Reflections on the 2011 Callaloo Conference

Some of the characteristic modes of twentieth century African American literary production—signifyin(g), social protest, an urge to mine the historical record—mimic scholarly practice. These modes evince a pragmatic desire to examine the ways our lived experience is engendered in the imagination, evolved into belief, and translated into social practice. In other words, they evince a desire to engage in conversation with the work and ideas of others in order to scrutinize the manner by which we construct and are constructed by our language community. Necessarily, I believe, such efforts entail some form of translation. Indeed, isn’t every analytical act an act of translation? And isn’t literary production a kind of translation of the zeitgeist? Fundamentally, aren’t we all—creative writers and literary and cultural critics—engaged in varying forms of translation? Translation seems the perfect paradigm around which to have convened a conference intended to examine the potentially false distinctions between production and critique. Thus it was with the 2011 Callaloo Conference hosted by Texas A&M University in College Station, TX.

Until very recently I considered myself an intellectual spy in the Ivory Tower, a poetical interloper in the house of Critical Reasoning. After completing my MFA in poetry, I enrolled in a PhD program in English. Though this is common, many poets chided me warning that proximity to “them” would regiment my diction and estrange me from the mysteries of the imagination. Fellow doctoral students viewed me with a combination of amusement and suspicion such that I often felt, in classes and at events, like a visitor getting a tour of the factory floor, set apart by an incongruous hardhat and bright orange name badge affixed to the lapel of my civilian garb. So I have long harbored a desire to play Lincoln to the rival tribes of American literature, the rival tribes of my soul. By nature, I am inclined to find their similarities and translate those similarities for each.

Soon after I made my first crossing between my two literary personalities, I attended a practicum for graduate students in English who were justifiably preoccupied with plotting the trajectory of their careers. Esteemed panelists traded insights on the merits of carving out and then devoting oneself to a scholarly niche within the discipline. Offering examples of specialized topics like medieval monsters, socialism and the rise of large group therapy, and the phenomenology of the black circus, these purveyors of academic values seemed to me like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant as like a tree, a rope, and a wall-face respectively. After the first hour, it became apparent that despite the prevailing tendency toward specialization, many of the values motivating the research were consistent throughout. This is often the case with American poetry: superficial differences ornament a conformist aesthetic. Perhaps this meant, I wondered, the difference between any two scholars’ interests is largely cosmetic? As a result, scholars and creative writers may face a very similar set of concerns. I wasn’t committed to any of these thoughts, of course. I recognize the heresy of even posing such questions. But sitting in the Stephen W. Hawking Auditorium at Texas A&M, years after attending that practicum for graduate students, I found myself brimming with the audacity to wonder anew.

I recalled, for example, a heated debate I had gotten into with a student after I suggested that most science fiction offers narratives and characters based on events, anxieties, and themes specific to the sociopolitical milieus in which they were composed. OK, I might have said, provocatively, all compelling science fiction is ultimately a caricature of its historical moment—intentionally so—and should be read as such.¹ This prompted the student to defend the honor of his sci-fi author-heroes by insisting that the best among them routinely birth universes wholly divorced from archetypes and analogs. I was touched by his idealism, but I was undaunted. At stake is a belief in the pure aesthetic, the myth of the radical individualist, the art that capitulates in no way to either popular or unpopular opinion...