Debate, Mourning, Affirmation

Koritha Mitchell

Michael K. Taylor © 2013

Since Charles Rowell added an annual conference to the work that Callaloo makes possible, I have been calling my colleagues “Callalooers.” Those involved in these gatherings have various levels of attachment to the journal, but by agreeing to enter the intellectual community in person, they each contribute to one of the most dynamic dimensions of Dr. Rowell’s vision. Because Callaloo’s overall project has never been based on a simplistic approach to culture, the conference cannot be passively observed. One must engage!

What I most treasured about the 2013 Callaloo Conference in Oxford and London can be characterized as moments of debate and mourning.

Debate became prominent partly because one audience member made a point of saying, during the question and answer period following each panel, that the presentations disappointed him. He was a local Black British man who had seen announcements about the gathering and was eager to join us. He often stood to articulate that, in his view, the panelists’ remarks did not match the quality he expected, given the visitors’ credentials and impressive institutional affiliations. He was consistently alone in this assessment, but that did not keep him from continuing to register his disappointment, and his words certainly inspired response. That is, he was not ignored or disregarded. His main charge was that we were out of touch with reality; we used “big words,” but what we said was meaningless in light of the suffering currently taking place outside the Ivory Tower.¹ His commentary, and the reactions to it, confirmed that debate is an embodied practice of belonging.² Because one debates only those whose opinions one values enough to engage (and attempt to influence), the fact that he was not ignored constituted a kind of affirmation.

For me, then, this stranger’s statements underscored the importance of the environment Callaloo provides. I waited until I was scheduled to speak on the program to say as much: “Callaloo offers a space in which we don’t pretend to be in agreement. And I think that is powerful and important. Thank you, Charles Rowell, for cultivating that kind of space for so many people, for all these years.” Dr. Rowell has made the pages of Callaloo home to invigorating exchange for almost four decades, and he has recently expanded its capacity by sponsoring annual conferences.

Though less combative, another audience member said he was disappointed that the Hispanophone Caribbean had not been engaged. Professor Carole Boyce Davies therefore reminded everyone of all the scholars and artists from the Hispanophone Caribbean whom she had just cited in her presentation. She wondered aloud as she responded, “Maybe we only hear what confirms what we think we know.” It was important that Davies marked this moment in exactly this way. We needed to pause and consider the possibility that, at least sometimes, our challenges do not arise so much from omissions as from mis-recognitions. Whenever Callalooers come together, “black modern expression takes form … through the often uneasy encounters of peoples of African descent with each other” (Edwards 5). That is, as much as our interactions “allow new and unforeseen alliances and interventions … they also are characterized by unavoidable misapprehensions and misreadings … a failure to translate even a basic grammar of blackness” (Edwards 5). In other words, since the conference became an annual event in New Orleans in 2008, we have participated in what Brent Hayes Edwards calls The Practice of Diaspora. Accordingly, these moments of debate in Oxford reminded me of my initial impression of the collective: “These critics and creators have positioned themselves in perfect cooperation with me by offering productive opposition. … [O]ur conversations stayed with me precisely because Callaloo once again did what it does best. It put the complexity and diversity of the African Diaspora center stage so that its thinkers could challenge each other to discover and extend our potential. Such rigorous intellectual engagement is possible precisely because we offer each other no easy conflation, no hallucination of unanimity” (“Generative Challenges” 614).

That is...