Callaloo’s Black TexturesConnecting Spaces, Intersecting Contemporary Identity Formations

At the panel “Callaloo: Literary and Cultural Studies,” Jean-Paul Rocchi presented these remarks.

“No, no, no, dear Jean-Paul, you have mis-read what is being expected from you as a panelist.” Mis-reading, I thought. After all these years, I’m still doing it. The point is to fathom out and assess what Callaloo has done and possibly not done for forty years as a literary and cultural forum and journal, in critical theory too, and through its conferences as well. Forty years, I said to myself. I was only five forty years ago. How am I going to do that in such a short time—forty years of journal to dig. This is intellectual mining. What on earth have I mis-read in the call for papers: “Your contribution may relate to any themes treated by Callaloo in literary and cultural studies and in critical theory.” Oh here we are—again—I see now. What I’ve mis-read, the slippery ground, the entanglement—to relate: telling, connecting, (re-)imagining inherited and created families.

This is a fictionalization of an electronic exchange I recently had with Dr. Rowell who kindly responded to an unpublished paper I sent about the “h(a)unting/hunting of blackness”—the permanence of racial and racist metaphorization in fictional, poetic and critical AIDS writing—and which was supposed to be the raw material of my contribution to today’s panel. The key signifier in this exchange is “mis-reading.” Because it connects perception, cognition, and orientation, all these signifiers encapsulated in the hyphen, symbolically assembling two unnatural allies—”mis” and “reading”—unless one considers the creative force of errors, mistakes, flaws; limitations all to transcend as one re-inscribes oneself in history (“re” is a prefix as much important as “mis,” both being in essence analeptic and proleptic). Re-writing and re-inscribing oneself. So, thank you, Dr. Rowell, and thanks to the entire Callaloo community for maintaining that possibility.

This paper intends to show the ongoing important role Callaloo—as a journal and forum of Arts and Letters, as a living community and a community-builder of both intellectual exchange and Black being practices—has played in worldwide Black identity formations since forty years. More particularly this contribution aims at sketching the potential spinning of three major threads of Callaloo’s fabric and textures that will be examined here as motions:

1. 1. From Callaloo’s 2000 issue on Black Queer Studies and AIDS to the memorialization of AIDS Writing, the development of critical analysis of Black Queer consciousness and culture and their being reshuffled by the AIDS era;

2. 2. From Callaloo’s standpoint on Diasporic Consciousness and Culture to Positionality, Intersectionality, and Transdisciplinarity;

3. 3. From American, African, and Caribbean geographico-cultural locations to Europe as a Black space in its own right.

Callaloo’s 2000 issue on Black Queer Studies and AIDS

In relation to my paper on the haunting/hunting of blackness, I intended to refer to and discuss Dagmawi Woubshet’s The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS, published in the Callaloo African Diaspora Series with two essays drawn from the Love: The 2012 Callaloo Conference and published in Callaloo 36.3 (2013): Marlon B. Ross’s “’What’s Love but a Second-Hand Emotion?’: Man-on-Man Passion in the Contemporary Black Gay Romance Novel”; and Koritha Mitchell’s “Love in Action: Noting Similarities between Lynching Then and Anti-LGBT Violence Now.” But as I looked back on and through the history of Callaloo, or at least its recent one, I came to consider another starting point and critical paratext, namely the winter 2000 issue (Callaloo 23.1) dedicated to the memory of Melvin Dixon and the memory of Audre Lorde which gathers “Plum Nelly: New Essays in Black Queer Studies” guest edited by Jennifer DeVere Brody and Dwight A. McBride; “Creative Work by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Writers of Color”; poetry by Melvin Dixon (especially the poems “Climbing Montmartre,” Heartbeats,” “Turning Forty in the 90s”); personal essays, such...