“My worldview is not like an African's, with his ancestral culture--his thousand-year-old tradition, the imposing gods, and so on--weighing upon him.”

—from Patrick Chamoiseau's “Creolite Bites”

 

TRANSITION 74: Table of Contents

 

POSITION____________________

Murder on the Green  
The Virgin Islands have it all: white sand, blue water, world-class golf resorts--and rich tourists ripe for the killing. Amid the benighted bays of Nevis and St. Croix, G. A. Elmer Griffin examines the dangerous liaison between race and golf. 

The Song of the Griot 
In West Africa, when griots sing your praises, you feel ennobled, invincible, heir to seven hundred years of cultural tradition. That's precisely why they should be run out of business, explains Manthia Diawara. 

The Rise and Fall of Black Britain 
Blackness of the British variety is white hot: playful, postmodern, procreative. But does the vogue for Black Britain obscure more than it reveals? Michael Eldridge charts the nettlesome history of “blacks” in “Britain.” 

UNDER REVIEW____________________

The Up and Up 
Does racial harmony require bourgeois bliss? Has integration itself become an obstacle to progress? Ellen Willis limns the dark side of optimism. 

Bi(bli)ographies 
The life and work of Jorge Luis Borges continues to fascinate, as multiplying biographies and far-flung translations attest. On the eve of the next Borges boom, Ilan Stavans traces the strange career of a consummate outsider. 

Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes 
Richard Rorty, the reformed ironist, has taken to haranguing the academic left to give up High Theory and come back to Politics. Tupac Shakur, the self-styled “Makavelli” of hip hop, lived only for himself (and his niggaz). In the all-American fable of the professor and the rapper, Lindsay Waters finds a contest of pragmatisms. 

CONVERSATIONS____________________

The Darker Side of the Earth 
Rita Dove has made a career (and a clutch of enemies) by staking broad claims for black art. Therese Steffen engages the former American Poet Laureate on why she loves Greeks and Germans. 

I Sing All the Space 
Baaba Maal, Senegal's most popular singer, attempts to reunite the black diaspora in songs that mix rap, reggae, and R&B, with the traditional sounds of the Fulani. Charles Sugnet talks with him about Islam, orality, and the selling of African music. 

Creolite Bites 
From the tiny French Caribbean island of Martinique, a triumvirate of literary provocateurs has been making waves by mangling the French language, vomiting at their critics--and winning nearly every prize in French literature. Now, the Creolistes are coming to America. Critic Lucien Taylor spars with Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, and Jean Bernabe about Negritude, political correctness, and the creolization of everyday life. 

The Secret Doctrine 
On big city radio stations across the country, rap music is all about the Benjamins--getting paid, living large, and keeping it real. But the mysterious Killah Priest brews a strange cocktail of black nationalism, Biblical hermeneutics, and alien abduction. Kelefa Sanneh goes underground with the Wu Tang Clan's most fantastical rapper. 

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