IU Press Journals - Transition 115: Transition: the Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora

Transition was founded in 1961 in Uganda by the late Rajat Neogy and quickly established itself as a leading forum for intellectual debate. The first series of issues developed a reputation for tough-minded, far-reaching criticism, both cultural and political, and this series carries on the tradition.

AN INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Houston A. Baker, Jr.

Transition seeks the intersection between blackness and the world of clinical psychology.

Celebrated photojournalist Robin Hammond shares photos from his project Condemned, which documents human rights abuses against mentally ill Africans, often by their families, caregivers, and those entrusted with their healing

Yohuru Williams interviews Peniel Joseph about his new book Stokely: A Life and his decision to focus his recent scholarship on Stokely Carmichael, the elusive and controversial Prime Minister of the Black Panthers

Fiction

Finding links between Tarantinos Django Unchained and Kara Walkers A Subtlety, Catherine Keyser looks at how metaphors of sweetness and delectability shaped white understanding of black bodies in the slave economy of the Souths Sugar Kingdom

Lara Stein Pardo reviews artist Christopher Coziers recent Art Basel Miami exhibition, The Arrest, exploring how it comments on themes of mass incarceration and the tension between the real Caribbean and the imagined Caribbean of touristic fantasies

: Illuminary Luminating (detail). Mixed media collage on paper. 50 50 in. Courtesy of Derrick Adams and Hales Gallery, London. 2013 Derrick Adams.

Illuminary Luminating (detail). Mixed media collage on paper. 50 x 50 in. Courtesy of Derrick Adams and Hales Gallery, London. 2013 Derrick Adams.

IN HIS EXCAVATION of the history of the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, Gabriel Mendes enters into the paradox of a world in which the mental health of African Americans was either an invisible, underground absence or something over which many professionals in the human sciences obsessed. He is describing the United States of the midcentury, but this paradox has proven remarkably durable both in the Americas and in other historically colonial cultures. Both perspectives deny the connection between mind and world that is the ground zero of mental health.

But even when this connection is denied or attacked, it continues to communicate a powerful charge. Jonathan Metzls deep reading of the trope of schizophrenia in rap music elaborates this wisdom: if racism is, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, a mass psychosis, then black madnesswhether inborn or bred, clinical or metaphoricalis not only a natural response to this psychosis, but an argument about the natural responsiveness between self and society, minority and majority.

Robin Hammond exposes the nightmarish side of this feedback loop in his documentation of the lives of the mentally ill in South Sudan and Somalia. It is always a risk to disseminate images of this nature, reinforcing, as they seem to, notions of African abjection. But the inhumanity he witnesses is not just an African problem. In the United States, the prison of Rikers Island has the notorious distinction of being the largest psychiatric institution in the nation; 4,000 of its 11,000 inmates have been diagnosed with a mental illness. In July of this year, the New York Times published an investigative report on the rampant guard-on-inmate violence that takes place at Rikers, aimed disproportionately at those suffering from psychological conditions: brutal punishments for suicide attempts and stomach-turning incidents like the following, in which correctional officers handcuffed [inmate Andre Lane] to a gurney and transported him to a clinic examination room beyond the range of video cameras where, witnesses say, several guards beat him as members of the medical staff begged for them to stop. Accounts like this dispel any defensive instinct to say that the people shackled to the ground in Hammonds photographs are an African anomaly. In the absence of activist institutions like the Lafargue Clinic, imprisonment steps in as the most primitiveand most ubiquitousmethod of responding to populations that inconveniently express or fail to tolerate conditions of war, poverty, and oppression.