| MISSION |
We aim to be a clearing house for the freshest, most compelling, most curious ideas about race - indeed, about what it means to be human - today," says Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Harvard University, and one of Transition's editors. "There is no party line." With his longtime friend and collaborator, Professor of Afro-American Studies and of Philosophy Kwame Anthony Appiah, Gates has made Transition a venue for unusual, and sometimes contentious, writing on ethnicity and identity. The official publication of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Transition—like Afro-American Studies itself—has become a fixture on the intellectual landscape of America.
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Transition was founded in 1961 in Uganda by the late Rajat Neogy and quickly established itself as a leading forum for intellectual debate. This series carries on a tradition of the original's tough-minded, far-reaching criticism, both cultural and political.
Quotes from the issue:
“It is clearly the ambition of the Sudanese government to surpass the monumental race criminalities of the past, and the world appears to accept that it deserves to succeed, that it is right and just that an African nation join its name to the long catalog of racist infamy.”
—Wole Soyinka
“If there had been more women in politics, then maybe there would have been fewer wars. Just don't say Thatcher!”
—Sara Abbas
“Mamo wrote many years later that as soon as they left Asabar's room he had felt deep inside that something was going to go wrong. Each step they took he expected the wind bearing a huge tree to knock them into darkness, or some heavenly fire to fall on them and incinerate them. None of that happened, though—until the river.”
—Helon Habila
“The first place I went looking for black folks was a reggae club on Tel Aviv's Harakevet Street. A pan-African green, gold, and red sign hung above the chain-locked doorway, which was being guarded by a stocky Russian Jew in a leather jacket. 'You don't want to go in there,' he warned me. A fighter plane roared above us, and then another, flying north. 'Oh, yes I do.'”
—Emily Raboteau
“It is surely one of the more peculiar encounters in the history of black music: the African American and the African, the jazz instigator and the Afrobeat agitator, the doctor and the Chief Priest, the playboy and the polygamist, the scout and the dissident, both down and out, both uprooted and broke.”
—Brent Edwards
“They wanted to know if Monica Lewinsky was beautiful, and when I replied that she was not that hot, they wanted to know how Clinton could commit such an act with her if she was not the most beautiful. I tried to explain that physical attractiveness wasn't the only factor, but this elicited blank stares.”
—Alan Edelstein
“I looked back at the woman who was still digging things up like a manic archaeologist, examining them briefly before tossing them aside. She looked a little frantic, but Hitler?”
—Jamal Mahjoub
“Extremist groups in Germany claim that parts of Poland once belonged to their country, and they've promised to take back what was theirs. It's a familiar story, the old justification for so much of German expansion—only his time, they're technically right.”
—Chris Bebenek
We are pleased to announce that Transition: An International Review is now published by Indiana University Press. Beginning with the first issue in 2008, the magazine will appear three times per year in a 176-page format. In addition to fiction, creative nonfiction, narrative journalism, art and cultural criticism, political commentary, book reviews, poetry, and interviews, we also hope to include in future issues letters to the editors in response to the ideas published here. We invite our readers to participate in the dialogues initiated by our authors by sending their letters to: The Editors, Transition magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, 104 Mount Auburn Street 3R, Cambridge, MA 02138; or via email: <transition@fas.harvard.edu>.
—The Transition Editorial Team