Title: Race, the final frontier…
Year: 1991
Issue: 52
Cover image: Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra in Jungle Fever. Photo by David Lee
POSITIONS
A Kinder, Gentler Islam? — Secularism is doomed to irrelevance for most Islamic states: but can Islam undergo its reformation and still be Islam? Now a leading Muslim legal scholar argues that the precepts of historical Islam can justify its own transformation. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im
Someone Writes to the Future: Meditations on Hope and Violence in Garcia Marquez — Ariel Dorfman explores the transformation of history, myth, and literature in a writer whose phantasmagoric imagination only just keeps pace with reality. Ariel Dorfman
Canon, Syllabus, List: A Note on the Pedagogic Imaginary — Just where is this canon, anyway? Amid all the grandstanding, a major theorist of the concept of “minority” sorts through the dubious logic of the entire debate. John Guillory
War Party: Buthelezi and Apartheid — The Chief’s peaceable relations with the apartheid state have long made him a favorite of conservatives-yet his Inkatha Freedom Party has sparked bloody violence in the black townships. What does Buthelezi want? And will he get it? Adam Ashforth
UNDER REVIEW
The Professor and the Prophet — Richard Rorty says he’d be prophetic, too, if only he could figure out what to prophesy.
Tact and Tarzan — When it comes to cross-cultural encounters, Michael Gorra wonders if Miss Manners doesn’t have as much to teach us as Magtre Derrida.
The Scandal of the Whorearchy — Anne McClintock revisits the sex trade in colonial Kenya.
V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin — Has he mellowed with age? Rob Nixon considers.
The Education of Judge Posner — Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr., tracks one of America’s most influential legal theorists on his road to Damascus.
Trading on the Margin — Renee Green finds a remedy for the multicultural malaise.
Split Screen — Berenice Reynaud focuses on the dialectics of identity in Israeli cinema.
Out of Turn — Lucy R. Lippard on Michele Wallace’s experiments in cultural criticism . . . and self-criticism.
IN FOCUS
Chaos by Proxy — Christopher Hitchens on Lebanon’s road to hell.
The Yen for Empire — Masao Miyoshi argues that the response to The Japan That Can Say No is almost as silly as the book itself.
Through the Looking Glass — Stephen Clingman on postcolonial Africa’s great expectations-and the mourning after.
The Postmodern Negro — Novelist Reginald McKnight on a new conception of race and difference.
CONVERSATION
Final Cut — Spike Lee and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., rap on race, politics, and black cinema.