THE HISTORY OF CALLALOO: An Interview with Charles Henry Rowell

This interview was conducted on Thursday, November 24, 2016, at Pembroke College Auditorium as part of the Callaloo Conference at Oxford University celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Callaloo. Behind the Black Atlantic thinking of Callaloo is my idea of making connections—especially cultural, social, political, and linguistic connections among the peoples of the African Diaspora. I am speaking of making connections among the millions of descendants of Africans in the Americas, the Caribbean, and in Europe. I am speaking mainly about those black people whose ancestors, through forced European enslavement, were taken westward across the Atlantic to what we today refer to as the Americas and the Caribbean; and those taken by force northward on the Atlantic into enslavement in a number of European countries. I am also thinking of those Africans who, centuries later, on their own volition, made the trans-Atlantic crossings by ships or planes looking for better political and economic circumstances than those which were shaped by European slave trade and colonialism in their own African countries—and shaped by other instruments of European domination, exploitation, dehumanization.