Transition
No. 63

“Race In Space.” The cover is a still of the featured alien from Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), and the issue’s pivot is Luise White’s Alien Nation, which reads contemporary UFO abduction stories as racial anxieties recast as extraterrestrial sex fantasies. Around it: Ellen Willis on Catharine MacKinnon and anti-pornography feminism; Bogumil Jewsiewicki and V. Y. Mudimbe on Edward Said and the dilemmas of the “postcolonial” intellectual; Selwyn R. Cudjoe on whether Show Boat is irredeemably racist; Román de la Campa on Latino identity; Philip Burnham on travel accounts of America; Andrew McCord on low-intensity warfare in Mozambique; Lucien Taylor on a Martinican master of obscurity; and Carol M. Swain on the Congressional Black Caucus. An exchange between Eliot Weinberger and Ilan Stavans runs under the headings Pas as “Dictator” and The Task of the Translator. In conversation, June Jordan talks to Peter Erickson about the fallacy of identity politics; Chief Eddie Ugbomah discusses African film with N. Frank Ukadike; and Albert and Allen Hughes talk to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about blaxploitation.