The Trotter Review, which has been published for over fifteen years, is entering a new phase. That is what the current issue represents, a marriage of old and new, a branching out into expanded territory that does not betray, we hope, the ideals or principles of the past.

What we have put together is historical and cultural and political. We raise questions. We draw connections and provide context as we focus on the local, the national, the international, and the diasporic. In addition, we give cognizance to the literary, as an expression of the urge to order the real, to give it utterance, or, as Chuck D would say, to bow to the power of the pad.

We wanted to sample the range of work that the Trotter has produced, and for that reason, many of the articles and essays are drawn from papers that the Trotter Institute has published as monographs over the years. There is a theme here, and it is the resistance of the African-inflected spirit, generation after generation, community after community, and country after country in an internecine war that has not yet come to an end.