New African Fiction

Iu Press Journals

Description

Published three times per year by Indiana University Press for the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. In issue 117, Transition presents new short fiction from writers with Uganda, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Liberia—and the diaspora—in their veins. Also in this issue are: selections from Transition's online forum, "I Can't Breathe," a venue for discussing the recent murders by police of unarmed black Americans; selections of poetry; and an interview with the architect and curator of the opening exhibit at Harvard University's new Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art.

Sujets

• HISTORY
• América
• African people
• Legal thriller
• Politics
• History of the Americas
• African American
• 21st Century
• American
• United States
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253019035
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

TRANSITION
Transition was founded in 1961 in Uganda by the late Rajat Neogy and quickly established itself as a leading forum for intellectual debate. The first series of issues developed a reputation for tough-minded, far-reaching criticism, both cultural and political, and this series carries on the tradition .
TRANSITION 117
THE MAGAZINE OF AFRICA AND THE DIASPORA
Editor
Alejandro de la Fuente
Visual Arts Editor
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Managing Editor
Sara Bruya
Editorial Assistant
Adam McGee
Visual Arts Assistant
Amanda Lanham
Student Associate Editors
Laura Correa Ochoa
Amanda Fish
Mariam Goshadze
Publishers
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Henry Louis Gates, Jr .
Former Editors
Rajat Neogy, Founding Editor
Wole Soyinka
Henry Finder
Michael C. Vazquez
F. Abiola Irele
Laurie Calhoun
Tommie Shelby
Vincent Brown
Glenda Carpio
Editorial Board
Wole Soyinka, Chairman
George Reid Andrews
David Chariandy
Teju Cole
Laurent Dubois
Brent Hayes Edwards
Sujatha Fernandes
Tope Folarin
Kaiama L. Glover
Kellie Carter Jackson
Biodun Jeyifo
Carla D. Martin
Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz
Achille Mbembe
Siddhartha Mitter
Laurence Ralph
Antonio Tillis
CONTENTS
I Can t Breathe
Selections from Transition s online forum of responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police by Tennille Allen, Kellie Carter Jackson, Colin Dayan, Jenny Korn, Danielle Legros Georges, Charles Nfon, Rae Paris, Nicholas Rinehart, Metta S ma, Ren e Stout, Kangsen Feka Wakai, and Afaa Michael Weaver
New African Fiction
Transition presents new short fiction from writers with Uganda, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Liberia-and the diaspora-in their veins
To Be Where We Are
Tope Folarin finds creation working on itself in his introduction to this issue s new fiction
Bras-Coup
by Louis Armand Garreau , translated and introduced by Sarah Jessica Johnson
Over Seas
by Peace Adzo Medie
Welcome to the Big Apple
by Marame Gueye
The Smell of Fear
by Prudence Acirokop
Rumors
by Vincent Ikedinachi
100,000 Men
by Fafa Foofo
An Unexpected Gift
by Ifeanyi Chi
The Dragon Can t Dance
by Sheree Ren e Thomas
Breweries
by Jekwu Anyaegbuna
From That Stranded Place
Aaron Bady and author Taiye Selasi explore the slippery definition of African literature, the inner dilemma of the Afropolitan, and the inspired moment of receiving a story s first lines
Poetry
John Warner Smith
Dumb
Hands
Higher Ground
A Letter from John D.
Reply to the Letter from John D.
Ladan Osman
The Key
My Father Drops his Larynx
Denotation
Patrick Sylvain
The Coffin Maker and the Poet
The National Identity Card
Mary Serumaga explores how the bungled attempt by the Ugandan government to issue a standard ID card to its citizens points to the larger failings of the state
Ali Mazrui (1933-2014)
We memorialize the passing of one of the greatest political philosophers of postcolonial Africa, who also served as one of Transition s earliest associate editors
Remembering Ali Mazrui
by Wole Soyinka
A Tribute to Ali Mazrui
by Seifudein Adem
Luminous City, Luminous Gallery
Famed architect David Adjaye and contemporary art curator Mariane Ibrahim-Lenhardt are interviewed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about their vision for the opening exhibit at Harvard University s new Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art
Cover : Umfundi. Afronauts series. Digital C-print. 12 12 in. 2012 Cristina de Middel.
ACPR
African Conflict Peacebuilding Review

Edited by Abu Bakarr Bah, Mark Davidheiser, Tricia Redeker Hepner, and Niklas Hultin
African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review (ACPR) is an interdisciplinary forum for creative and rigorous studies of conflict and peace in Africa and for discussions between scholars, practitioners, and public intellectuals in Africa, the United States, and other parts of the world. It includes a wide range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives on the causes of conflicts and peace processes including, among others, cultural practices relating to conflict resolution and peacebuilding, legal and political conflict preventative measures, and the intersection of international, regional, and local interests and conceptions of conflict and peace.

ACPR is a joint publication of the Africa Peace and Conflict Network, the West African Research Association, and Indiana University Press. It is published twice a year.

Published semiannually

pISSN 2156-695X | eISSN 2156-7263

http://www.jstor.org/r/iupress

For more information on Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu
I CAN T BREATHE
TRANSITION
Transition hosts an online forum for responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police. The responses are raw and unedited. The following is a selection of submissions from that site. Please visit, and add your own voice.
http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/I-Cant-Breathe

Kangsen Feka Wakai Can t Breathe
I Can t Breathe
I can t breathe because I watched the news and saw myself, crawling on a pot-holed filled street from Monrovia to Conakry by way of Freetown. I am the other. I named my last born Ebola, but I still can t breathe.
I am Eric, Mike, and Tamir. My grandma calls me Amadou, and my friends Trayvon. I inhabit your dreams. I am the night to your day. The bad to your good, and the cry to your laughter. So I laugh to breathe. I laugh to let the air swim in, but I feel an arm grabbing me. I am humid like a New Orleans summer night. I gasp. Grasping for the Bayou s wind, yet I can t breathe.
Yemoya , abeg o!
I see you. I see her. I see him. I see them but I barely see myself in the cracked mirror on the pavement. I can t breathe.
Sir, I just can t breathe.
So I drift above like air on a Chicago Fall morning. I hug the clouds, spit out rain, shine like the sun, then I see myself lying on a concrete pavement. I smell the powder. I dive to the pile of spent shells. I hear the chorus humming. I am asleep but still can t breathe.
Kwifon , you fit see me so?
I sleepwalk through Heathrow, De Gaulle, and O Hare in a layer of soot, which all can see but me. I can t breathe.
I smoke a joint for Fela, but still can t breathe. I chew khat and read Achebe, but still can t breathe. I shave my locks for Madiba . . . I try to resurrect Sankara . . . I say a prayer in Lingala. I can t breathe, so I am booking my next trip alongside Sun Ra.

Colin Dayan Can t Breathe
Hard to write what I want to say. Knowing that my words can t even get close to righteous response.
I remember Birmingham and Jackson and being a child in Atlanta in 1963. What is happening now is different. It might be more pernicious, more lasting, less easy to combat. No Civil Rights Act can stop it.
Trying to put into words what these murders of blacks-by any white person, police or not-tell us, I sense a desire to repeat the racial tags of our American history, a litany of law that seems like a series of death announcements that always precede and continue to haunt the bodies left lying on the street losing blood unable to breathe talked over and done in.
But instead I can only say what I keep thinking about: How the most well-intentioned and reasonable folks end up abetting the state of fear and atrocity, terrifying because commonplace-easily as tactful as de Blasio s call for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things that we will talk about in due time. I remember Nina Simone s words in Mississippi Goddam, Keep on saying go slow. Who has to slow down? How long is due time?
Real terror plucks us by the sleeve and comes along naturally, forever just occurring, always perceptible just at the edge of our vision. What terrorizes is this casual but calculated disregard. A terror relayed not by the dogs, hoses, and bombs in the new South of the sixties, but by the near nonchalance of legal murder anywhere in the United States today: as if these living breathing black citizens, now dead, were not supposed to go about their lives, walk down the street, stand on a corner, put their hands in their pockets, take a toy gun to the park, go down the stairway of their own building-breathe.

Metta S ma Can t Breathe
Realism: a poetics
Imagination! who can sing thy force -Phillis Wheatley
The woman s fingers are alternately
two praying mantes in mid fight alternately
the skittish legs of a rock crab blue
limbs swishing left and back to blue
mirages of packed sand untrammeled hole
Free No life forms around the small world a hole
waiting to be dug or alternately
the world is a giant fissure of blue
music classical notes plinking hole
after hole into a theory of What
What does the mantis pray for What
does the crab skirt from What
is this life A force of What
will happen to this child
I want with its child
thoughts and its ways na ve
untouched Is that na ve
to think a child I could birth
could be untouched by the world before its birth
I think I want to at the least imagine
that tiny world is somewhere I can imagine
many days with this na ve child <