“The immediate prospect of poor black men who want to be wealthy and famous white women suggests, at least, a culture of acute maladjustment.”
—from Edward Conlon’s “The Drag Queen and the Mummy”
TRANSITION 65: Table of Contents
POSITIONS____________________
The Drag Queen and the Mummy
When Dorian Corey, the grande damme of the film Paris is Burning, passed away, she left behind an apartment full of costumes and a body twenty years dead in her closet. Edward Conlon investigates a Manhattan murder mystery.
Bastards of Empire
What sense clings to words like “nation”or “home” when diaspora becomes a way of life? Vast numbers of the human race are homeless or in exile, displaced by war, famine, and the legacies of Great Power chauvinism. Nuruddin Farah muses on writing and the post-colonial condition.
Fresh Maimed Babies
In the shifting terrain of the global media, the child has become a totemic figure, capable of generating unthinking compassion or suspicion, underwriting wars, rescue missions, and moral crusades. McKenzie Wark surveys the uses of innocence.
The Latin Phallus
Whither machismo? Tracing the history of sexuality in the Americas from the swaggering conquistador to the homosexual outlaw, Ilan Stavans limns the omnipresent figure of the phallus—and the crisis of Hispanic masculinity.
Citizen Chan
As Hong Kong braces for Chinese receivership, it is China itself that is undergoing an unprecedented tranformation. But if Hong Kong is all the rage on the mainland, does this betoken the dawning of a post-communist cultural enlightenment—or a new age of robber barons? Jianyang Zha tells the story of Chan Koon-Chung, a Hong Kong entrepeneur and cultural radical caught in the clash of commerce and culture.
UNDER REVIEW____________________
The Repressed Community
A chorus of critics have made “communitarianism” a keyword of soft-core political thinking: on the left and the right, from Wall Street to the White House, there is agreement that the fraying of communities is the foremost poltical and social problem of the day. Richard T. Ford goes to Main Street, U.S.A. and asks, “Whose community?”
Beyond the Foul Lines
Ethan Casey look at the politics and poetry of American baseball with C.L.R. James’ trained eye.
Caught In Flux
Paul Gilroy, the dean of black-British cultural studies, has unsettled conventional senses of race and ethnicity, arguing for a trans-national understanding of race and culture. Surveying contemporary North American art, Calvin Reidlists diaspora do’s and don’ts.
EXCHANGES____________________
Jazz People
A TRANSITION exclusive: jazz master Wynton Marsalis and jazz critic James Lincoln Collier face off in the complete text of last fall’s Lincoln Center debate.