Transition 113

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 113, Transition updates Countee Cullen's iconic question by asking, "What is Africa to me now?" A soul-searchingly private query, its ramifications nevertheless play out in profoundly public ways, around issues of immigration, racial and ethnic tension, and the search for belonging. Guest edited by Benedicte Ledent and Daria Tunca, in this cluster Madhu Krishnan takes Achebe's Things Fall Apart as a starting point for defining contemporary African literature, while Louis Chude-Sokei explores through their novels the experiences of Africans living in America. Julie Kleinman reveals the perspective of Malian immigrants in France, and photographer Johny Pitts searches Europe with his camera for what he calls "Afropeans." Meanwhile, celebrated author and editor Hilton Als has his own questions about diaspora, which he explores in recollections of a childhood summer in Barbados. Caribbean Canadian novelist David Chariandy also treats Transition readers to a sneak preview of his forthcoming novel, Brother. The issue concludes with a suite of essays that examine the social impacts of collective fear, and ask—given obvious parallels between the Rodney King beating and the murder of Trayvon Martin—why does this keep happening to young black men?

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: 1
• EAN13: 9780253018601
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 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 113
AN INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
Editors
Tommie Shelby
Glenda Carpio
Vincent Brown
Visual Arts Editor
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Managing Editor
Sara Bruya
Editorial Assistants
Elisabeth Houston
Adam McGee
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
Achille Mbembe
Toni Morrison
Micere M. Githae Mugo
Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Eve Troutt Powell
Cornel West
William Julius Wilson
CONTENTS
What is Africa to me now? Transition updates Countee Cullen s iconic question, examining the meaning of the continent for members of African diasporas both old and new .
Introduction
by B n dicte Ledent and Daria Tunca
Negotiating Africa Now
Madhu Krishnan retraces how Chinua Achebe s Things Fall Apart helped inaugurate contemporary African literature as we know it, and examines the ways that contemporary African novelists are trying to smash the image of Africa as a monolith-even as their works sometimes play into efforts to stereotype what Africa means.
The Path Between Two Points
Narrating the story of Boubacar, a Malian immigrant in France, Julie Kleinman explores how French colonial fantasies of travel and adventure in Africa belie the fraught and perilous real-life adventures of Soninke men trying to eke out a living in the Hexagon .
An Afropean Travel Narrative
Johny Pitts questions what it means to have a black body, and sets off with camera across Recession-turmoiled Europe in search of the elusive Afropean .
The Newly Black Americans
Engaging in close readings of fiction from a number of African-African American writers-including Mengestu, Adichie, Oguine, and Cole- Louis Chude-Sokei considers how a new wave of African immigrants thinks about race and solidarity with extant black American culture .
Happiness Fiction
by Chika Unigwe
Some Connection with the Place
Poet and novelist Jackie Kay is interviewed by Petra Tournay-Theodotou about her memoir , Red Dust Road, which tells of the adopted, biracial Briton s search for her Nigerian father and Scottish mother .
Islands
Falling through memory, Hilton Als juxtaposes a day spent with his intimate friend-a man he loves like no other -with arresting recollections of a childhood summer spent in Barbados, when sexual maturation sundered him from his brother .
We Eat Cold Eels and Think Distant Thoughts Poetry
by Danielle Legros Georges
Straddling Shifting Spheres
Kelly Baker Josephs chats with David Chariandy , author of Soucouyant, about the relationship between his scholarship and fiction. The two also discuss Chariandy s role in defining a Black Canadian literary canon .
Excerpt from Brother Fiction
by David Chariandy
Burial Ground Poetry
by Malika Booker
Considering Race and Crime
Transition examines the social impacts of collective fear, from the L.A. Riots to the Zimmerman trial .
Legacies of Fear
Laurence Ralph and Kerry Chance explore how blacks are construed by the American legal system as inherently problematic-their mere presence in public space an indication of wrong-doing. The authors draw comparisons between the Rodney King beating and Trayvon Martin s murder, and introduce the following essays .
Remembering SA-I-GU
In this interview, Ju Yon Kim invites Dai Sil Kim-Gibson to reflect on the impact of her 1992 film Sa-I-Gu, which provided a Korean American perspective on the L.A. Riots. The filmmaker goes on to discuss the motivations behind her decision to return to the subject years later in Wet Sand.
The Luminance of Guilt
Inviting the reader to consider a number of images depicting black suffering, Patricia Williams scrutinizes how black Americans, from Rodney King to Trayvon Martin, have consistently been falsely construed as the perpetrators-rather than the victims-of violence against themselves .
Cover : West African Souvenir Seller, Eiffel Tower, Paris . 2013 Johny Pitts.
ANNOUNCEMENT
I T IS RARE that a thinker comes along who not only completely alters the way we engage in social critique, but also introduces new objects of social criticism. We at Transition deeply mourn the loss of the incomparable Stuart Hall, one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies and a longtime member of our Editorial Board. So much of what appears in our pages would be simply unimaginable if not for his profound impact on the study of the African diaspora and the black popular arts. Hall, more than anyone else, brought serious thinking about race and the postcolonial condition to the cultural studies movement. His legacy includes an abundant source of ideas and critical tools that can be built upon as we confront the powerful meaning-making representations of new media technologies. We owe him a tremendous debt. May he rest in peace.
-The Editors
What is Africa to me now?
guest edited by B n dicte Ledent and Daria Tunca

An Afropean Odyssey/Self Portrait, Ventimiglia (detail). 2013 Johny Pitts.
What is Africa to me now?
the continent and its literary diasporas
B n dicte Ledent and Daria Tunca
A RTISTS ATTEMPT TO capture the complexities of human nature through writing, painting, and other creative media. Academics, on the other hand, act on this impulse to understand the world by engaging in more mundane activities, such as holding conferences. And so it was that, eager to explore issues of representation, identity, and memory in the literatures of the African diasporas, we started to consider organizing an event at our home institution, the University of Li ge, Belgium.
Academia is often about academia and not about the real, messy world.
Explore issues of representation, identity, and memory : our use of this erudite but hopelessly vague phrase rapidly set off our internal alarm bells, for it betrayed a seemingly in-built academic predisposition-that of examining, researching, surveying, scrutinizing an object of study, without, in the end, saying anything noteworthy (or indeed intelligible) about it. Thus, when we decided to follow through on the initial idea of organizing a scientific meeting on the African diasporas, some rather down-to-earth questions imposed themselves: what exactly were we hoping to achieve by adding yet another event to the long list of those already hosted in other institutions all over the world? How would this conference negotiate the uncomfortable chasm between the academic spheres and the world at large? Academia is often about academia and not about the real, messy world, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in an interview published in The Believer in 2009. Even as we were convinced that scholarly work did have something valuable to contribute to contemporary debates on Africa and its diasporas, Adichie s admonishment lingered in our minds.
These concerns shaped our preliminary discussions, from which two ideas emerged. First, we wanted an event that would encourage exchanges between academics, creative writers, artists, and the general public. Second, we wished rather idealistically to address questions that were at once topical, under-explored and in need of in-depth analysis. With this relevance criterion in mind, we delineated our specific focus: the representation of Africa in the writings of authors from the old and new African diasporas. These two categories, at first sight, seem to speak for themselves. The former refers to the descendants of people who were displaced as a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade; the latter designates those who were born (or whose parents were born) on the continent in the contemporary period but left it either as children or as adults.
We kept coming back to the famous line written by Countee Cullen in 1925: What is Africa to me?
Yet, if delineating the historical differences between these two diasporas seemed easy enough in theory, circumscribing the ways in which they addressed the image of Africa in their literatures proved a more complicated task in practice. What appeared to us after some research is that, even if the continent continued to haunt many creative and critical texts produced by (and on) the old diaspora based in the Americas or in Europe, Africa had lost the prominence that it had had for the greater part of the twentieth century in favor of notions more markedly denotative of displacement or (un)belonging, whether in the Old or the New World. Quite significantly, analyses of contemporary literary texts centering on the slave trade more readily discussed the writers representations of history than their engagement with Africa per se , which is imbued in most cases with mythical, almost unreal qualities. In studies of the new diaspora, on the other hand, we noticed that a more concrete Africa had never ceased to occupy center stage, but i