Callaloo 43.4 is Here!
Discover the new issue: Callaloo 43.4
Editor's Note
These are troubled times in the United States. Trouble keeps coming fast, and not the good kind. As people of African descent, we’ve long known that it can be dangerous for us to trust the motives and methods of the systems that control our lives. Now, that danger looms for a new set of groups and institutions. Law firms. Newspapers. Universities. Now, that danger is getting closer for all of us who challenge the vision that the powerful few hold for the country. The danger is in the heartland, touching people who are far from "other". There are more sticks and fewer carrots to separate the obedient from the untamed, and the administration shows no hesitation when wielding their sticks.
So we are proud that Volume 43.4 features a timely and critical special section on The Austin School Black Studies Manifesto. Drafted by a collective of scholars at the University of Texas at Austin almost twenty years ago, the Manifesto is a call that goes beyond the classroom and asserts that Black intellectual inquiry and methodology must be deeply connected to our political and artistic commitments. It asserts that this connection is key as we teach towards freedom and equity in the twenty-first century. The guest editors for this section—Omi Joni Jones, Ted Gordon, and Celeste Henery have assembled a folio that invites readers to engage with the Manifesto not simply as an artifact of the past, but as a document that inspired scholarship, art, and activism, and continues to provoke and mobilize students and scholars. This featured section underscores our commitment at Callaloo to amplify voices calling for transformation, both in the academy and across the broader terrains of power. We look not for consensus, or obedience to any one doctrine, but always for an invigorating conversation undertaken with rigor, vulnerability, and urgency.
To be sure the times are urgent, and the poets and prose writers in this issue know it. They are speaking out—with lyricism, with humor, with elegance—and speaking to the times we live in, using their pieces to contend with the disorientation of displacement and immigration, the struggle to have others hear our words the way we mean them, the infuriating persistence of being told to shut up because we are women, or Black, or trans. And we have, in a way, a memorial to a tremendous voice of resistance: Essex Hemphill. John Keene and Robert Reid-Pharr edited a new collection of Hemphill’s poetry and, in their conversation with Marlon Ross, they reflect on the poet’s legacy. Much of his work was written during another dark time in US history: the AIDS crisis. Hemphill spoke his plain truths––about race and sex and queerness––to power, rarely obedient, and never tame.
These are times when we must keep speaking, all of us, in whatever way we can. Callaloo’s pages will remain a space where the voices of Black people, wherever they may be, will be respected, honored, held with care, and considered deeply. We invite you to engage with this volume with a reverence for the hard-won freedoms we still possess, and be inspired to join the efforts to protect them.
Onward,
Kyla Kupferstein Torres
Executive Editor
