various kinds. In other words, the 2012 Callaloo Conference is a continuum: we are mindful of our original gathering in New Orleans, where creative writers demonstrated what they do, and literary and cultural critics explained in full measure how and why they do what they do.

As you join the discussions of the 2012 Callaloo Conference here at Princeton University, we sincerely hope that the different activities of the conference will provide you a variety of glimpses into each artist’s and academic’s thoughts on Love. We also hope that each speaker and performer will add other dimensions to your understanding of the arts...