In Transition

When Transition 51 appeared in 1991, its editors could not have expected many readers to be acquainted with the magazine. Not only had its editorial offices migrated from East Africa to the northeastern United States, but it was emerging from a fifteen-year hiatus. The magazine faced a fresh generation of readers who knew of it only through patchy collections of back issues—if they knew of it at all. There was also the matter of its contents. Two Harvard professors, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., edited the new Transition, and a university press, Oxford, published it, but it certainly didn’t read like the typical academic journal circa 1991, when Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault were still the rage. Where was the jargon, and where were the theoretical fads and the prima donnas? Where, for that matter, were the footnotes?

To lend readers some guidance, Transition 51 offered two points of orientation. One was “Beyon...