Callaloo Futures

Individuals who have felt compelled to speak to the public or to record their thoughts and observations for posterity have invented language and media to communicate with others since time immemorial. From the pictographs of prehistoric Africa to the hieroglyphics of ancient Kemet and Mexico, to the stone tablets of Mesopotamia, writers have created ways of using the tools and symbols of writing to communicate with others and/ or memorialize their insights. For the past 300-plus years, the “little” magazine or literary journal has been the principle publishing organ and legitimizing medium used to provide a forum for aspiring and established writers in creative literary genres.

The first literary journal of record was Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, published in France by Pierre Boyle in 1684. The North American Review, first published in 1803, is the oldest North American literary magazine. Literally thousands of such periodicals have been published since then. African American literary journals are of more recent vintage. Prior to the twentieth century, African American writers relied on Black, abolitionist, and other liberal White newspapers, magazines, journals, and book and pamphlet publishers to print and distribute their creative and intellectual works. Black newspaper, magazine, and journal publishers in particular opened their columns to poetry, essays, criticism, short stories, and serialized novels by Black authors as well as to Black writers’ articles on political, social, economic, and political themes.

Significantly, Black periodicals founded for purposes of social, economic, and political advancement made literature and the arts regular and recurrent parts of their offerings. The principle journalistic media for the writers of the Harlem Renaissance were the publications of the NAACP and the National Urban League: The Crisis and Opportunity, respectively.

Fire!!, edited by Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman, was an early effort to publish a Black journal specifically devoted to literature and the arts. Founded in 1926, only one issue of Fire!! was published. Within that sole issue, the young writers of Fire!! explored a variety of controversial issues including homosexuality and interracial relations. Ironically, the budding journal’s headquarters burned down soon after the first edition appeared, and the publication was never revived.

The College Language Association (CLA), an organization of Black scholars and college teachers of English and foreign languages founded in 1937, was the first organization to create a forum for intellectual discourse among Black scholars in academic language and literary studies. Established in 1957 to foster the publication of scholarship in language, literature, linguistics, and pedagogy, the CLA Journal is likely the first African American academic literary journal. Not until the advent of the Black Arts Movement in the late-1960s and early-1970s did African Americans begin to publish a sizeable number of journals and magazines dedicated to expressing their own views and perspectives on Black politics, history, and culture as well as creative arts. Literary journals were among the new vehicles of communication published by, for, and about Black people during that era.

This conference is part of a year-long celebration of the 40th anniversary of the founding of Callaloo, the journal. The brainchild of Dr. Charles H. Rowell, its inaugural issue appeared in 1976, the 200th anniversary of the founding of the United States—ten years after the June 1966 James Meredith March Against Fear, at which Stokely Carmichael announced the arrival of the demand for Black Power. That bicentennial year and the decade following it were pivotal to the evolution of the Black Power and Black Arts movements for African American political struggle and artistic creativity, respectively. During that period, many new, independent Black political organizations, Black theaters, Black schools, Black Studies programs, Black television shows, and Black journals were spawned.

It was in this context that Dr. Charles Rowell founded Callaloo, his “journal of necessity.” According to Rowell, who was teaching English at Southern University in Baton Rouge at the time, the voices of African American writers, artists, and intellectuals of the American South were not a significant presence in the early decades of this new era of Black consciousness, literary discourse, and creativity. In large measure, as he surmised then, this was the result of Southern Blacks...