African American Review at 40: a retrospective.

The recollections below were first presented as part of the Division on Black American Literature and Culture panel of the same title at the 2006 convention of the Modern Language Association. Each author has served on the AAR Advisory Board since the 1970s; the first, Joe Weixlmann, served as Editor from 1976 to 2004.

Joe Weixlmann

Provost and Professor of English

Saint Louis University 

The beginnings of African American Review were humble. In the fall of 1967, Negro American Literature Forum, a new publication "for School and University Teachers," appeared in what we would think of today as newsletter format (see Fig. 1). Edited by Indiana State University English professor John Bayliss, but published under the imprint of the University's School of Education, the journal was intended to provide useful information to the rela tively few K-16 faculty members determined to teach African American texts. But the fledgling journal's modest beginnings should not obscure the fact that, from the outset, it was attracting contributions from some of the field's giants. Richard Barksdale, Arthenia Bates Millican, Arna Bontemps, Thomas Cripps, Arthur P. Davis, Michel Fabre, Nick Aaron Ford, Gladys Marie Fry, Blyden Jackson, Keneth Kinnamon, and Darwin Turner were among the luminaries whose work appeared in early issues of NALF.

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Bayliss's successor, Hannah Hedrick, lengthened the journal's academic trajectory. Assuming the editorship of NALF in its seventh year of publication, Hedrick developed connections with leading publishers of African American literature, including Dudley Randall and his Broadside Press, and she started the journal on its way to becoming more scholarly by printing longer, more developed literary analyses than the ones that tended to appear under Bayliss's editorship. She also assembled the first of many issues devoted to writing by black women--a bold editorial statement in 1975. (1)

The journal's second phase began with the Winter 1976 number, the first issue of Black American Literature Forum. The name change reflected not only a change of editors--I had assumed the helm in September of that year--but also evidenced a commitment to make the journal an essential part of the larger scholarly community. Midway into the journal's second year of publication, John Bayliss had appointed a four-person advisory board--Charlotte K. Brooks, Virginia M. Burke, George Kent, and Charles Nilon--but neither he nor Hedrick asked that group to assess submissions. By contrast, 14 scholars, including Brooks, Burke, and Nilon, committed in the fall of 1976 both to serving as readers of submitted manuscripts and to offering advice about the journal's content and image on a regular basis. (2) And so, with the advent of a new editor, a new name, and a communal commitment, a small publication with a circulation of about 625 institutional and individual subscribers, having shed its anachronistic name and abandoned its in-house decision-making process for the acceptance or rejection of manuscripts, was poised to evolve into a journal of note.

A key marker of that evolution was the decision of the newly constituted MLA Division on Black American Literature and Culture, in 1983, to denominate BALF as the Division's official publication, a distinction that it has held for nearly a quarter-century. (3) Another indicator of success was the journal's circulation growth; in the five-year period between 1976 and 1981, circulation doubled. Grant support followed, including seven grants from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines between 1977 and 1986, and a Kennedy Center grant in 1983. But the most important marker of the journal's having made a difference in the scholarly community were the theory-based issue (14.1) edited by Houston A. Baker in 1980 and the double-issue devoted to critical theory in 1981-82 (15.4-16.1), edited by Skip Gates. Baker would go on to publish The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism later in 1980, a book that revolutionized how we understand African American literature, and the Gates issues would appear, with minimal changes, as the 1984 critical anthology Black Literature and Literary Theory, another landmark book in the field. Today, we take for granted the importance of theory to the study of African American cultures, but in the early 1980s, grounding literary analyses in theory was highly controversial, and BALF was at the vanguard of this movement.

One of my contributions was to emphasize themed issues, in the belief that such issues more clearly highlight evolving critical trends than do issues that consist of disconnected essays. Only two themed issues appeared in the journal's 10 NALF years, whereas 12 appeared in the first decade of BALF. Black American Literature Forum not only focused attention on such canonical figures as Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wole Soyinka, and Richard Wright, but also produced early issues on less well-known authors such as Owen Dodson, Henry Dumas, Charles Johnson, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed, and, before she was a household name, Toni Morrison. BALF/AAR also printed the first issue ever devoted to black science fiction (18.2), a three-issue series on black theater (16.4-17.2) edited by James V. Hatch and another on the black church and black theater (25.1), a two-issue Black South series (27.1-2) edited by Jerry Ward and Kalamu ya Salaam, several special issues devoted to fiction and poetry, respectively, as well as a children's literature number (32.1). Guest-edited issues on black expressive forms other than literature also found a home in the journal, most notably Camille Billops's art issue (19.1), a jazz issue (25.3) edited by Gary Carner, an African American music issue (29.2) edited by Kalamu ya Salaam, and a film issue (25.2) edited by Valerie Smith, Camille Billops, and Ada Griffin. During the 2006 MLA session at which a version of this article was first presented, Thadious Davis referred to AAR as "our journal," a resonant phrase that suggests the publication has always been the product of many hands, many minds, and many critical and artistic impulses. That many people have contributed in signal ways to the journal's evolution has been one of its greatest strengths. And evolve it has.

By 1986, it was clear that the 8 1/2 x 11", saddle-stitched format that had served the journal since its inception would not allow for the requisite physical growth of the publication, now swollen to the limits of saddle-stitching. Moreover, the format seemed too informal for what was becoming an increasingly important and respected publication. The transition, in Volume 20, to a standard 6 x 9", perfect-bound format resolved these concerns (see Fig. 2).

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A number of objective indicators suggest that the journal had truly "arrived" by the late 1980s. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided grant support to the journal between 1988 and 1995, and in 1991 BALF became one of five journals to receive a Literary Publishers Marketing Development Program Grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund in the initial round of that program. (4)

It was, in part, that award that led the journal to adopt its current name and format as it began its twenty-sixth year of publication in 1992. Reasoning that a 7 x 10" perfect-bound format with color covers would be more attractive to knowledgeable consumers of African American cultures who might not be "school or university teachers" (NALF's target audience), and aware that the journal had for years not been limited to the study of literature alone, the editorial board oversaw BALF's evolution into AAR in 1992 with the twin goals of reaching a wider readership and having broader cultural impact. (5) Three things were crucial to AAR's achieving these goals: follow-on grants from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund in 1992 and 1995; additional emphasis on such reader-friendly elements as poetry, fiction, and interviews; and the existence of a functional small-press distribution system in this country. During the mid-1990s, AAR enjoyed a circulation of nearly 5,000, and could be found not only in independent bookstores but on a variety of large-city newsstands. Moreover, in 1994 and 1995, AAR earned American Literary Magazine Awards for Editorial Merit, and it was one of the first literary journals selected for inclusion in JSTOR, an electronic archive of scholarly journals developed with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. But these forms of recognition were not enough to counterbalance the ill effects on circulation brought about in the late 1990s by the widespread demise of independent bookstores and the supply chains that undergirded them. Circulation--almost all of which is now subscription-based--dipped to about 2,500 at this time and has remained stable since. Even so, this number places AAR in or near the top one percent of all literary journals.

In the fall of 2001, AAR moved to Saint Louis University, where it continues to be housed, and in 2004 the editorship passed to Joycelyn Moody, allowing the introduction of new ideas and features, such as the "Back Talk" commentaries. (6) At a time when the pressures on scholarly publishing in the US continue to mount, AAR is fiscally and intellectually sound and poised to continue contributing to African American cultural studies as the journal enters its fifth decade of publication. "Our journal" has a bright past and a future of boundless possibility.

Notes

(1.) W. Tasker Witham, a Iongtime faculty member at Indiana State University, edited one transitional issue (10.3) of NALF during the summer of 1976, following Hedrick's departure to assume a new academic post.

(2.) The other 11 scholars who served on the first BALF Advisory Board include William L. Andrews, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Richard K. Barksdale, founding editor John Bayliss, Daryl Dance, Chester J. Fontenot, Donald B. Gibson, James V. Hatch, Phyllis Klotman, Charles Nichols, and Stewart Rodnon, several of whom are now in their fourth decade of service to the journal.

(3.) The two people who did the most to make this designation possible were Darwin Turner and R. Baxter Miller. MLA Division status was largely owing to Turner's tireless efforts to carve out a stable place within the Modern Language Association for the study of African American writing, and Ron Miller's unwavering advocacy for BALF proved crucial to the decision of the Division's membership to embrace the journal as its official publication.

(4.) The Literary Publishers Marketing Development Program, sponsored by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, was a highly structured program designed to transmit marketing know-how and fiscal rigor from large-circulation publishers to a select group of small-press journals and book publishers. The program required an immense amount of staff and editorial effort, but led BALF/AAR to professionalize its operations in ways that would not otherwise have occurred.

(5.) The name African American Review was first suggested by Bill Andrews at the 1991 MLA conference, but for the next six months I stubbornly kept our search for the "perfect" one-word name alive before concluding that the quest was illusory. The idea--a brilliant one--to feature African American art on the journal's cover and overprint that art work with the journal's name originated with Camille Billops. And Indiana State graphic designer Glenn Dunlap's layout for AAR has worked brilliantly for another 15 years.

[(6.) AAR celebrated an additional marker of its success when the Council of Editors of Learned Journals awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award to outgoing Editor-in-Chief Joe Weixlmann, author of this essay, at the 2006 MLA convention.-Ed. 's note.]

Houston A. Baker, Jr.

Distinguished University Professor and Professor of English

Vanderbilt University 

When I lapse into nostalgic reverie on a southern afternoon after a full day's labor in our mutual line of work, I sometimes find myself back on the Westwood campus of the University of California at Los Angeles in the 1960s. I am hurrying through stands of leafy palm trees and gleaming West Coast architecture with a green book bag slung over my right shoulder. The bag is filled with classic English and American literature and literary criticism. I am lean and flexible. I am a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the "Capstone of Negro Education," Howard University. I am going to be a College Professor. The big surprise of UCLA for me is its nearly unrelieved whiteness. Who knew? I thought Sidney Poitier was only one of many, many! But we are four--four "Negroes" (as we then called ourselves) entering the gargantuan 1965 Graduate English Program of UCLA. Picture me: stocking-capped hair, high-water khakis, bobbing about with my classic English and American texts in a sea of whiteness. Did I have any real notion of what precisely I was doing? Absolutely not! But my good fortune was that one of the fearless four was none other than the redoubtable Addison Gayle, Jr. He was from Newport News, Virginia, and working with furious self-fashioning to forget it. He told me at our first encounter that he was from Manhattan, had studied with the inimitable James Emanuel, had marched on the UN to protest the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, and was certain he would devote his MA thesis to the great initiator of modern Negro Letters, J. Saunders Redding. The only thing in his self-introduction I recognized was "Manhattan." Combined with his assumed Oxbridge accent were the incomprehensibles: UN protest marches, James Emanuel, and Saunders Redding. Who and what were these entities? I convinced my ignorant self that Addison Gayle was (as the black vernacular has it) "tech'ed in the head." Poor me! Bobbing along in a classic sea of whiteness.

When some quotidian alert pulls me back from the kind of reverie I have just described, I look around at the manifold rows of my African American literary fiction, criticism, autobiography, public intellectual outpourings, histories, political science and sociology treatises. I realize that when Addison set his goals, they included teaching naive young Negroes like me that there were far more things in heaven and earth than we had dreamed. Addison introduced me to LeRoi Jones, J. Saunders Redding, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Negro American Literature Forum. And it was, in fact, a Negro woman librarian at UCLA who looked compassionately on my belatedness with respect to the treasures of our expressive culture and placed a copy of Negro American Literature Forum on the pale oak table of the library's reference room at my request.

I would be disingenuous if I described my first experience of the publication as epiphanic. It was not. The forum seemed almost like an underground, self-published call to intellectual arms dropped off somewhere in South Central, transported by bus to Westwood, and smuggled into the august holdings of UCLA's research library. It was noble, perhaps, in intent and content, but it seemed a paltry thing beside the likes of, well, Speculum and PMLA. But Addison had said I was to read it, and I did.

It was not, however, until I became a convert to a new naming of my self, my culture, and my work as "Black"--and got a brand new bag--that I realized the majesty of Negro American Literature Forum.

Black Studies was suddenly in the house at Yale University as I took up my first professional post as a college professor in the '60s. By that time, the journal I read at UCLA was on its way to becoming Black American Literature Forum. I published my first really not-so-great effort at Black American Literary Criticism in Negro American Literature Forum. I published one of the essays that I am still most proud of in the third life of the journal when it was under the energetic leadership and savvy editorial enterprise of Professor Joe Weixlmann. The essay that Professor Weixlman accepted had to do with blues, ideology, and "Afro-American Literature." Joe provided shrewd editorial suggestions and an ironic caution that if I kept on saying the things I was saying Speculum might be reluctant to publish my work. The ideology essay became the foundation for what is perhaps my favorite book.

I return to my friend and mentor Addison Gayle. Addison and so very many of our forbearers have made the transition. Nobody knows the true immensity of their names and works. But one thing is certain, it was they who cleared ground--ideological, critical, and cultural--for the growth, chameleon changes of name, and now universal majesty at age 40 of African American Review.

The beauty that Joe Weixlmann and company brought into the world in chill, pre-dawn hours of Indiana, Mississippi, Manhattan, Madison, and Ithaca is virtually indescribable. The venue of their African American genius is now St. Louis, where the brilliant Joycelyn Moody has taken the reins, set a new and glorious tone for the journal.

We see before us, then, on the morning of this fortieth anniversary occasion, a changed world of scholarship where African American Review is a foremost influence. The camaraderie of the journal's contributors, editors, and readers has made a world of scholarly difference and thus has made the world of knowledge production in our era remarkably different. We are better for its presence among us. What a proud morning this is when we can say: Congratulations to all who have brought forth the manifold blessings of our 40-year-old, vibrant, and invaluable African American Review.

William L. Andrews

E. Maynard Adams Professor of English

Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts & Humanities

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

I think it was the spring of 1976 when Joe Weixlmann invited me to serve on the African American Review Advisory Board. I should note with caution at this point that now that I'm 60 years old, my memory functions like Mark Twain's. He said when he was young he could remember everything, whether it happened or not. Once he got old, however, he remembered mainly the latter.

So making allowances for my mental mythopoeia, I will hazard that it was in the spring of 1976 that Joe asked me to join the board of what was then still known as Negro American Literature Forum. In the spring of 1976, Joe and I were assistant professors at Texas Tech University, where he was on a three-year, non-renewable contract. I, on the other hand, enjoyed comparative privilege, the opportunity to become permanently tenured at Tech and spend the remainder of my days in Lubbock, Texas.

When Joe got a job offer from Indiana State University, which I had never heard of, I must admit that I was sorry to see him go. Neither he nor I was a native Texan, and this failing on both our parts relegated us to minority status in the Tech English department. I didn't want to become even more of an outsider once Joe left.

Joe informed me that along with the job at ISU, he was also going to take over the journal, with which I had a nodding acquaintance. It was one of the few journals that, in the mid-1970s, had the audacity to be devoted to a body of literature that most scholars didn't think existed. On top of that, Negro American Literature Forum, as I recall, also was interested in the teaching of Negro American Literature, which was in those days something of an iffy enterprise at most institutions of higher learning in these United States.

I was happy to say yes when Joe asked me to be on the advisory board. I had no idea what being on that board would mean, or that it would turn into a lifetime assignment. The journal has evolved, as everyone knows, from its workmanlike origins into a first-rate, prize-winning, grant-garnering literary magazine that now publishes a whole lot better stuff than I ever contributed back in the day. The subscription list, which Joe pegged at 750 in a January 1977 memo, has undoubtedly tripled. In every respect that I can think of, African American Review is a publication that has grown up with the field of African American literary studies. Both the field and the journal have given character and prestige to the other.

What I've appreciated most about being on the journal's advisory board over three decades is that even though the number of submissions has grown substantially, befitting the increasing quality of the journal, neither Joe nor Joycelyn increased proportionally the number of submissions I had to read. Instead, they kept opening up the board to new areas of expertise, and new experts, which has stimulated a much wider range of articles in the last half-dozen years than I've ever seen before in the journal.

As we look toward the future, I hope all who work on the journal and who contribute to the journal keep in mind that a publication like African American Review has an important teaching and community-building function. The teaching function is not limited simply to what each of us learns from what we discover in each issue. There's a teaching function--or maybe a professionalizing function--served through the process of editorial consideration and acceptance or rejection of submissions to the journal. The insistence over the last 10 years on professionalizing graduate students has led to, I'm afraid, a publish-or-perish attitude among advanced graduate students, which in turn has spawned the submission to various scholarly journals of too many good, but not publishable, PhD seminar papers. In this time of hyper-professionalization of graduate students and new PhDs, it becomes increasingly incumbent on those who edit and who advise the editors of journals like AAR to treat the review of a submission as a teaching opportunity. Sometimes we need to tell an author, respectfully but firmly, when a submission is good and true but still doesn't need to be published. Sometimes we need to tell an author, with the same respect, how to recast her or his approach to a topic so that it may become original and important enough to be considered seriously for publication.

If we keep this teaching function in mind, we will also be doing the kind of community-building that I like to associate with the mission of AAR. I've never felt that AAR has toed an editorial line or held a brief for this or that faction or has become identified with a reigning critical or methodological orthodoxy. As long as the journal remains free of this sort of thing, I think it will remain a journal by and for the community of scholars and teachers who constitute the field that all of us have worked to build and advance.

I close simply by congratulating the editors and associate editors and Advisory Board members and staff assistants on all they have done to bring AAR to the forefront of our field. I urge all who lead the journal now and in the future to keep it a forum in a traditionally communal sense; that is, as an open space to which we all turn to be informed, from a variety of points of view whenever possible, about issues and questions of moment in African American literary and cultural studies.

Trudier Harris

J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

When I moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the summer of 1979, I lived at 716 Tinkerbell Road. I liked that house. However, friends and colleagues have no shame, so I was constantly teased about the name of my street. "Is it next door to Peter Pan Lane"?, the laughingly curious would inquire. As I picture the living room in that house, with my work desk, I can see packages from Black American Literature Forum. If I open a drawer in that desk in my mind, I can see the files of letters from Joe Weixlmann, the review forms that accompanied articles. I don't remember exactly when I became a reader for BALF--probably after I submitted an article for publication in the mid-1970s--but I remember the years and years that I was. In fact, it was my initiation into reading for journals. And boy, was I naive. I would receive an article from the journal, read it, write the review, and return it "in a timely fashion." Then, almost immediately, I would have another of the journal's articles on my desk. I thought I was clearing off my desk, and it took me years to figure out that I was killing myself. By being so efficient in returning those articles, I was just inviting more. I then began to imagine the office at Indiana State University where some eager little assistant would assert: "Oh, Trudier Harris just returned a review; she's free to receive another article." It finally dawned on me that, as a reader for the journal, it was my bounden duty to hold on to an article for at least six or eight weeks--even if I read it on the first day I received it. It was the only way I could create space to do my own work.

Joe Weixlmann once remarked that I was one of his two best readers for the journal. (He probably said that to everybody to get more work out of them.) Efficiency may get you known, but it will also create tons of work for you. Still, I remember my working relationship with Black American Literature Forum as a particularly pleasant one. That period in the 1970s and 1980s was a time of uncovery and discovery, of unknown and little known African American literary works being written about, of crucial bibliographies being compiled and published on various writers, known and unknown. It was a time of networking and establishing life-long professional and personal friendships. It was a time of becoming recognized by MLA, of institutionalizing the study of African American literature and preparing the way for the scholars of the 1990s to publish their anthologies and ensure its healthy survival into the twenty-first century.

It was a time for gathering at conferences and sharing the connection that the journal provided. It was always good to see Joe Weixlmann at those countless conferences, especially MLA. It was good to join those groups of scholars, almost all of whom were reading for Black American Literature Forum, who would go out to restaurants or shows at conventions in Chicago or New York or San Francisco. Sometimes there would be as many as 18 or 20 of us on such outings.

Things change, however, and over the years some of us moved more into administration and decreased our attendance at conventions. Some of us went through the ebbs and flows that characterize scholarly careers and just disappeared. Still others of us hung around in the hope that younger people would soon take over the profession and undertake the tasks that had dominated our careers. Just as we have a collective legacy with Black American Literature Forum, we also have our individual legacies.

Many of us write and publish, but few of us build institutions. We are gathered here today to recognize and honor one of the institution-builders in our profession. When I think of Negro American Literature Forum turned Black American Literature Forum turned African American Review, I can easily contemplate the making of many scholarly reputations. Young people given the opportunity to publish have become giants in the profession. Others who first published in the journal have continued steady outputs. Every scholar of African American literary studies must know the journal. Every graduate student expecting to enter the profession must know the journal. Serious undergraduates in literary studies should know the journal. It was and is the nurturing of the journal into the crucial organ that it is today that we say "Thank you!" to Joe Weixlmann. Your child has matured into a fabulous offspring, one that we hope will continue to make reputations for decades to come.

Thadious Davis

Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American

Thought and Professor of English

University of Pennsylvania 

For a history of late 20th-century poetry, someone should study successive issues of African American Review, the old Black American Literature Forum, formerly Negro American Literature Forum under the founding editor John Bayliss. In its pages for over 25 years, during the editorship of Joe Weixlmann, there was a feast of black poets writing and not coincidentally appearing in print. These were the days when I thought I was a poet. Some of you will remember the broadsides and mimeographed little magazines and even littler volumes of poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s; more of you will remember that boy LeRoi in the Village, and Don L. Lee in Chicago, and Ferlinghetti's black cohort out by the Bay. But I'll bet that most of you will not remember that Black American Literature Forum actually had poetry special issues, and published quite a few poems in each issue.

I remember because, when I thought I was a poet, I was also an early poetry editor for the journal, and actually also one of the last. Sterling Plumpp and I had shared the duties for a few years, and then Pinkie Gordon Lane, who would become the Poet Laureate of Louisiana, joined us before the death knell came. When it came, I worried, of course, in that happily paranoid way, that I had been found out: that I really was not a poet. When the death knell came, it actually arrived not in the form of any failed poet, but rather in the form of undisputed success for the academic, critical, and scholarly writing appearing in the journal. But ironically, it also came as a result of not a little success in getting the word out to aspiring young poets that Black American Literature Forum actually published poetry by black poets, even radical black poets. The journal was overwhelmed with poetry. For a time there was a veritable feast of poetry, every imaginable style--not just Sterling's blues format or Pinkie's lyric or my vernacular mix. It was poetry of the people, by the people, and for every body. It was writing from prisons and from schools, from graduate programs, and rehab centers; it was Gwendolyn Books on the same page as Thadious Davis (yeah, y'all, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven); it was Alvin Aubert's South Louisiana up close and personal with Gerald Barrax, Amiri Baraka, Elizabeth Alexander, and Michael Weaver, or Askia Toure, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Lenard D. Moore in the same issue as Irma McLaurin and Nia Damali and Gary Smith, poets all without a hierarchy of rhyme or ideology.

In the Fall 1989 Poetry Issue, for example, Sterling Plumpp, Alvin Aubert, and Wanda Coleman contributed selections of their poetry, and James Cunninham gave us "Baldwin's Aesthetics in Sterling Plumpp's Mojo Poems"; Jerry W. Ward, Jr., wrote "Alvin Aubert: The Levee, the Blues, the Mighty Mississippi"; and Tony Magistrale offered "Doing Battle with the Wolf: A Critical Introduction to Wanda Coleman's Poetry." How many of us could use all three of these essays in our classes next semester, and right along side the poets' own work? Oh, and did I mention that in that very same 1989 poetry issue, Alvin Aubert reviewed Kenneth A. McClane's Take Five? Or that Amiri Baraka reviewed Airs and Tributes, by Dennis Brutus? My point is simply that the record of our journal is rich and remarkable, eclectic and engaged. Under Joe Weixlmann's editorship, it gave us the creative and scholarly mix of the day; the vibe was cutting edge before we thought of the terms; it was street smart and institution savvy; and it was as sassy as Sara, as elegant as Duke, as flamboyant as Bootsie, as smooth as Smokey, and down with Aretha.

All of this to say, history is more than memory or rememory. It is the tactile and the precocious someone dreamed and dared to blow out into the living and breathing. Forty years is a long time. Of course, some of us were mere babes, no--prodigies, no--better yet, shuckin' and jivin' at a time when it was possible to laugh out loud, to be black and proud, and tap dance to any old beat, beat, beat. This anniversary is the passing of an era, but it doesn't have to be a time of moaning or mourning. It can be the time of renewal and refreshing and replenishing and whatever else is positive before "re" can become "tro." It perhaps should be a time once again of encouraging and supporting poetry in the journal and from our young writers especially who today will provide the creative starting points and imaginative sparks for all of the critical scholarship and theoretical tomes of tomorrow. We do need the infusion of creativity and energy, and not all of the same type. For African American Review, this moment may well be another when poets and scholars might mingle and riff off one another.

Onwards, and in print at 40! Poetry and power to the people, and all that slogan from the long ago meant. What a stupendous idea! Has the time passed for it? We all can be the judge. But my hope is that in its next incarnations, our journal will continue to serve poetry, will encourage poetry submissions, and recognize that for many young writers and perhaps-to-be scholars, poetry is an access route, the way into participating in literature, of becoming active in the world of writing and reading. To my mind, the next generations of writers, creative writers and scholars alike, will be exceedingly well served by another visionary moment in the evolution of African American Review.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Distinguished Professor of English

Dillard University

When people and entities turn 40, it is not unusual for them to look into a future for an affirmation of a past. In the human instance, a person can elect to meditate privately, independently; in the case of entities, the reflection takes the shape of public collaborative efforts.

Here we have the latter--a roundtable of editors and Advisory Board members testifying to the services that African American Review has performed for the profession at large, for the MLA Division of Black American Literature and Culture, and for scholars, critics, and writers. For some of us, the magazine taught us to be adult about the complexities of invested concerns with modes of expression authorized by the US racial contract. For many of us who came of age with the magazine, it was a forum that transcended ink and paper. It was also a space wherein we were mentored. Joe Weixlmann's remarks about the origins of the magazine remind me of watching William Andrews being mentored by Blyden Jackson and also of trying to digest the invaluable advice Darwin T. Turner gave me about being a scholar and being a teacher. In those days, we respected our elders even when we disagreed strongly with their perspectives on Black literature. The giants associated with the early days of the magazine put us in conversation with continuity of tradition and responsibility.

A special feature of the magazine has been its drawing attention to diverse uses of literacy and literary artistry, and the interpretive issues implicit in the writing of literary history. Thus, at age 40, African American Review should begin to document itself by publishing an annotated index of its 40 years of articles, reviews, and creative writing. The index is available at the AAR website and in each year's Winter issue, but it is not annotated for future scholars who might not recognize the names or topoi. In addition, the magazine should collect qualitative and quantitative evidence about its influence on thinking about literature and culture. I anticipate the magazine's being the subject of a doctoral dissertation. Might we prevail on Joe Weixlmann to write its autobiographical biography, since, with a generous grant from the Lila Wallace Foundation, he transformed what had first been Negro American Literature Forum (1967-1976), then Black American Literature Forum (1976-1991), into African American Review? He has already begun the job with his opening remarks today. Future scholars need to have both challenging strategies for generating criticism and scholarship and tactics for stimulating thought about black subject matters.

I am calling for an "autobiographical biography" to emphasize my belief that African American Review has been ethical in seeking balance between the values of traditional print culture and the emerging values generated by new technologies. One fine example of "autobiographical biography" is Margaret Walker's Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius (1988), and Weixlmann might use that text and its genre in writing the life of AAR.

Technology, of course, helps to obscure the usefulness of genre, making the oral the aural, and the visual (in all their many combinations) attractive if not downright seductive. There is nothing obscure or unclear about the magazine's respect for change over the period of 40 years. It now faces an enormously expensive question. Will the magazine continue to navigate successfully between DVD and print, or what comes after DVD and the antiquity of papyrus? The question has to do with the future of the archive, the future of libraries and information resource centers, the future of a user's access to technology. It pertains also to the latest forms of what we may be willing to call "literature." The creation and transmission of new knowledge, particularly in classrooms, is a matter of no small concern for a magazine that speaks to a community of scholars as well as to a broad readership of intelligent people who have special interest in literature and culture.

I will risk essentialism (a buzzword on its way to the grave) to say that performance in some sectors of African American culture is an indication of a will to be distinct, and African American Review can remain distinct by giving rigorous, principled notice to a full range of creative and critical performances. Indeed, I do hope AAR in a future will be as successful as it has been in a past in alerting us to forms of things unknown.