TRANSITION 52: Table of Contents
POSITIONS____________________
A Kinder, Gentler Islam?
Secularism is doomed to irrelevance for most Islamic states: But can Islam undergo its reformation and still be Islam? Now a leading Moslem legal scholar argues that the precepts of historical Islam can justify its own transformation.Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im
Writing to the Future: Hope and Violence in Garcia Marquez
Ariel Dorfman explores the transformation of history, myth, and literature in a writer whose phantasmogoric imagination only just keeps pace with reality
Canon, Syllabus, List: A Note on the Pedagogic Imaginary
Just where is this canon, anyway? Amid all the grandstanding, a major theorist of the concept of "minority'' sorts through the dubious logic of the entire debate. John Guillory
Buthelezi and Apartheid
The Chief's peaceable relations with the Apartheid state have long made him a favorite of conservatives--yet his Inkatha Freedom Party has sparked bloody violence in the black townships. What does Buthelezi want? And will he get it? Adam Ashforth
UNDER REVIEW____________________
The Professor and the Prophet
Richard Rorty says he'd be prophetic, too, if only he could figure out what to prophesy.
Tact & Tarzan
When it comes to cross-cultural encounters, Michael Gorra wonders if Miss Manners doesn't have as much to teach us as Maître Derrida.
The “Scandal of the Whorearchy”
Anne McClintock revisits the sex trade in colonial Kenya.
V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin
Has he mellowed with age? Rob Nixon considers.
The Education of Judge Posner
Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr. tracks one of America's most influential legal theorists on his road to Damascus.
Trading on the Margin
Renée Green finds a remedy for the multicultural malaise.
Split Screen
Bérénice Reynaud focuses on the dialectics of identity in Israeli cinema.
Out of Turn
Lucy R. Lippard on Michele Wallace's experiments in cultural criticism...and self-criticism.
IN FOCUS____________________
Chaos by Proxy
Christopher Hitchens on Lebanon's road to hell.
The Yen for Empire
Masao Miyoshi argues that the response to The Japan That Can Say No is almost as silly as the book itself.
Through the Looking Glass
Stephen Clingman on postcolonial Africa's great expectations--and the mourning after.
The Post-Modern Negro
Novelist Reginald McKnight on a new conception of race and difference.
CONVERSATION____________________
Final Cut Spike Lee and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., rap on race, politics, and black cinema.