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Transition is a unique forum for fresh perspectives on global issues, literature and art, cultures and people, with an emphasis on Africa and the diaspora.
“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., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, and co-publisher of Transition. “There is no party line.” With his longtime friend and collaborator, Professor of African American Studies and of Philosophy Kwame Anthony Appiah, Gates has made Transition a venue for unusual, and sometimes contentious, writing on ethnicity and identity. An official publication of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Transition—like African and African 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.
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| Cover Image: “Kin(by)Night,” © 2008 Cédrick Nzolo |
From the issue:
"Living in the dark, we have learned to wait even when there
doesn’t seem to be anything left to hope for. And so we walk
the streets at dusk and into the night. Some corners, some
alleys we learn to avoid; past 8 pm you meet pomba there:
thugs, muggers. Still, it’s better to be outside—in the street, you
can scream and drink and lie, talk and watch small dramas
unfold; in the street, the walls of home can’t close in on you as
you sit and wait."
-Cédrick Nzolo
"I sometimes have a strong urge to set free a flock of
squawking chickens in the thoroughfare, to take out my car
and crash it into the car in front of me before storming out
with a crowbar, then to set up a barbecue grill outside of my
apartment, slaughter a goat in the street, and sell its meat for
10 cents a skewer as the blood drips into the gutter."
-Lowell Brower
"The Machine is the supreme power; it is above individual
agenda, the spirit of the times, and partisanship. The
Machine is now oriented to the same worldview as it was in
the beginning. The system remains intact. The faces may
change, but The Machine always wins. Race, culture, gender,
and ethnicity are all subsidiaries of Machine politics."
-Harry Lennix
"He knew where the third rail was. Hell, he’d known taggers
who’d walked those tracks. Climbed half a mile into the
intestines of New York City, dodging trains and mole people,
just to spray their bullshit name on a wall that wasn’t even lit
up. In a place no one was ever going to see."
-Matthew Quinn Martin
"Where circumstances require much more cooperation in
order for individuals to survive, the emphasis becomes
the duty of individuals toward the group, and institutions
focus on producing caretaker leaders (such as benevolent
despots). Rather than creating institutions of government to
leave individuals unencumbered, this distinctively African
conception of freedom emphasizes the obligation to interfere
in the lives of others."
-Ajume Wingo
"By silencing the ethnic and racial minorities among the
school employees, The Class intimates that they are unequals
within what is supposed to be a democratic sphere; they
are a dominated or marginalized group in an environment
in which the dominant protagonist is the white teacher.
The silence of the non-white employees thus reflects the
hierarchical organization of the school staff."
-Abdoulaye Gueye