Ivy G. Wilson Ayo A. Coly Introduction Callaloo Volume 30, Number 2, Spring 2007 Special Issue: Callaloo and the Cultures and Letters of the Black Diaspora.To employ the term diaspora in black cultural studies now is equal parts imperative and elusive. In the wake of recent forceful critiques of nationalism, the diaspora has increasingly come to be understood as a concept—indeed, almost a discourse formation unto itself—that allows for, if not mandates, modes of analysis that are comparative, transnational, global in their perspective. And Callaloo, as a journal of African Diaspora arts and letters, might justly be understood to have a particular relationship to this mandate. For this special issue, we have tried to assemble pieces where the phrase diaspora can find little refuge as a self-reflexive term—a maneuver that seeks to destabilize the facile prefigurations of the word in our current critical vocabulary, where its invocation has too often become idiomatic. More critically, we ...
Comments