Callaloo

[End Page 549]

[End Page 550]

After a grueling year’s work of thinking through, planning, organizing, and coordinating the annual Callaloo Conference, I usually step aside during the events and quietly coordinate the program and its different activities from behind the curtains, as the phrase goes. That is, I stand down out of sight, as much as possible. But for the last two conferences, I have made myself more visible by at least introducing the proceedings for the four-day gatherings. As a self-assigned project for the opening session of the 2013 Callaloo Conference hosted by the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, Pembroke College of Oxford University, the task I reserved for myself was simply this: to give a brief explanation of what previous concerns brought us to that site at that moment, along with brief comments on the significance of the central topic of the conference as it relates to the locus of the gathering and to our exploring the subject at this moment in our common Transatlantic past. As I stood before that audience of about two to three hundred people from the UK, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, I suddenly realized that what I had set for myself was no simple task at all, and that if I wanted to do justice to the subject or subjects at hand, I needed more than the five or so minutes I had allotted myself. First of all, as the directing agent of the conference, I needed to thank our host, Stephen Tuck and his staff, who afforded us the use of their relatively new Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities to stage the proceedings of the conference. I also needed to acknowledge the invaluable work a number of people contributed to making this conference possible—for example, Carole Boyce Davies, GerShun Avilez, Marlon Ross, and Dagmawi Woubshet—all of whom, in various ways, were instrumental, like the conference committee members and the tireless and devoted Callaloo staff, in helping to mount this conference at Oxford University.

I must confess that I panicked when I heard a loud applause rise from the audience and float down to our dais. Were they telling me sit down, I wondered, or what? Why were they applauding? I glanced at my watch, and I realized that I had already spent more than five minutes on the necessary acknowledgements. After all, my Southern-ness would never allow me to walk through a person’s front door without thanking them for inviting me in, for hosting a dinner for my friends and me, or just simply welcoming me inside. Manners matter.

Etiquette aside, my sudden recognition of the rapid passing of time and the realization that Professor Salamishah Tillet needed to follow me with comments and that Mukoma wa Ngugi would follow her with an introduction of his father, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who would deliver the keynote address—all on the heels of the unexpected loud applause that caused me much panic indeed. And yet I suddenly realized that I had to improvise from there to the end of my little performance—what for the short time left and the shocking [End Page 551] fact that I could not find my place in my prepared script for the occasion. To confess the truth of it, I cannot recall what I spoke during the very short time I had left. I do not remember: it was not scripted; it was improvised. A much shorter text than the following is what I had written to present on the occasion. The version that follows is much more expansive and argumentative—that is, much longer and more challenging in its answers to two central questions: What is the Callaloo Conference? Why assemble the 2013 Callaloo Conference at Oxford University?

What is the Callaloo Conference? It is literally a one-of-a kind annual gathering, to which...