Transition

...Of course, Neogy did choose to criticize...

...This is the cleanest I've been since my mother let me out of her belly, I thought, as I eyed the blackfaced Japanese in the mirror...

...Rather, the diaspora figures as both an essential element of a global cultural milieu and, as in Soyinka's "Beyond the Berlin Wall," an arena of self-determination for the nation and the individual...

...I realized it after reading a handful of issues, and the experience was akin to entering a crowded room in which many conversations are occurring simultaneously...

...THAT TRIUMPH was cut short On October 18, 1968, when the Ugandan regime arrested Neogy on charges of sedition...

...Besides permitting disputes to unfold over several issues, Neogy also assembled special issues on various subjects—"Love," "Violence"— that fielded a wide range of unorthodox opinions...

...Steele would probably view Kilson's essay as endorsing precisely the kind of pigeonholing he deplores...

...With a new car owner's pride I celebrated my small triumphs: how I'd brought myself to Japan, how I'd found this truly Japanese sento, how I felt right at home...

...Shortly thereafter he stripped Neogy of his Ugandan citizenship, which meant that Neogy had to leave the country immediately upon his release in March 1969...

...Confusion can be a troubling state of mind, but sometimes it can be the best alternative...

...Much of its contents—a mix of essays, long reviews, and interviews—concerns the African diaspora, but not as some rare and exotic realm suspended in amber...

...Fib, democracy!' Alaydin said, raising his glass...

...Steele upbraids Malveaux for being a knee-jerk leftist...

...Farrakhan really does believe that a cabal of Jews secretly controls the world," Gates writes in the preface to the interview, and "he also suspects that one of his own grandparents was a Portuguese Jew...

...And just last year, in issue 74, Ellen Willis challenged Orlando Patterson's view that the disintegration of the black family is the highest barrier to integration...

...Soyinka doesn't exactly roll out the red carpet for left intellectuals, either...

...All bore the imprint of a liberalminded editorial ethos, one that Neogy described as a mix of an "aggressive non-prejudice, a willingness to see all factions of an argument," and a "disciplined permissiveness that allows proponents to reach the limits of their arguments or points of view...

...Of course they can aid freedom struggles like Mandela's, he insists, but only after purging themselves of a bitter legacy—"excusing, ignoring, or even justifying leadership atrocities and betrayals, simply because they are of the left.'" The second point of orientation was an essay by Charles Sugnet about the literary magazine Granta...

...True to form, Neogy permitted the head of Obote's secret police to reply to that characterization with a point-by-point rebuttal in Transition 33...

...There was also the matter of its contents...

...My head began to pulse once more, a good warm pulsing...

...with the exception of the recent "White Issue," their magazine is never explicitly themed...

...I stayed with Alaydin Hasan Sali," recalls Malcomson of a stopover at the home of a former schoolteacher in Kilment, Turkey...

...Achebe, in his riposte, "English and the African Writer," offered an eloquent defense of his practice of Africanizing the colonizer's tongue...

...Each weaves a narrative from vignettes that incorporate short bursts of sociology, splashes of reportage, interviews, bits of scholarship, and scraps of memoir...

...Not only had its editorial offices migrated from East Africa to the northeastern United States, but it was emerging from a fifteen-year hiatus...

...Apologists and detractors alike feel free to decide which represents the DISSENT / Spring 1999 n MI MAGAZINES `real' Farrakhan...

...Steve Lino, it seems, was right...

...They know very little about us...

...The best essays in Transition manage to coax two contentious desires onto speaking terms: the desire to make the essay the tissue of personal reflection, and the desire to make it an instrument of historical analysis...

...I use "conversation" only partly as metaphor...

...In a handful of terse paragraphs, Wood casts three different states of mind against each other: his ruminations about being kokojuin (a black foreigner), his obsession with discerning what a fellow bather is thinking about him ("His skin is dark dark dark...

...We toasted...

...The root of his indignation is a volume from Harvard's own list...

...Is race an inescapable reality or an eradicable myth, the nemesis of a color-blind politics or the catalyst of a multicultural society...

...99 MAGAZINES there is a bonus: Transition publishes this cacophony of argument with a minimum of editorial throat-clearing...

...We wouldn't go so far as to publish a piece by David Duke," Appiah told the Harvard Gazette in 1993, "but we do publish things we don't agree with...

...Sugnet chooses all the right targets—the monthly's myopic view of race in the United States, its publication of Robert Kaplan's crypto-colonial essays on Africa—yet his belligerent, strident tone suggests he might be more at home at a county fair duck shoot...

...A few examples...

...Transition has kept pace with many of the changes around the world, but parts of the magazine world have not taken enough risks to keep pace with Transition...

...Transition was not only pissing people off but doing so with such aplomb that the Angry Reader couldn't help but reply...

...I got out and repeated the process several times...

...Take "For Polite Reactionaries,"in which Charles Sugnet attacks the political sensibility of the Atlantic...

...Nonetheless, each issue features the latest strands of one or more long-running debates about race...

...When Granta writers go abroad, Sugnet claims, they tramp a path trod nearly a century ago by H. Rider Haggard...

...I could tell—I saw my skin in his eyes and I knew that look and what it meant...

...Another of Transition's accomplishments is its devotion to the essay...

...Emboldened by the release of Nelson Mandela, Soyinka condemns the ideological self-righteousness that has animated the continent's dictators during the last thirty years and tarnished the efforts of democratic-minded politicians...

...With effort I rose, went to the faucets, scrubbed my body once more...

...Some other essays are merely sensationalist...

...The continent as a whole was changing dramatically...

...His acceptance of repugnant views must be determined by his ability to reply to them, and not because someone said, 'always look at both sides of the story.'" Neogy voiced these opinions in 1966 in an essay tagged with the cover line "Do magazines make an impression on culture...

...Prime Minister Apollo Milton Obote could tolerate Neogy's commitment to unfettered expression only if Neogy chose not criticize the new Ugandan government's drift toward tyranny...

...Other interviews resemble a conversation from a Philip Roth novel, with characters lobbing rants at each other...

...Despite delivering a philippic about Achieving Our Country, Waters still respects Rorty, striking an impish tone one has come to expect from Transition...

...Consider the array of essays in issue 71, published in 1996...

...Besides Wood's "The Yellow Negro," there's Adrian Piper's autobiographical "Passing for White, Passing for Black" and Jamaica Kincaid's "On Seeing England for the First Time," a sharp-elbowed recollection of growing up in Antigua, where as a child the three words "Made in England" infiltrated Kincaid's life absolutely...

...With patience one grasps the germ of each conversation, even as some voices peel off in new directions and others chime in...

...Some correspondents wrote to applaud, some agreed to disagree, others nit-picked, and still others were just plain mad...

...He was soon orchestrating the first of many extended debates in Transition, as Obiajunwa Wali, a young Nigerian critic, and the novelist Chinua Achebe squared off over the proposition that African novelists should write in African languages...

...DURING A TRIP South in the early 1960s, James Baldwin dubbed himself a fly in buttermilk...

...Steele himself has been the subject of three pieces in Transition, a fact that signals the magazine's ongoing concern with the fortunes of the new black conservatism...

...Two Harvard professors, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., edited the new Transition, and a university press, Oxford, published it, but it certainly didn't read like the typical academic journal circa 1991, when Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault were still the rage...

...But sometimes rage gets the better of Transition's essayists, and they give way to ranting...

...Someone whom he dubs an incarnation of Emersonian individualism: the late gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur...

...Some of Transition's most engaging arguments occur in its interviews, which lend a platform—if not an ear—to some irreverent voices...

...Kilson inveighs against Carter, Sowell, and Steele for espousing a reactive rather than proactive politics, and thereby leading themselves into a moral declivity...

...Then there's "The Yellow Negro," in which Joe Wood describes a journey to Japan and his encounters with "jiggers," Japanese teenagers whose enthusiasm for hip-hop runs to the extreme...

...Tarzan is an Expatriate," Paul Theroux's 1967 attack on the racism of East African whites, provoked a deluge of angry letters...

...An editor, he continued, "should be neutral but not a neuter...

...But they didn't...

...The early Transition's letters pages answered that question with an unequivocal yes...

...Unlike many commentators on Farrakhan, Gates doesn't pander to sensationalism...

...I knew...

...Issue 1 appeared in November 1961, featuring poems, literary criticism, and political essays...

...So warm are the ashes of burning empires...

...spineless (Where's the party line...

...That hooks, an outspoken feminist, claims that for many feminists the director of the Nazi spectacle Triumph of the Will "remains an artist to study, admire, and emulate" is certainly provocative...

...The power turned on, and Madonna appeared on TV...

...The concern is not an infatuation...

...Take Wood's "The Yellow Negro," which concludes with an enlightening moment of discomfiture...

...What better name for a magazine indelibly bound to these changes than Transition...

...Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, Waters sneers,"is the supreme instance of what George Santayana calls the DISSENT / Spring 1999 n 103 MAGAZINES genteel tradition...

...Correspondence MAGAZINES poured in from around the globe: England, Australia, Sweden, the Virgin Islands, Finland, the United States, Canada, and, of course, various countries in Africa...

...Mind you, Waters, the executive editor of humanities at Harvard University Press, didn't attack just any book...

...In 1960, having returned home to Kampala, Uganda, with a degree from the University of London, Neogy wanted to start a magazine I00 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 that would spark a literary and intellectual renaissance in East Africa...

...Malveaux needles Steele for his opposition to affirmative action...

...These letters pages, as much as anything else, signaled Neogy's editorial triumph: he had produced a magazine that did not preach to the choir...

...104 n DISSENT / Spring 1999...

...For all their aggressive non-prejudice, however, the editors don't stage disputes in Neogy's manner...

...My skin felt raw and good...

...And whose grasp of contemporary politics does Waters prefer to that of his marquee author...

...Soyinka's equal in exposing the sentimental, Sugnet maintains that too much of Granta recycles imperialist clichés about race and geography...

...And the essayist, while eschewing the stance of Representative Man (or Woman) monumentalized by Octavio Paz, nonetheless uses hard-won personal experiences and observations to gain a purchase on flinty social realities...

...The other man left...

...Where was the jargon, and where were the theoretical fads and the prima donnas...

...And in "The Poverty of Poverty," Nicholas Lemann decries the hollow vocabulary used by intellectuals of both left and right in discussions of economic inequality...

...I washed hard, cleaned everything again, including my hair this time...

...They darken their complexions with ultraviolet rays to look black, and they hang out in clubs with Africans and African Americans...

...Actually, Transition has looked at such politics plenty...

...This is equally true of the new series...

...Achieving that clarity is what creates the essay's drama, and it is as integral to the social reality depicted in the essay as are the people and places described therein...

...That year alone the United Nations had admitted to its ranks seventeen new African states, all the offspring of decolonization...

...In the late 1960s, the Washington Post pegged Transition as "a combination of Ramparts and the New Republic...

...In "The Feminazi Mystique," for instance, bell hooks examines the career of the filmmaker Leni Riefensthal...

...The magazine faced a fresh generation of readers who knew of it only through patchy collections of back issues—if they knew of it at all...

...and unlike Farrakhan himself, Gates forgoes dogma and attends to complexity and irony...

...AN UNGENEROUS reader, having sifted through this small sample of material, might harrumph that Transition is either dilettantish (Can't it fix its attention on at least one school of thought...

...What one hears in Transition's intellectually and racially hybrid rap on race is not unlike what Theodor Adorno–in a line quoted 102 n DISSENT / Spring 1999 by Alex Ross in Transition 69–heard in Alban Berg's opera Lulu: a grand effort to synthesize "the incompatible, the disparate, and letting them grow together...

...Henry Louis Gates, Anthony Appiah, and executive editor Michael Colin Vazquez have resurrected Neogy's commitment to pluralism and unfettered debate...

...Malcomson and Wood use similar voices: unassuming, reflective, and a tad ironic...

...Rather, it springs from a gumshoe diligence toward the investigation of a problem...

...This is more baffling than anything white America has ever attempted," writes Wood...

...Borders were changing, new political and literary sensibilities were emerging...

...In "Mike's Brilliant Career," Gerald Early muses on Mike Tyson's inability to crack the riddle of black cool...

...There will be no birth without miscegenation," an editorial declared in issue 3. Neogy did not betray those words...

...For that matter, where else would you find, in back-to-back issues, an essay that deplores the phenomenon of the yellow Negro and an essay that, by pitting the ironic white professor against the "real" black rapper, carries echoes of Norman Mailer's "The White Negro...

...Its travel essays, for instance, feature "a rational, detached, slightly disillusioned writer making a foray out from the center (usually London or Oxbridge) to the periphery (Uganda, Benin, Vietnam, Borneo) where he (and it's almost always a he) sees that, as usual, the peripheries are uncivilized, and the people of color who live there are making a botch of running the place...

...Wood, having circulated among the habitués of the jigger scene, realizes that "the sexualized 'cool' that Japanese attribute to blackness doesn't leave much space for black humanity...

...This mix recalls the New Journalism's knapsack of rhetorical tricks, but both Malcomson and Wood cultivate a prose MAGAZINES style more akin to that of George Orwell and James Baldwin than Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion—one that favors diffidence and remorseless clarity over sizzle and chilly incisiveness...

...Rage is the raw material of many of Transition's finest essays...

...With infrequent exceptions, their Transition lacks a letters page...

...And DISSENT / Spring 1999...

...I went back to the tub...

...0 NE REASON Transition has thrived is that it has not forsaken the legacy of its combative founder, Rajat Neogy...

...Wood, trying to stay fly in the sento, resolves his episode of exfoliation on this note: I nearly passed out...

...The constitution was soon ratified, but the exchange about its merits spilled into the next issue of Transition, which featured a letter from one Steve Lino, who bitterly charged that the constitution did not befit a democracy...

...The first issue of the new series featured Stephen J. Carter commending Steele and Thomas Sowell for arguing that affirmative action has exacerbated the problem of the color line...

...It would be misleading to define Transition with a similar comparison today, for a very simple reason...

...In time, Wole Soyinka and many other writers of various aesthetic and ideological persuasions joined the fracas...

...All these diverse notions—and many others—have found a home in Transition, and have presented themselves, for the most part, in original and intellectually rigorous voices...

...In 1967, Transition 32 featured a discussion of Obote's "illiberal, authoritarian, and dictatorial" new constitutional proposals, which included a provision for executive powers of preventive detention...

...We must constantly remember," Soyinka implores his readers, "that the African has never been allowed to enter fully into the European's consciousness, not in a fundamentally affective way, as yet another segment of the human family" Transition brings the same urgency to the issue of race in the United States—but to its great credit, it enforces no party lines...

...The jiggers, it seems, have lifted their sense of "black culture"— the inner-city homeboy revue—from the tabloids, Hollywood, and MTV...

...And why not...

...JOHN PALATTELLA'S essays and reviews have appeared in Lingua Franca, Dissent, Boston Review, and other publications...

...Where, for that matter, were the footnotes...

...So begins "Continental Drift," in which Scott L. Malcomson details his travels through the political landscape of post-cold war Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, where he witnesses various nonwhite ethnic groups all trying to forge a flimsy idea of Europe into their escutcheon...

...The exchange finally gets the better of Steele, who explodes in a rage: "If you write a book or if you make a statement that might be interpreted as critical of Black life–Bingo!–you are a right-wing neoconservative...

...So no one will look at your actual politics after that...

...In issue 70, for instance, Henry Louis Gates chats with Louis Farrakhan, and their conversation opens on a pleasant enough note, with Farrakhan reminiscing about his career as a calypso singer...

...Try to imagine Al Jolson or Sophie Tucker or even Bert Williams wearing their blackface with pride, going out on the town, trying to seduce black people...

...and his enthusiasm for the sento ritual of scrubbing under cold water taps before immersion in a pool of steaming water...

...I didn't understand this when I first read Transition...

...Cut to Wood's last day in Japan, and his account of bathing in a sento, or public bath...

...its editor was neither an intellectual purist nor a cultural separatist...

...I let my muscles go and submitted to the hold of weightlessness...

...Readers are not asked to endure self-congratulatory notes about the magazine's breadth or high-mindedness...

...Transition has struck out in a different direction...

...But when Gates asks Farrakhan "to get into this Jewish thing," the dam breaks and Farrakhan's patented antiSemitic vitriol spills forth...

...Last year in Transition, Lindsay Waters assailed a recent book about contemporary politics that, in his words, "blasphemes the truth of our dreams...

...or sensational (It's staging an endless battle royale...

...The curious and careful reader will detect something different...

...In issue 56, Julianne Malveaux spars with Shelby Steele about his book The Content of Our Character...

...In some instances, however, a contrarian sensibility can do more than simply shock or numb...

...Instead, he exercised his newly authorized powers of preventive detention and had Neogy jailed...

...In issue 59 the tables were turned—sort of—in Martin Kilson's "Anatomy of Black Conservatism...

...I did not know then that the statement 'Draw a Map of England' was something far worse than a declaration of war," Kincaid writes, "for in fact a flat-out declaration of war would have put me on alert, and again in fact there was no need for war—I had long ago been conquered...

...The interview is remarkable, not least for the way it is framed...

...In "The Dead End of African Literature," Wali insisted on making the use of African languages the litmus test of literary achievement...

...There's Scott L. Malcomson's "West of Eden," a glimpse at the lives of Senegalese Muslim immigrants in New York City who peddle greymarket goods out of suitcases in the hopes of achieving "the economic conquest of America...

...Peter Beinart, in "The Jews of South Africa," examines the difficult choice faced by many Jews living under apartheid: make a separate peace with white politicians and thereby preserve the detachment that sheltered Jews from religious persecution or join blacks in the struggle for liberation and forgo the ethnic identity that detachment protected...

...One was "Beyond the Berlin Wall," an unvarnished account of postcolonial Africa by Wole Soyinka, chair of Transition's editorial board...

...Soyinka edited the magazine from 1973 to 1976, the last years of its first incarnation...

...After all, where else would you find an editor arguing in print about the merits and demerits of one of his author's books...

...But hooks's flat-footed prose, hamstrung by psychoanalytic jargon, drains her essay of nuance, and her contrarian remarks about Riefensthal's being a feminist hero ring hollow...

...Obote was unwilling to tolerate such dissent, but he did not say so in the letters pages of Transition...

...Transition has never shrunk from taking gambles, and that's precisely why it remains vital...

...To lend readers some guidance, Transition 51 offered two points of orientation...

...The South African novelist Bessie Head once remarked that Transition was a home to her during the 1960s because it didn't pretend to have all the answers...

...Neogy gladly printed some of them under the heading "Letters from the Tarzans...

...All these pieces are impeccably written, and all of them could have appeared elsewhere: Malcomson's and Early's in the New Yorker, Beinart's in the New York Times Magazine, Lemann's in the Nation...