Title: 50th Anniversary Issue
Year: 2011
Issue: 106
Artist cover by: a modified rendition of Transition No. 1, originally designed by Helen Calogeropoulos and A Place to Call Home ©Hank Willis Thomas, courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
How is it possible to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a magazine that has spanned three countries, two continents, and several long stretches of silence?
Issue 106 provides many answers. Rather than telling a seamless story about our journey from Africa to the Diaspora, we have called upon generations of remarkable contributors to define what the magazine has meant to them. The diversity of responses is astonishing:
Henry Finder describes it as “the internationalization of the African mind,” Ilan Stavans fancifully dubs it “the Jewish journal of blackness,” and for Wole Soyinka it has been nothing short of a “universal mission.” If there shall be “no birth without miscegination,” as our founder Rajat Neogy memorably declared, there shall be no remembrance without it either.
We devote the other half of this celebratory issue to Uganda, our birthplace. We return less to pay homage to our past than to imagine our future. Elizabeth Palchik Allen introduces exciting work from David Kaiza, Okello Ogwang, Richard Ssebaggala, and many others, all of whom explore their country’s “postcolonial identity” and call into question the easy coupling of those words. If any thread runs through all of these contemporary writings and the rest of Transition’s peripatetic history, it is the rejection of easy words in favor of hard words, weird words, and risky words. Only in providing a home to these can the true words be found. Read more about Transition’s History.
Read the issue on JSTOR: Celebrating Transition at Fifty / Reflections from Contemporary Uganda
View 50th Anniversary event photos …And the After Party!
Featured Articles: #OpenAccess
Cannibal Logic: An interview with Michael C. Vazquez
by Carina del Valle Schorske
On the occasion of 50 years since Transition‘s founding, former Executive Editor Michael C. Vazquez explores “culture as the great chain of swallowing.”
But Why, Father?: Looking back on the Legacy of the African Writers Series, Fifty Years On
by David Kaiza
For half a century, the African Writers Series was the publisher of record when it came to African literature (whatever that means). Growing up in the shadow of the AWS, Kaiza tells us why the next generation of writers is less concerned with salvaging black pride than with the craft of fiction itself.
Contributors: Side A – Nina Chanel Abney, Michael Adams, Onwubiko (Biko) Agozino, Olu Amoda, René Bélance, Jeffrey D. Brown, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Henry Finder, Jack Hamilton, F. Abiola Irele, Souleymane Keita, Adrianne M. LaFrance, Barbara Neogy Lapcek, Nomusa Makhubu, Ali A. Mazrui, Aimé Mpané, Rajat Neogy, Tolu Ogunlesi, Dayo Olopade, Carina del Valle Schorske, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, George Dillon Slater, Wole Soyinka, Ilan Stavans, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Paul Theroux, Hank Willis Thomas, Michael C. Vazquez. Side B – Ronex Ahimbisbwe, Elizabeth Palchik Allen, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Doreen Baingana, Elza Botha, Edward Echwalu, Sandile Goje, Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, Phillemon Hlungwani, Angelo Izama, Noah Jemisin, David Kaiza, Caroline W. Kaminju, Daudi Karungi, Susan Nalugwa Kiguli, Colbert Mashile, Paul Molete, Rodney Muhumuza, Henry Mzili Mujunga, Okello Ogwang, Walter Oltmann, Richard Ssebaggala, Motsamai Thabane.