Literature, Culture & Critique: Notes on the First Callaloo Retreat, March 5–8, 2008

I founded Callaloo in 1976 as a publishing outlet for Black South creative writers and literary critics whose voices were marginalized to the extent that they had been all but silenced. Once I was able to establish the journal as a visible and viable African Diaspora quarterly by the mid-1980s, I then began deliberately working toward transforming Callaloo into a forum in which creative writers and literary and cultural critics in the African Diaspora could converse—if not to engage each other directly, then at least to read each other’s work, in spite of the tendency of current centers of power within English departments, which seem to encourage the contrary. I have always thought the growing divide between the creative and critical worlds to be superficial and nonproductive at best and collectively paranoid at worst.

It is obvious to me that the majority of faculty members of English departments continue to valorize the work of academics (archival, critical, and theoretical) at the expense of that of their creative writing colleagues. Academics have far too long viewed living, not-yet-canonized creative writers as Others—a group of artists that academics, with their institution-sanctioned power, tend to marginalize and construct as mere exotics. Thinking of creative writers in this way, academics have made them an annex to English departments. That is, critical theoretical work is ranked very high in value but the work of the contemporary poet or novelist, for example, is seldom read or even given a tepid applause until the time comes for hearings on tenure or rank change. I have always viewed these circumstances as serious problems, and as a result I have tried to address them in the pages of Callaloo—that is, as they pertain to African Diaspora literatures, and African Diaspora literary and cultural studies.

Since the 1980s, I have edited Callaloo with the intention of pulling the creative and critical together: by publishing, for example, poems beside theoretical and critical articles on problems in literature and culture or by printing prose fiction next to essays on the life of a playwright or a visual artist. I wanted the one to see/read what the other is doing. I have thought, in other words, that I could at least get the literary critic to study what some creative writers are producing, and I thought I might engage the creative writer to peruse with interest some of the rigorous texts literary and cultural critics are creating. My efforts to bring the critic face to face with the creative writer—that is, on the page—is stage one of what I am calling a conversation between two subjects: the critical and the creative, the academic and the artistic.

My efforts in stage one have not generated the effects that I had hoped they would. In fact, the two groups continue to grow apart. Why? I did not see both sides of the problems—not with the clarity and precision that poet and literary critic Michael S. Collins showed when I discussed the subject with him. In an email summing up his side of our conversation, he wrote:

What I was trying to say about critics and creative writers is this: In recent decades, literary theory under the influence of French theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault has incorporated and elaborated upon a specialized vocabulary that non-initiates sometimes find impenetrable. At the same time, many within the academic critical community find the productions of literary theory to be more profound and more exciting than creative works. Creative writers, on the other hand, sometimes view literary criticism as parasitic at best, badly-written and pretentious at worst. There are often, in other words, built-in misunderstandings between the communities. It is especially telling that academic literary criticism is not even considered for things like the National Book Critics’ Circle award for criticism. The world that rewards creative writers, and that creative writers have to pay attention to, views academic literary criticism as, for the most part, irrelevant. Complicating things further is the fact that...