The Transatlantic, Africa & Its Diaspora: The 2013 Callaloo Conference

Top (left to right): Anthony Bogues, Benedicte Ledent. Middle: Audience. Bottom (left to right): Brett Gadsden, Anthony Joseph.

Photographs by Jerriod Avant and Michael K. Taylor © 2013

Top (left to right): Jacob Sam-La Rose, Carole Boyce Davies. Middle (left to right): Ben Okri, Ivy Wilson. Bottom (left to right): Charles Henry Rowell, Vievee Francis, and Salamishah Tillet.

Photographs by Jerriod Avant and Michael K. Taylor © 2013

Top (left to right): Jerriod Avant and Ed Roberson. Middle (left to right): Dagmawi Woubshet, Elleke Boehmer. Bottom (left to right): Gregory Pardlo, Hortense Spillers.

Photographs by Jerriod Avant and Michael K. Taylor © 2013

Top (left to right): Joan Anim-Addo, Jarvis McInnis and Julius Fleming Jr. Middle (left to right): Nicole Furlonge, Lloyd Pratt. Bottom (left to right): Jean-Paul Rocchi, Justine McConnell.

Photographs by Jerriod Avant and Michael K. Taylor © 2013

Top (left to right): Nuruddin Farah, Natasha Tretheway. Middle (left to right): Sarah Lewis and Salamishah Tillet. Bottom (left to right): Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Mukoma Wa Ngugi.

Photographs by Jerriod Avant and Michael K. Taylor © 2013

Top (left to right): Zerihun Birehanu, Stephen Tuck. Middle (left to right): Pat Noxolo, Sarah Lewis and Robert F. Reid-Pharr. Bottom (left to right): Pascale Ratovonony, Z’étoile Imma.

Photographs by Jerriod Avant and Michael K. Taylor © 2013

A Letter from the Editor of Callaloo

Dear Colleagues & Friends,

Welcome to the 2013 Callaloo Conference, our sixth annual gathering, which focuses on “The Transatlantic, Africa & Its Diaspora” and the implications of this topic for the developing discourse called Transatlantic studies.

For the 2013 Callaloo Conference, we have invited distinguished intellectuals and artists, whose backgrounds, along with their artistic and academic interests, signal our investments in the evolving discourse which will inform not only our presence in our respective institutions but also our lives and the work we perform as artists and academics. We are inviting you to visit the panel presentations and join in the discussions, which are offered for your benefit as well as ours. The conference program that follows indicates that we have also organized evenings of poetry and fiction readings at both our Oxford and London venues. In fact, the poetry readings at Goldsmiths, University of London, are the conference finale, which we also invite you to attend. Each Callaloo Conference 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-six years of existence, has published the work of creative writers alongside that of academics and other intellectuals. Our aim has been to encourage, however indirectly, literary critics and creative writers to stay abreast of and to 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...