Forty More Observations

Forty More Observations Brent Hayes Edwards (bio) At the panel discussion “Callaloo: A Forum for Academics and Creative Writers,” Brent Hayes Edwards presented these remarks. It was slightly embarrassing, I have to admit, to realize that the first time I celebrated an anniversary of Callaloo was all the way back in 2001, at the Modern Language Association convention in New Orleans, where I spoke on a panel organized for the 25th anniversary of the journal. I subsequently contributed an essay on the history of Callaloo to one of the special issues celebrating the 30th anniversary in 2006. So when Charles asked me to speak on this panel, my first reaction was, what more can I say? (I have to save something for the 50th!) One of the things I tried to highlight in the piece I wrote for the 30th anniversary issue was what Charles Rowell and Tom Dent described as the “Black South” orientation of Callaloo—or put differently, the way the journal was conceived from its inception as a space for the articulation of diaspora. In the preface to the first issue, calling for a southern US regionalism, Dent declares that “one of the things we are about is redressing the balance between so-called advanced, progressive NY & the backwards, countrified South.” The founding editors read the Black South not just as the “Black Belt” but understand it as an inherently transnational South: a field that foregrounds and explores the links among black expressive practices in the United States, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa itself. From my own vantage point, this orientation meant that from the beginning—and certainly from the time I started reading it, more than a decade after its founding—Callaloo has served to provincialize New York. The journal provides a continual reminder of the breadth and variety of the African diasporic cultural landscape, in a manner that one could call the only appropriate comeuppance to those of us who might be tempted to imagine that it can be taken for granted that, as James Weldon Johnson once put it, Black Manhattan is the singular “culture capital” and Harlem the “Mecca” of the Negro World. Callaloo teaches us, and has always taught us, otherwise. Thinking about the legacy of Callaloo in preparation for the 40th anniversary panel, I realized that I did have something to add to what I had said before. And it is something I want to emphasize today because it is part of what makes the journal so unique in the way it places itself within a diasporic orbit. I want to say a little bit about Callaloo as a forum for translation. This could be described as an addendum to or a consequence of the journal’s diasporic orientation, because it is something that already seems to be implied by that outer-national orbit. The journal has been shaped not only by a transnational impulse but also by a concomitant conviction that any diasporic undertaking requires working in translation. Last year, there was a stir among translators and scholars of translation occasioned [End Page 67] by a call for “more translation of literary works by non-Anglophone black diasporic authors into English, particularly by U.S.-based translators” (Keene). This prescription may have caused a good deal of commotion among practitioners in the translation subfield; but the first thing I thought when I read it was, that’s what Callaloo has been doing for the past thirty years! If the charge given our panel was to consider the particular ways Callaloo has explored a fertile interface between “creative” writing and “critical” scholarship, one could argue that translation emblematizes such an interface, if we follow the argument of a theorist such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak that translation is “the most intimate form of reading.” While requiring us to grapple with the aesthetic nuances of a text, translation takes us down, somehow, to the foundation of the interpretative act. Thus the fact that Callaloo has been such an important forum for translation is integral to the way the journal has counterposed new writing and new scholarship, reminding us of the reflexive and analytical qualities in any mode of expression as well as

Convention · Diaspora · Linguistics · Panel discussion · Political science · Classics · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Music History and Culture · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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