“When I first saw my brother in the hospital, lying there almost dead, his lips were scarlet red, as if layers and layers of skin had been removed and only one last layer remained, holding back the dangerous fluid that was his blood.”

—from Jamaica Kincaid's “My Brother”

 

TRANSITION 72: Table of Contents

 

MEMOIR____________________

My Brother
When Jamaica Kincaid learned that her brother was dying of AIDS, she returned to Antigua to face him “—and the world she had left behind.” The author of Lucy and The Autobiography of My Mother recounts the story of a life.

POSITIONS____________________

Passing For Italian
Even as the Dominican-born beauty Denny Mendez was being crowned the first-ever black Miss Italy, Snoop Doggy Dogg donned Versace and a fedora to become . . . the Doggfather. What is it about blacks and Italians? John Gennari considers the enduring appeal of crossover culture.

The Return of the Native Son
Sani Abacha’s Nigerian dictatorship is supported by Shell, Mobil, Chevron . . . and an unofficial public relations lobby of African American journalists and politicos. Tejumola Olaniyan investigates Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, Louis Farrakhan, and black radical chic.

Aftermaths
Jailed, censored, and exiled for decades, the South African writer became an emblem of creativity under seige, a living symbol of the resistant imagination and the relevance of writing. But what happens to a literature of protest when the protest succeeds? Rob Nixon considers the end of apartheid and the crisis of the adversarial imagination.

Queen of Denial
Black or white, African or Greek, queen or temptress? Cleopatra has been the bete noire of Western Civilization since the reign of Augustus. Mary Hamer examines what becomes a legend most.

UNDER REVIEW____________________

Greatest Hits 
When movie critic David Denby went back to Columbia to divine the fate of the Great Books, he got caught in the cross fire of the canon wars. Charles Sugnet considers the pleasures of reading.

The New Cosmopolitanism
As the term multiracial glides toward public acceptance (and its own spot on the U.S. census), cosmopolitanism has become the byword of a new liberal consensus, sympathetic to civil rights but eager to get over not just racism but race itself. Against the postethnic tide, Eric Lott argues that the American dilemma is still black and white.

Middle Passages
The missionaries of the African Methodist Episcopal Church forged new links between black Americans and Africans—in Africa and in the United States, as well. But was the A.M.E. Church a beacon of hope or a bastion of reaction? Alex Lichtenstein reviews the transatlantic history of black methodism.

CONVERSATIONS____________________

Turning Color 
Black, British, and Asian, Gurinder Chada has challenged the boundaries of British belonging in films like Bhaji on the Beach and I’m British . . . But.. Susan Koshy talks with her about black British filmmaking and the strange life of popular art.

After Genocide
Paul Kagame, the forty-year-old vice president of Rwanda and leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, is heralded as one of the keenest military minds in the world. He is also widely rumored to be the primary architect of the rebellion in Zaire. In a series of conversations spanning three years, Kagame talks with Philip Gourevitch about the legacy of genocide and the future of Rwanda.

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