Transition 111

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 111, Transition focuses on "New Narratives of Haiti." Guest editors Laurent Dubois and Kaiama L. Glover have invited contributors to think about the world in ways that place Haiti at its center. Thought pieces by Madison Smartt Bell, Jonathan Katz, Gina Athena Ulysse and others, as well as translations of Franketienne, Lyonel Trouillot, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, dispel trenchant cliches that have long plagued representations of Haiti in literature and scholarship. This issue also includes Jamaica Kincaid's poignant memories of a brother lost to AIDS, and a scholar's chance discovery of cultural (and genealogical?) links between Cuba and Sierra Leone. Exceptional poetry, fiction, and review essays also take us beyond Haiti to San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, and Renaissance Europe.

Sujets

• Popular Culture
• African
• History of art
• African people
• ART

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253018649
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 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 111
AN INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
Editors
Tommie Shelby
Glenda Carpio
Vincent Brown
Visual Arts Editor
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Managing Editor
Sara Bruya
Editorial Assistant
Elisabeth Houston
Image Assistant
Jason Silverstein
Publishers
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Henry Louis Gates, Jr .
Senior Advisory Editor
F. Abiola Irele
Advisory Editors
Laurie Calhoun
Brent Hayes Edwards
Henry Finder
Michael C. Vazquez
Chairman of the Editorial Board
Wole Soyinka
Editorial Board
Elizabeth Alexander
Houston A. Baker, Jr .
Suzanne Preston Blier
Laurent Dubois
bell hooks
Paulin Hountondji
Biodun Jeyifo
Jamaica Kincaid
Toni Morrison
Micere M. Githae Mugo
Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Eve Troutt Powell
Cornel West
William Julius Wilson
CONTENTS
New Narratives of Haiti A selection of readings from and about Haiti, guest edited by Laurent Dubois and Kaiama L. Glover
Depi m soti nan Ginen
sung by Erol Josu , translated from Haitian Creole by Laurent Dubois and Jacques Pierre
Introduction
by Laurent Dubois and Kaiama L. Glover
On the Sounds of Haiti Fiction
by Lyonel Trouillot, translated from French by Laurent Dubois
My Spirit is There
The work of artist Edouard Duval-Carri is anchored in the particulars of his Haitian motherland, like history embedded in amber. Here, he speaks with Kaiama L. Glover about mentors, media, and life in Miami .
Blood and Ink
Journalist Jonathan Katz encounters the English speaker s bible of Haitian history , Written in Blood, and learns a lesson in writers humility from its tainted origins .
Vodou, History, and New Narratives
Kate Ramsey connects colonial images of Vodou with the ongoing contemporary stigmatization of the religion, and the attempts of practitioners to offer a different vision for the religion s place in Haitian society .
Five Poems Poetry
by Millery Polyn
The Myth of the Exiled Writer
Nad ve M nard asks why exile is seen as the major trope of Haitian literature when, for every text mentioning exile, there is another emphasizing rootedness .
From Dezafi and Les Affres d un d fi Fiction
by Frank tienne , translated from Haitian Creole by Wynnie Lamour and from French by Kaiama L. Glover
From Ti dif boul sou istoua Ayiti
by Michel-Rolph Trouillot , introduced and translated from Haitian Creole by Mariana Past and Benjamin Hebblethwaite
Mumbo Gumbo
Novelist Madison Smartt Bell takes on Ishmael Reed s Mumbo Jumbo and tells the story of his own encounter with Haiti .
VooDooDoll: What if Ha ti were a Woman
by Gina Athena Ulysse
Glossary of Haitian Creole and French Terms
I Make Them Call Him Uncle
Mar a Fr as talks with Jamaica Kincaid about shame, love, and the grief of losing a sibling to AIDS .
Josefa Diago and the Origins of Cuba s Gang Traditions
In the mid 1800s, a girl who would later be christened Josefa was loaded aboard a slave ship in . . . Liberia? Sierra Leone? Emma Christopher discovers that Josefa s Cuban descendants still sing her songs, and reunites the Gang with their West African kin .
Ipanema Poetry
by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
Watermelon Song Fiction
by Dust Wells
Presence of Mind
Adrienne L. Childs reviews Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, an exhibit on view at Princeton University Art Museum through June 9 .
Benga Benga
In Binyavanga Wainaina s memoir , One Day I will Write About this Place , the author maps the cobbled fragments of his creative path and the collision of history and geography that is post-independence Kenya. Review by Kangsen Feka Wakai .
The Problem of Citizenship, the Question of Crime, and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement
Exploring the statistical link between blackness and criminality, Michael Ralph reviews Khalil Gibran Muhammad s Condemnation of Blackness.
Cover: Images from Haiti: History Embedded in Amber series. 2011 Laurent Dubois and Edouard Duval-Carri . http://www.fhi.duke.edu/haitiamber/
REMEMBRANCE
His Wondrous Passages
a tribute to Chinua Achebe
Biodun Jeyifo
C HINUA A CHEBE HAD more than the standard allotment of respect and fame for writers, including even those who in their lifetime achieve great acclaim. One of the most notable expressions of this respect bordering on adoration came from one who is himself a celebrity among celebrities, Nelson Mandela. In their long time in the prisons of the South African apartheid system, above all other writers it was Chinua Achebe s work that sustained the spirit of Mandela and the other giants of the anti-apartheid struggle. The writer in whose company the prison walls fell -that is how Mandela described the liberation of psyche and spirit that he and his mates felt when they encountered Achebe s brooding, fiercely insightful novels on colonialism and its complex legacies for Africa, the West, and the rest of the world.
I had not yet read of Mandela s uncommon praise for Achebe s writings when, as a member of a volunteer team of Cornell professors and graduate students that taught in correctional facilities in Elmira and Auburn in upstate New York, I taught Achebe and Fanon to some inmates of these prisons. A disproportionately large number of these inmates were African American, and all were men. I think these factors account for the fact that above all the other Cornell volunteers, the inmates felt a very special emotional bonding with me since I was the only African male in the group. But beyond this, Achebe, shall we say, provided the real fulcrum for the connection; Achebe in dialogue with Fanon. Fanon was not exactly a hard nut to crack for the brothers, but the mix of flights of vertiginous psychoanalytic and philosophical musings with visionary and prophetic prose was a bit too abstruse for them.
With Achebe, the story was different. With very little prompting from me, the prisoners-some of whom were lifers who were serving time for extremely violent crimes-used Achebe to throw further light on my explications on the more schematic or programmatic aspects of Fanon s theories of radical decolonization. One surprising thing in this was the fact that the two Achebe novels that I taught the inmates, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God , told harrowingly tragic stories of the failures of anticolonial revolt, whereas Fanon s books mapped difficult but ultimately victorious paths to decolonization. When I probed the sources of this deft move by the prison inmates, they revealed their deep empathy with aspects of Achebe s novels that I hadn t at the time paid much attention to, aspects to which their own situation had apparently made them far more responsive. Chief among these was the startling fact that beneath and beyond the main plotlines of failed and tragically flawed nationalist revolt against colonialism, Achebe s novels told scores of mini stories of ordinary men and women whose humanity, resilience, and self-empowerment were not crushed, could indeed not be crushed by the otherwise powerful and all-conquering forces of colonialism and imperialism. This experience, this revelation served as the catalyst for two of the most important among the half dozen essays and monographs I have published on Achebe: For Chinua Achebe: the Resilience and Predicament of Obierika and An African Cultural Modernity: Achebe, Fanon, Cabral, and the Philosophy of Decolonization.
The passage from Mandela and his prison mates at Robben Island to the world of lifers and other carceral subjects in America s prison colonies is axiomatic of the centrality of passages between incredibly diverse spheres of sociality and community in the world that Achebe as writer and public intellectual traversed in his life and career. One of the most portentous of these passages is the journey of his work in fiction and non-fiction into virtually all the literary languages of the world. He got extensive commendations, inquiries, and plain God bless you correspondence from men and women, old and young, the highly literate and the modestly schooled. And these came from all the continents, all the regions of the world, and all stations in life.
This liminality, these wondrous passages into nearly every corner of the world of letters on the planet pose tremendous interpretive challenges to us. Achebe is one of two or three of the most popular, most widely read contemporary authors and yet he is a writers writer, an author who was/is deeply respected by some of the most influential authors of the past half century like James Baldwin, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, and Wole Soyinka. He is a towering pioneer figure in modern African literature but he is also in the front ranks of the rarefied canon of World Lit. He has been a constant subject of discussion in the popular presses of Africa, Europe, and America but he has also been an endless source of debate and controversy among literary scholars all over the world.
As much as these passages are constitutive of Achebe s fame and renown, they cannot be taken as self-evident or self-explanatory. Of course it is not the case that explanations that don t explain much, that are in fact rather tautological, have not