TRANSITION 110 features a suite of Black poetry, along with photographers, artists, architects, and writers
who catalogue the textures and colors of Africa and the African American
experience. History imprints itself upon the poetry and art featured in
Transition 110 and also the prose: Diane McWhorter
returns to Birmingham, Alabama and finds that the virulent politics of
discrimination continues to flare in the streets of Birmingham—not only
in the black community but also among immigrants. Ed Pavlić looks at race and gentrification in San Francisco through two films; and David Adjaye
talks about art and architecture, saying “the generative roots of
architecture indicate that it is the support, the frame, for bodily
rituals. And ritual is how architecture is birthed.” History meets the
contemporary in these pages, and the present continues to be seduced by
the past: in this issue we witness the contemporary’s tempestuous love affair with history; what is born is at times beautiful and at times awful.
Crying for the Razor in Dar es Salaam
Richard Prins paints a portrait of Teacher, a Tanzanian wunderkind living on the margins among “whores and orphans.” Years later, seeking his friend again, Prins finds him pleasantly unredeemed.
Back to Birmingham
Returning to her hometown, Diane McWhorter bids farewell to Civil Rights leader Fred Lee Shuttlesworth and reflects on the history of a city rife with corruption and conspiracy–and the xenophobia that continues to haunt its present.
Precise Medicine
Dell M. Hamilton talks with architect David Adjaye
Fais Do-Do · Poetry
A selection of African American poetry with images by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
A South Carolina State of Nation Mind
Eating Vegetarian in Taichung with Chien Cheng-chen
by Afaa Weaver
Cracker
Grandpop’s Creed
by Roxane Beth Johnson
Lately, summer
by Metta Sáma
Fais Do-Do
Cadaver
by Rickey Laurentiis
Asunda’s Story
by Vida Cross
Seeds of Secession
In Sudan, ideologies of othering play out in the historical tension between North and South. Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf examines the often silenced view from the Left.
The Open Door of Paradise · Fiction
by Léonora Miano, translated from French by Michelle Chilcoat
Speechless in San Francisco
In the film Medicine for Melancholy, two lovers bike through a desolate and delicate San Francisco—a city explored forty years earlier in a documentary by James Baldwin. Ed Pavlić considers how silence and history weave through the geography of one city and two films.
The Human Project
Jayna Brown examines the role of the black heroine in two cinematic parables of modern catastrophe. A review of 28 Days Later and Children of Men.
Square Roots
The Afro-German alter-ego of artist John Sims plays with the organizing forces of the universe, mathematics and art, race and ethnicity, in a video reviewed by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw.
Shouting Down the Walls or a Mess of Pottage?
Mark Jefferson explores how and why black political agency has been undermined during the age of Obama in a review of Fredrick Harris’ The Price of the Ticket.
More on Transition: http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/transition-magazine
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