LONG HAULERS: Invisible Labor in Motion
by Zhena Faith Omojola This spring, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) hosted its annual Documentary Voices series, a program dedicated to showcasing contemporary documentary films and fostering critical conversations around nonfiction storytelling. The series is presented in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Film 125: Documentary Forms course, taught by Professor Deniz Göktürk, […]
The Fourth Memory
by Grégory Chatonsky & Yves Citton TRANSIT vol. 15, no. 1 Download PDF So-called “artificial intelligence” (AI) brings forth a new category of memory which recursively generates texts, speeches, images and sounds that can resemble “authentic” documents.1 In the automation of expression and representation using the massive data accumulated on the Web, the question of […]
Foreword to 15.1: “Words and Lives in Transit“
May 2026 Download PDF It is June of 1940, soon after the Nazis have taken Paris, and the first-person narrator of Anna Seghers’ Transit has been tasked by a friend with delivering a letter to the famous writer Weidel, who is staying at a hotel in the Rue de Vaugirard. The narrator, a double alumnus […]
Translator’s Introduction to “Journey to the Eleventh Reich”
TRANSIT no. 15, vol. 1 by Ambika S. Athreya Download PDF Click here for translation Anna Seghers wrote “Reise ins Elfte Reich” in Paris in 1938, and published it in early 1939, in a series of installments for the antifascist weekly Die neue Weltbühne, which by then was operating in exile in the same city.1 […]
“The Book of the Future” and “Enrichment”
TRANSIT vol. 15, no. 1 by Rafik Schami translated by Didem Uca Download PDF Click here for translator’s introduction The Book of the Future (1993) Manfred is one of the top computer experts in the country. “The book of the future,” he told me during his last visit, “will be like a dream. It will […]
Translator’s Introduction to Rafik Schami’s “The Book of the Future” and “Enrichment”
TRANSIT vol. 15, no. 1 by Didem Uca Download PDF Click here for translation Rafik Schami (b. 1946) is a Syrian-German author, editor, and literary critic born in Damascus, Syria, where he completed his initial schooling. Faced with compulsory military service and censorship, he moved to Lebanon in 1970 and then to Germany a year […]
Journey to the Eleventh Reich
TRANSIT vol. 15, no. 1 by Anna Seghers translated by Ambika S. Athreya Download PDF Click here for Translator’s Introduction I. Arrival When, despite all guarantees and guarantors, witnesses and recommendations, ten countries denied us entry, we found ourselves at a loss, and fell into despair. But one day, along the way, we met an […]
Alexander von Humboldt’s Examen critique de l’histoire de la géographie du Nouveau Continent et des progrès de l’astronomie nautique aux quinzième et seizième siècles (1836-1839)
A brief introduction to an excerpt from the first English version TRANSIT vol. 15, no. 1 by Vera M. Kutzinski Download PDF Click here for Translation Alexander von Humboldt’s Examen critique might rightly be regarded as the slightly belated crowning achievement of his writings about the Americas. Humboldt had begun his research for the Examen […]
Critical Examination of the History of the Geography of the New Continent and of the Progess of Nautical Astronomy in the 15th and 16th Centuries
by Alexander von Humboldt Translated by Vera M. Kutzinski TRANSIT vol. 15, no. 1 Download PDF Click here for Translator’s Introduction NOTE: Translator’s additions in square brackets. In general, the the translator has followed the orthography of the 1836 Gide edition of the text. To Dominique-François Arago, whose brilliant insights extended the fields of physical […]
The Inheritance
by Safae el Khannoussi translated by Elizabeth Sun and Thomas Siemerink TRANSIT vol. 15, no. 1 Download PDF Click here for Translator’s Introduction I. In the spring of 2001, a man sits in a Moroccan teahouse in Amsterdam’s Pijp district and recalls the story of A. M. Almosnino. The events he recounts take place in […]