Editor’s Note
“Many today may not be aware of this, but the Black Arts Movement
tried to create Black Literary Theory and in doing so became prescriptive.
My fear is that when Theory is not rooted in practice, it becomes
prescriptive, exclusive, élitish.”
--Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,”
Cultural Critique, Spring 1987, U. Minnesota Press.
In my imagining Black The [Or] Y: Praxis, Sum Unknown for the Winter 2021 Issue of Interim Journal, my hope was to center, by way of open invitation, Barbara Christian’s call for a mode of Theory, which for me is The [or] Y—emphasis on the “or,” the Y axis, the vector, a range that spreads across and towards an alternative nexus of theory where generative praxis becomes possible among “people of color, feminists, radical critics, creative writers…for whom literature is not…discourse…but necessary nourishment for their people and one way by which they come to understand their lives better.”
And as I read, danced to, sung with, stared into, thought with and felt my way across the following works, beautiful in power, range, purpose, form, and discipline, I was excited to encounter and experience what happens when the press of such a call, now, successfully invites writers, thinkers, and artists to follow Christian’s timeless and essential lead into a radical clarity of remaining open, through her understanding of maintaining the vantage point and vivid enactment of a shared creative-critical horizon, that is, in Christian’s words:
“…open to the intersection of languages, class, race, gender in the literature. And it would help if we share our process, that is, our practice, as much as possible, since, finally, our work is a collective endeavor.”
And perhaps this was, and continues to be my hope, in bringing this selection, “a collective endeavor” of brilliant poets, fiction writers, translators, visual, sound and interdisciplinary artists, cultural critics, all radical thinkers and makers, together across forms, genres and disciplines in the spirit of Christian’s still urgent call for variety, multiplicity i.e. “that which is alive and therefore cannot be known until it is known,” until you say/write it.
It, is here. It, is now. It is—in these pages, across languages, screens, images, sounds, video, songs, sights, and beings. I am honored to have had the pleasure to receive and be in the company of this work, as an editor, and am now so thrilled and honored to share it with you, as I continue to think and live with these works, in conversation with one another, and with the power and generosity of Christian’s urgent and enduring call, again and again.
Ronaldo V. Wilson
Editor-at-Large
Interim Journal