“Reading Richard Rorty is rather like listening to a quaint old crank trying desperately to convince you that Walt Whitman would be appalled by the current state of the IRS.”

—from Eric Lott's “Boomer Liberalism ”

 

TRANSITION 78: Table of Contents

 

DISPATCH____________________

Welcome to America
Burundian journalist Alexis Sinduhije wanted to know how American blacks feel about Africans. So he asked them. Traversing the eastern United States, Sinduhije listened to anyone who would talk to him–old women at a community center, the ambassador to Tanzania, a high priest of Afrocentrism, the cashier at a bus station café. What they said terrified him.
Photographs by Dawoud Bey

POSITION____________________

Boomer Liberalism
As Black Power erupted at the close of the 1960s, white leftists went ducking for cover. Thirty years later, the whites have their own movement–a vast centrist conspiracy, talking big about unionism and shilling for Clinton. Eric Lott finds the pitfalls of the new progressivism.

UNDER REVIEW____________________

One Little Indian
When V. S. Naipaul voyages to the Muslim world, he invariably finds disorder, corruption, epic violence. For years, he’s been attacked as a Third-World apologist for First-World imperialism. So why is he sounding more and more like a Hindu fundamentalist? Akash Kapur bears witness to the rebirth of V. S. Naipaul.

The Idylls of the Bard
As the Academy Awards confirmed, Shakespeare has once more conquered the West. Scholars scrutinize porno flicks and Congressional records for the faintest allusion. But in the outposts of Empire–in Africa, India, and the Caribbean–the real battle of the Bard is only beginning. Nicholas Moschovakis reflects on tradition and transformation.

The Ethnics of Surrealism
In the 1920s, Paris swooned for black culture, celebrating boxers and dancers, poets and pygmies. But amid the primitivist pageantry, a new generation of black intellectuals was coming of age. Brent Hayes Edwards considers Georges Bataille, Aimé Césaire, and the surreal birth of modern blackness.

CONVERSATION____________________

The Hyena’s Last Laugh
Last summer, one of Africa’s most enigmatic voices was stilled. Djibril Diop Mambety had an urbane, allegorical style: his masterpiece, Touki-Bouki, was an African Bonnie and Clyde. In his last published interview, the Senegalese filmmaker talks with N. Frank Ukadike about animals, the IMF, and the magic of cinema.

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