African and African-diasporic magazine Transition has a new issue out which is titled Home Soon. The 134th issue of the historic magazine focuses on the many meanings of home and belonging through fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual culture.

Transition was founded in 1961 in Uganda as an East African literary magazine by the late Rajat Neogy. It developed a reputation for tough-minded, far-reaching criticism, both cultural and political. In recent years, it has been under the aegis of the W.E.B Du Bois Institute at Indiana University and transferred to the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University in 2013.

Issue 134: Home Soon features a stellar roster of debut and emerging African writers including poetry by Nigerian poets Adedayo Agarau and Okwudili Nebeolisa, Amy Abugo Ongiri’s exploration of the African roots of Mambomania, as well as Bhakti Shringarpure’s illuminating interview with East African film directors, Lula Ali Ismail and Amil Shivji.

Read the synopsis of the issue and the reasons for the theme of home below:

Home Soon takes its title from Taylor Byas’s poem “Re-narrativization” in which the speaker, chooses to call “the vague choreography” of vultures following her home “a halo.” At the end of the poem, the birds scatter as she declares her permanence. Ama Codjoe, in her experimental personal essay, finds the comforts of home in Little Africa in Paris, which is, at times, less than welcoming. In other work, like Zkara Gaillard’s story “A Good Word, “reality complicates the longing for home, or a home; see Panamanian artist Giana De Dier’s series of collages, “Home and Belonging: Contextualizing Ownership,” which explores the history of Panamanians of color displaced in the early 1900s by the segregation of the Canal Zone.

The issue sounds absolutely stunning based on the in-depth look at the concept of home here. Readers will be thrilled to know that the issue is open access for a limited time only.

Read the issue here.

Table of Contents

Re-narrativization, and: From the Photo Album – Taylor Byas

Madam Kosoko – Eviano George

migration, and: we daydreamed of angels – Adedayo Agarau

The Colonial Chains of Neo-Liberalism: How Marine Le Pen Was Able to Win the Elections in the French Caribbean – Silyane Larcher

Return to Sender: Big Time Tief – Winelle Felix

Phonetics – Clemonce Heard

A Good Word – Zkara Gaillard

On Being Lost, and: Americana: A Becoming – Myronn Hardy

The Levee – Stanley Stocker

Talking Behind Glass – Myles Gordon

pushing a broken cart through the unplowed target parking lot – Marlin M. Jenkins

An Excessive Number of Beautiful Things – Jess Silfa

Mambomania! Perez Prado, the Rise of Afro-Latin Music and the Negotiation of Race in Afro-Latin Exchange in the Fifties – Amy Abugo Ongiri

Hypnotic, and: Relative, 1968 – Kortney Morrow

Love, Feminism, and Freedom on the Indian Ocean: Lula Ali Ismail and Amil Shivji on East Africa’s Film Renaissance – Bhakti Shringarpure, Amil Shivji, Lula Ali Ismail

The Threshold: Photograph, and: Somewhere Between the Prime & the Obsolete – Abdulkareem Abdulkareem

Damask Rose, or The Evening Lamp’s Light – Issa Quincy

Looping the Loop: Assemblage, Repetition, and Diaspora: Three Museums—Paris, France – Ama Codjoe

Pee Goes Quick – Lutivini Majanja

Negotiations with the Snow, and: Rationale – Okwudili Nebeolisa

They’ll Probably Be Okay – Miranda Valerie