“To assume that the ends of education are best advanced by focussing principally on our own separateness, our own ethnic identity, ironically, place us where we had been placed by nineteenth century racial theory, unable to share in the general riches of human culture.”

—from Edward W. Said's “Identity, Authority, and Freedom”

 

TRANSITION 54: Table of Contents

 

POSITIONS____________________

Identity, Authority, and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveller
When education is pressed in the service of nationalism — of whichever stripe — intellectual freedom is the first casualty. Edward W. Said

“And Everybody Claim Dem Democratic”: Notes on the “New” South Africa
Part promise, part abomination, and part concentrated confusion is Rob Nixon's verdict on South Africa's ballyhooed new order.

UNDER REVIEW____________________

Twilight in the Rue Morgue
Science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany explores Donna Haraway's simian vision.
 
Stuffed Animals
Marianna Torgovnick considers the lives of Carl Akeley and Sir Richard Burton — and their biographers' skills at literary taxidermy.

Through a Gaze Darkly: Pornography's Academic Market
Jennifer Wicke investigates the latest critical craze.

“Hammering at the Truth”: The Civil Rights Era and After
Robert C. Smith charts out a new history of the Civil Rights era.

Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora
R. Radhakrishnan rethinks the ethics of ethnics.

Racial Remedies
Lawrence Thomas thinks the American race problem isn't as bad as they say: it's worse.

Can Language Be Planned?
David Laitin argues that African language policies that takes individual self-interest into account have the best chance of actually working.

IN TRANSIT____________________

Charles E. Curran, Catholic theologian and dissenter, on South African churchman and activist Tschenuwani Simon Farisani.

CONVERSATIONS____________________

The Language of Struggle
Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiongo tells Feroza Jussawalla about life after English.

Educating Africa
Benin's Minister of Education, Paulin Hountondji, talks about the problems ahead with fellow philosophes V.Y. Mudimbe and K.A. Appiah

EXCHANGE____________________

Wole Soyinka as Television Critic: A Parable of Deception. Ali A. Mazrui

Triple Tropes of Trickery. Wole Soyinka

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