“The political economy of underdevelopment, more than sexual intercourse, is killing Africans.”
—from Charles Geshekter's “The African AIDS Hoax”
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 Reid lists diaspora do's and don'ts.
EXCHANGES____________________
Jazz PeopleA 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.