Podcast
Transition on the Wire
In our inaugural podcast, Sarah Ladipo Manyika interviews best-selling, Booker-Prize- winning author Bernardine Evaristo. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or directly from Soundcloud. Join us each month for a new interview with authors and artists of the Diaspora. In our next episodes, Sarah interviews rapper, singer-songwriter will.i.am and actor Delroy Lindo!
Artist Spotlight
Kapwani Kiwanga
Kapwani, a Canadian artist based in Paris, is currently representing Canada at the 2024 Venice Biennale, where in that country’s pavilion, you can view her installation “Trinket,” which in characteristic fashion for this artist known for her deep research, examines the smallest and most coveted item of commerce in Venetian history, the seed beed.
Kiwanga’s work has explored enslaved women’s use of plants as a way both to abort children who would have been born into bondage and also to poison their enslavers. In her interview with Makeda Best in T135 SPECIES, she discusses her work Residue, which addresses the way in which the chlordecone crisis continues to poison the land and people of Martinique, as well as past work—including Flowers for Africa (right) one of Kiwanga’s most celebrated works—as well as current projects, her process, and what animates her practice.
Kapwani Kiwanga, Flowers for Africa: Rwanda, 2019, Exhibition view, “Prélude”, la Mécanique, Générale, LUMA, Arles (FR), 2021 © Photo Marc Domage. Courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery,
Cape Town, Johannesburg, London / Galerie Poggi, Paris / Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Featured Award
Winelle Felix and Zkara Gaillard Win PEN/Dau Awards for Debut Short Stories
The PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers recognizes twelve emerging writers annually for their debut short story published in a literary magazine, journal, or cultural website, and aims to support the launch of their careers as fiction writers. Winelle has won for her story “Return to Sender: Big Time Tief” and Zkara for her story “A Good Word.” Read both stories in T134!
The winning writers each receive a $2,000 cash prize and will be published by Catapult in their annual anthology, Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize.
From the Archive
Upon Returning to Jamaica in Search of the Undead
When Thomas Glave visited Manchester, Jamaica, with his family, he could not find his great-great-grandmother’s grave. She, Catherine Wright, a Black woman, most likely, did not have one. But his great-great-grandfather’s stone, though cracked and unadorned, lays steadfast on the land to mark the death of the Englishman. Their child spreads his palms on the grave. What easier way to invoke the life of the forgotten by placing your hands on the one who has chosen, by circumstance or conviction, to forget you?
That is only one question the writer Thomas Glave posits for himself, and by extension his ancestry, in his essay, “In Search of the Undead: (Un)marked Graves and The Sea of We,” published in Transition, Issue T128. In his commitment to uncovering the hard truths of racial economy, sexual politics, and their intersection, Glave provides a searching, uncompromising historical account—as Transition authors have done since the magazine’s founding.
—Bizaye Banjaw
Our History
The Longest-Running Pan-African Cultural Magazine
In immediate postcolonial Africa…the various decolonized or soon-to-be decolonized countries didn’t know too much about one another…
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Transition aims to speak to the lay intellectual through jargon-free, readable prose that provides both insight and pleasure.
