Labor's Devotion & Love: The Editor's Notes

Callaloo is a bubbling dish of what is lively, scholarly, serious, and imaginative. It has become a staple food for American literary thought.

—John Hollander, Yale University

This issue inaugurates our yearlong Thirtieth Anniversary celebration of Callaloo, which was first published in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in December, 1976, while I was teaching at Southern University. For the first time since its founding, I will not actively serve as producing editor for one calendar year. To mark our three decades of labor supporting and promoting creative writing in the African Diaspora, along with literary and cultural studies focusing on artistic and other cultural productions throughout its sites in the Americas, Europe, and beyond, a number of younger scholars and writers have elected to serve as guest editors for each of the four numbers to be published throughout 2007.

During each quarter in 2007, a group of two or three scholars and writers will assemble an issue of Callaloo devoted to a particular subject. In the present issue, "Reading Callaloo, Eating Callaloo," editors Shona Jackson and Karina L. Cespedes explore "the cultural, social, and political meaning of callaloo as food and its significance for and relationship to the journal." The editors and their contributors "look at the ways in which the dish [like Louisiana gumbo and Brazilian carurú] serves as ritual, as a social and cultural gathering point." "Reading Callaloo, Eating Callaloo" is, moreover, "a meditation on not only the transformation from the vernacular to the literary, or the journal's role as metatext, but also on the significance of the oral for physical and metaphorical survival."

* * *

Meta DuEwa Jones, Cherise Smith, and B. Stephen Carpenter, II—editors of the 2007 spring number—are preparing an issue of the journal "that focuses on visual culture and collaboration in the African American context." The issue features "visual and written works that examine the important crossroads—where literary and visual art meet—that Callaloo provides." "The Cultures and Letters of the Black Diaspora" is the subject of the issue that Ivy G. Wilson and Ayo A. Coly will edit for the summer of 2007. These two editors are interested in "the black diaspora as both a historical formation and as a concept": the manuscripts they select will "complicate our understanding of blackness as quotidian by investigating how the diaspora intersects with, and translates, other realities, including language, gender, region, nation, work and labor, sexuality, and religion . . ." Other texts in the issue will address questions that deal with Callaloo's relationship to the African Diaspora within and beyond the USA. What, for example, is the journal's relationship to the literature and literary studies of the Diaspora? During the past thirty years, what role or roles has Callaloo played in the development of an African Diaspora discourse? Has the journal supported and promoted individual writers outside the USA? These two numbers, along with the present one, focus on the journal's past and present.

"The Next Thirty Years of Callaloo," the final issue for the journal's yearlong celebration, looks ahead. Because their project focuses on the next three decades of the journal, editors Kyle G. Dargan and Keith Leonard are requesting creative and critical work from contributors "45 and under." These two editors, who are themselves under forty, view Callaloo "as an international cultural institution," whose "writers and scholars . . . will fuel" its next thirty years. The work of these editors will, in fact, look backward as well as forward; they will examine past, present, and future Callaloo as a forum for the African Diaspora. Let us hope that those coming thirty years of honest labor will be rendered, like those that have passed, not without love and devotion for the literature and culture that is ours.

As we read the present issue and the other three for the year 2007, we will discover, I am convinced, that the work of the guest editors celebrating the Thirtieth Anniversary of Callaloo is a collective demonstration of labor's love and devotion. I will always be grateful to each of them for allowing me, for the first time, to assume the privileged role...