In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Callaloo Conference Makes Us Scat
  • Valérie Loichot (bio)

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Valérie Loichot (speaking) with Robert J. Patterson, Z’étoile Imma, and Joshua Bennett

Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014

[End Page 534]

While I had been an avid reader of Callaloo for two decades, and been lucky to see some of my academic articles and interviews printed in the journal, the memorable 2014 edition was my first live participation in the Callaloo Conference. And live it was. From the opening night featuring Ifa Bayeza’s unforgettable performance of her own play honoring the living life of Emmett Till, to knockout poetry readings by Jericho Brown and Kevin Young, to a movingly generous reflection on her own art-making by Barbara Chase-Riboud, the conference was a celebration of life, art, and poetry, even in the face of death. As Chase-Riboud nakedly offered in her intervention, “The Woman Who Began at the End”: “When you come to my funeral, come with poems in your head, not on your Ipad screen.”

Beyond the wealth of poets, dramaturges, novelists, archivists, musicians, opera writers, photographers, painters, literary critics, and art historians, the characteristic format of the Callaloo Conference made everyone on the podium and in the audience alive and on. My participation as a respondent to the panel on “Authorship in Africana Studies” was one of the most challenging and rewarding performance of my career. Of course, I had prepared a script. Yet, this script had to evolve constantly as I was taking into account the rich live testimonies of Caribbean literary scholar and opera libretto writer Joan Anim-Addo, scholar artist Arturo Lindsay’s compelling discussions of imagined faces of “Children of the Middle Passage,” Professor Robert Reid-Pharr’s qualification of university geographies as plantation spaces, and Martha Southgate’s evocation of her fictional characters as agents on their own terms who “make you wonder what they will do next.”

The script I had prepared for the response dealt with the power residing within the act of willingly relinquishing authority in Africana Studies, based on reflections by Frederick Douglass who wrote, “In allowing myself to surrender to the text, I too, have found myself … absolved of authorial intention,” and by NourbeSe Philip, who in her poem Zong! privileges “the language of the limp and the wound” to speak the unspeakable of the murder by drowning of enslaved Africans. I argued that relinquishing authority, and perhaps even authorship, did not amount to weakness, sloppiness, or surrender. Rather, letting go of authority, like relinquishing a script or a standard obviously requires a great mastery of archival, living, poetic, or musical material and an enormous amount of work and rehearsals. [End Page 535]

I ended my intervention with the image of the scat, a form of improvisation in jazz performance that requires a total mastery of the voice and digestion of a standard. The Callaloo Conference, in putting its presenters, respondents, and audience in the hot seat of live collective engagement—in the challenge it gives to let us interweave our critical voice with creative artists, and artists’ voices to engage with our scholarly fabric—does just that. It makes us scat. [End Page 536]


Click for larger view
View full resolution

Phillis Wheatley Reading

Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014

[End Page 537]

Valérie Loichot

VALÉRIE LOICHOT is Professor of French and English and core faculty in Comparative Literature at Emory University. She is author of Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literatures of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (2007) and The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (2013), winner of MLA’s Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Literary Studies. She has also published a number of critical articles on Caribbean literature, culture, and art, and on Southern literature and culture in such periodicals as Callaloo, French Cultural Studies, Mississippi Quarterly, The French Review, The International Journal of Francophone Studies, and Small Axe. Her edited volume on Édouard Glissant, Entours d’Édouard Glissant, was published by La Revue des Sciences Humaines (2013).

...

pdf

Share