Transition
No. 74

“The Gods Must Be Crazy.” The masthead has shifted — Michael Colin Vazquez is now executive editor, Henry Finder advisory editor, and Kelefa Sanneh assistant editor, with Micere M. Gĩthae Mũgo and William Julius Wilson added to the board. G. A. Elmer Griffin opens with race and golf in the Virgin Islands; Manthia Diawara argues that West African griots should be run out of business; and Michael Eldridge charts the history of “blacks” in “Britain.” Ellen Willis takes up integration and bourgeois bliss, Ilan Stavans traces the strange career of Jorge Luis Borges, and Lindsay Waters sets Richard Rorty against Tupac Shakur as a contest of pragmatisms. In conversation, Therese Steffen engages Rita Dove on The Darker Face of the Earth, and Lucien Taylor spars with Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant and Jean Bernabé about Négritude and the creolization of everyday life. Kelefa Sanneh goes underground with the Wu-Tang Clan’s Killah Priest, and Charles Sugnet talks to Baaba Maal about Islam, orality and the selling of African music.