Mother Tongues & Masters of Words: Callaloo Across the Atlantic

Salamishah Tillet

Michael K. Taylor © 2013

For whom are we doing what we do when we do literary criticism? I can only speak for myself. But how I write and what I write is done in order to save my own life.

—Barbara Christian, “Race for Theory”

When the late Barbara Christian penned this famous essay, she did so with the urgency of the moment. In the late 1980s, the canon wars were raging; multiculturalism was seen either as a belated gift or imminent threat; and African American literary studies had the growing pains that came with its legitimacy in the American academy. Even our beloved Callaloo was only a mere decade old. But, I always read Christian’s words as not just for her time, but also as a harbinger for things to come. It reveals the long-standing concern, even angst, amongst those of my generation who continue to do African American literary criticism.

Though there is certain circularity to this tension between formal politics and literary criticism, it is also inescapable. For whom are we speaking? In what languages do we write? And to what end? Those questions stayed with me after I left last year’s Callaloo Conference titled “The Transatlantic, Africa, and Its Diaspora” at Oxford University and Goldsmiths, University of London. A sentiment I do not share lightly because it was sparked as much by the insights of the conference participants as it was by the interruption of a single audience member.

Perhaps, I should not use this space to think about his disruption. For those who attended the conference and experienced the successive series of his verbal assaults firsthand, we left feeling that this one person—whose name I sadly never learned—took up too much of our time and intellectual energy. But, I think his comments, our responses, and the eventual outcome of our exchange reveal the limits and the power of African American literary criticism itself.

Language is the battlefield. It can be the tool of conquest and the sword.

—Ngugi wa Thiong’o

It did not have to be a strained moment. The panel, “Europe and the UK: Transatlantic Studies” featured a conversation about imagining new cartographies, or as geographer Pat Noxolo noted, new ways of seeing and recognizing creolizations, the in-between-space, that pushes us beyond the Atlantic. Likewise, literary critic Jean-Paul Rocchi posited the African Diaspora as “the possible space of recreation and reinvention,” always contingent on “multiple identifications and multiple points of intersections.” Within this context of thinking through new circuits and the context of black diaspora studies, it was strange when a graduate student in the audience (from the United States but now studying in Paris) asked the panel about a debate that seems to plague some of us in the American academy: what is the role, if any, of the critic as public intellectual?

The lines were quickly drawn. And the African Americanists primarily gave the responses: one panelist said the critic is the interpreter and disseminator of ideas to the outside world; another senior critic proffered that we should differentiate the public intellectual from publicity intellectual, the scholar from the pundit. In both cases, the emphasis was on the performance of translation—that delicate dance between the critic and our various publics. So, when the next question came up, it did not belie the contentiousness that would later take us off course. It started off innocuous enough, but it landed with a punch: “I am not sure why you all speak the way you do. Without passion. Without love.”

Upon first blush, this audience member’s move is not so unfamiliar. Joyce Ann Joyce’s postulation that “Black creative art is an act of love” in 1987 was so bold that Sharon Holland would later call the ensuing debate between Joyce, Houston Baker, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about the role of post-structuralism within African American literary criticism as so heated and important that it was “a revolution that should have been televised” (Joyce...