Transition
No. 65

The cover photograph, by Brian Lanteigne, is of Dorian Corey, the drag queen of Paris Is Burning. Edward Conlon’s The Drag Queen and the Mummy opens the issue with the Manhattan mystery Corey left behind: an apartment of costumes and a body twenty years dead in her closet. Nuruddin Farah follows with Bastards of Empire, on writing and the post-colonial condition when diaspora becomes a way of life; McKenzie Wark surveys the uses of innocence in the global media’s image of the child; Ilan Stavans traces machismo from the conquistador to the homosexual outlaw; and Jianying Zha tells the story of the Hong Kong entrepreneur Chan Koon-Chung on the eve of Chinese receivership. Under review, Richard T. Ford asks whose community communitarianism means, Ethan Casey reads American baseball through C. L. R. James, and Calvin Reid takes up Paul Gilroy. The issue closes with the complete text of the previous autumn’s Lincoln Center debate between Wynton Marsalis and the jazz critic James Lincoln Collier.