literature throughout the United States. With its
1986 move to the University of Virginia, the jour-
nal’s breadth again expanded to its current status.
Callaloo now sets out to address the whole of Afri-
can diaspora experience, including in Central and
South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. Now
housed at Texas A&M University, Callaloo is a
nexus for black artistic culture in the United States
and elsewhere.
The journal has a long history of devoting issues
to prominent writers, artists, critics, and genres.
Most issues have sections presenting poetry, fiction,
literary nonfiction, visual artwork, criticism, and
bibliography. Maryse Condé, RI TA DOVE, ERNEST
J. GAINES, Nicolas Guillen, Wilson Harris, LANGS-
TON HUGHES, LARRY NEAL, JAY WRIGHT, RICHARD
WRIGHT, and dozens of other individual authors
have been comprehensively examined in Callaloo.
An example of the close examination the journal
publishes is a special section of a 1990 issue ad-
dressing the work of poet and professor MICHAEL
HARPER. Fourteen recent poems by Harper were re-
printed, followed by a lengthy interview conducted
by Rowell; essays written by Robert B. Stepto, Nic-
colo N. Donzella, Anthony Walton, Robert Dale
Parker, Herman Beavers, Suzanne Keen, John S.
Wright reflected on the various manners in which
Harper had influenced their work as scholars, poets,
and Americans. Closing the section is an extended
essay by John F. Callahan on Harper’s friendship
songs. Harper’s work is given a well-rounded and
multiperspective presentation.
Additionally, special issues have addressed
women’s poetry, Native American literature, Puerto
Rican women writers, postcolonial discourse, Ca-
ribbean literature, jazz poetics, and other literary
and theoretical concerns, both contemporary and
historical. Rowell continues to serve as editor, and
the contributing and advisory editors include some
of the most prominent talents in African-Ameri-
can letters: Thadious Davis, YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA,
Robert B. Stepto, Derek Walcott, and JOHN EDGAR
WIDEMAN, are among the many in the journal’s es-
teemed editorial community.
Making Callaloo: 25 Years of Black Literature, a
capstone book, was published in 2002. Edited by
Rowell, this is a collection of more than 50 of the
most important works published in the journal’s
first quarter century. RALPH ELLISON’s “Cadil-
lac Flamb” excerpt from his posthumous novel
Juneteenth and OCTAVIA BUTLER’s oft-read “The
Evening, the Morning, and the Night” are both re-
printed, as is a section of SAMUEL R. DELANY’s Shoat
Rumblin’. The book, a useful and valid representa-
tive selection, underlines Callaloo’s critical impor-
tance to black literary culture in the United States
and elsewhere today.
Keith FeldmanCall and Response: The Riverside
Anthology of the African American
Literary Tradition Patricia Liggins Hill,
et al., eds. (1997)
A signature publication for Houghton Mifflin
(Boston and New York), a major academic press,
Call and Response was edited by Patricia Liggins
Hill, general editor, Bernard W. Bell, Trudier Har-
ris, William Harris, R. Baxter Miller, and Sondra
A. O-Neale, with Horace A. Porter. Unlike the
more canonical, Eurocentric Norton Anthology
of African American Literature, Call and Response
is the first BLACK AESTHETIC–based anthology to
be published since BLACK WRITERS OF AMERICA:
A COMPREHENSIVE ANTHOLOGY (1971), edited by
RICHARD K. BARKSDALE and Keneth Kinnamon.
For the most part, its works and authors are com-
mitted to promoting a more authentic criterion
for black art.
Call and Response is structured both chrono-
logically and thematically. It is divided into six
parts. Each section focuses on a distinct feature of
African-American history and culture: 1619–1808
(Slavery as Racial and Religious Oppression),
1808–1865 (The Quest for Freedom), 1865–1915
(Escaping Slavery to Reconstruction and Post-Re-
construction), 1915–1945 (The Harlem Renais-
sance and Reformation), 1945–1960 (Post–Harlem
Renaissance and Post-Reformation), and 1960 to
the present (Social Revolution, the New Renais-
sance, and the Second Reconstruction). This divi-
sion not only indicates the editors’ emphasis on
the history of oppression known by New WorldCall and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition 89