TRANSITION 64: Table of Contents

 

POSITIONS____________________

Routes
Alex Haley followed his family tree back to Africa, and 130 million Americans watched, riveted. But what, at bottom, does Haley's M.O. signify? David Chioni Moore tackles the identity politics of geneology.

The Postcolonial Exotic
Does winning the Commonwealth's most coveted literary prize compromise Salman Rushdie's subaltern élan? As “marginal writers” take the center by storm, bagging prestigious prizes and lucrative contracts, questions arise for the new literary lions. Graham Huggan gauges the perils of post-colonial celebrity.

UNDER REVIEW____________________

Bum Rap
Who speaks for the dispossessed? Who's down with the b-boy? Contemplating the hip-hop academy, Michael Bérubé finds Houston A. Baker, Jr. puzzling out High and Low in Black and White.

Dangerous Liaisons
For European Jews at the onset of the twentieth century, America promised more than prosperity and the end of pogroms. It also meant an escape from ethnic anxieties about Jewish...Blackness.
Sandra L. Gilman ponders a strange and tortuous chapter in the history of Black-Jewish relations.

Questions of Travel
The guide-book and travelogue betray equally the splendid ruins of Empire, whether in the abandoned city of Fatephur Sikri or the cramped alley-ways of Rome. Michael Gorra goes to town with the travel literature of the nineteenth century.

Race and Science
A provactive collection of essays blasts the pretensions of modern science from the vantage of race. V.Y. Mudimbe surveys the damage.

CONVERSATIONS____________________

The Other Voice
Of identity and alterity, the complexion of English and the world of the writer: Anita Desai, Caryl Phillips, and Ilan Stavans on writing “Third World” literature.

Filming Slavery
Distributors are allergic, critics are wary, but audiences are seeking out Sankofa, a parable of African-American enslavement and resistance. Director Haile Gerima discusses craft, criticism, and the plantation school of cinema with writer Pamela Woolford.

EXCHANGES____________________

White on Black Revisited. Jan Nederveen Pieterese

White on White: Act 2. Sieglinde Lemke

SYMPOSIUM____________________

Against Power
Emery M. Roe, Norman Rush, Paul Smith, Donald S. Moore, Bruce Robbins, Michael Lerner, James Ferguson, Jonathan Arac, Manning Marable, Michael Watts, Jeffrey C. Isaac, Biodun Jeyifo, and Paul Piccone take up questions of power and agency, complexity and domination, policy and democracy, in response to Emery M. Roe's polemical sketch against the politics of power. 

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