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  • Callaloo Calling All Black People
  • Hermine Pinson (bio)

At the panel “The History of Callaloo: An Interview with Charles Henry Rowell,” Hermine Pinson presented these remarks.

When Professor Hortense Spillers insightfully placed the courageous work of Charles Rowell and the Callaloo journal within the historical context of social movements on a global level—the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Women’s Movement, the Chicano Movement, the Gay Movement, BREXIT, the extreme elements in the Alt right movement, and I would add the Black Lives Matter movement—I was reminded of the following quotation: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” Toni Morrison wrote those words in an essay celebrating another fine journal, The Nation’s 150th anniversary. She was feeling pessimistic after George Bush’s election in 2004, and when she mentioned to an artist friend that she couldn’t write because of it, he stopped her in her tracks and told her, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything’s fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!” This story fits the historical conditions under which Callaloo was started and which have in a very real sense come back ‘round.

Regarding Marlon Ross’s question to Charles about being a race man, it’s important to acknowledge that Callaloo and a handful of other black journals have emerged over the course of forty years to become premiere journals for the African Diaspora precisely because of their growth in response to social movements. Thomas Weissinger, who argues for a new system of ranking black journals, has asserted without equivocation that Callaloo, Black Scholar, formerly edited by Robert Chrisman, and Journal of Black Studies, edited by Molefi Asante, represent the “top-tier of Black journals” (and I would add American mainstream journals as well). Weissinger lavishes praise on the three journals for the leadership of the editors and for the quality of its editorial staff. And when you consider the stellar list of assistant, associate, managing, contributing, and advisory editors over the years, you can appreciate Weissinger’s assertion.

In the by now oft-quoted story of origins, Charles Rowell conceived the idea of a journal to highlight the contributions of artists in and of the American South in his “father’s home on his father’s farm” in Auburn, Alabama. Rudolph Lewis, editor of ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary and Artistic African American Themes, citing quotations from poets, historians, and former editors of journals in the 1960s and 1970s gives a general sense of the mood of those times. At the same time Charles Rowell was in Alabama dreaming the not-yet-named Callaloo, Askia Toure, who had recently arrived at San Francisco State, used his new position and his affiliation with the university and his position as one of the associate [End Page 122] editors for Black Dialogue magazine to criticize LeRoi Jones and others involved in the Black Arts movement. Toure challenged Jones for his advocacy of what Toure described as “reactionary Super-Blackism, a dogmatic nihilism—in Black literature as well as politics.”

From Southern University to University of Kentucky to University of Virginia to Texas A&M, Callaloo’s influence, its geographic, cultural, and aesthetic vision grew. Think about Charles Rowell living in these times and responding therefore to all these issues, as he talks to the various and sundry people, professors, and graduate students who helped bring this idea to fruition. If the journal “began to transform itself (I’m using your words, Charles) from a regional to a national journal” at University of Kentucky, at UVA with the help of Melvin Dixon it became an African Diaspora journal in name, words, and practice, in the words of another editor.

Last night LeRonn Brooks quoted Charles Rowell as saying that Callaloo “was a journal of necessity” as he explained in an article by the same name when he recounted the historical exclusion of black writers in the American South from...

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