Field Notes: Artists, Academics Dialogue the Past and Future of Diaspora Literary Expression

From March 5 to March 8, 2008 Callaloo and Tulane University welcomed a group of artists/intellectuals and African Diaspora scholars to New Orleans to engage in a broad dialogue on the present and future relations between black/African Diaspora artists/ intellectuals and scholars; between the critical and creative work or artmaking and its relational cousin the work of critical and creative engagement with the artistic texts. The endeavor was populated by senior artists/intellectuals and scholars; mid-career artists/intellectual scholars; and junior artists/intellectual scholars all concerned to maintain and continue to develop relations across the lines of creative diaspora intellectual traditions in different genres. What was particularly important about the meeting was the sense of urgency that all attending felt about the current context of Black Studies in the U.S. academy and the place of larger diasporic questions both for Black Studies in the U.S. and other forms of blackness as it interacts and is conditioned by, through, and in resistance to U.S. global black hegemony. There were indeed tensions at this meeting but importantly those tensions were useful pedagogically, politically, and ethically for a conversation that needed to occur and indeed should continue to occur and occur more often. In what follows is my reaction to the many conversations had around the conference table distilled from the notes I made as a respondent at the dialogue that Dr. Charles Rowell invited a group of us to.

The 1960s remains an unresolved place in contemporary black life. The post-war period which ushered in anti-colonial struggles in the global black South resulting in independence movements throughout the 1950s and 1960s; the U.S. civil rights movement and its development into black power; black feminism of the 1970s and continuing; and gay and lesbian organizing all have now substantively contributed to the ways in which Black Studies might and does address its object of study, research, and knowledge making. Marked by the arrival of a different understanding of the self in the upheavals of the 1960s all the above social movements now constitute a perspective or critical analytics that must be taken seriously as a part of the foundations of black critical discourses. For someone like myself born in 1965 I am made by these social movements for better and for worse and those movements are the foundations upon which I do something called Black Studies or African/Black Diaspora studies. The Callaloo retreat was an attempt to grapple with the history of the black movements that produced Black Studies and made it possible and at the same time the retreat had a desire to map out the present and future in ways that Black Studies might be different from the decades of the 1980s and 1990s. The retreat was concerned with both failure and success.

The failure and success that the retreat concerned itself with cannot and should not be read outside of the failures of all those movements of the 1960s to produce the material realities of liberation for the black masses. Thus the retreat grappled with how to move forward in our critical endeavors in a fashion that retained some of the idealism and the genuinely imagined possibilities of the social movements of the 1960s. As we meet in New Orleans in the context of its post-Katrina devastation all kinds of post-movement disappointments were on our conference table. From post-colonial disappointment to the still racialized (read white) context of feminism and queer politics; to the class biases of post-civil rights and national liberation struggles which have produced middle-classes whose interests are opposed to those of the still largely economically marginalized and disenfranchised black masses all these tensions, contradictions, and dilemmas crowded our conversations and dialogues about how to make space for them in our creative/intellectual projects organized and influenced by the powerful political and ethical need to still set the record straight—so to speak.

It was at this point that I turned to David Scott who has argued across at least two persuasive and important...