@smallaxeproject.bsky.social
A Caribbean Platform of Criticism https://smallaxe.net
This essay by Carlos Garrido Castellano attempts to answer two main questions: What might contemporary art from the Caribbean look like? And how does contemporaneity emerge when scrutinized from the point of view of the Caribbean?
Read it @ Duke tinyurl.com/ys4zuf6n
Congratulations to our very own Vanessa Pérez-Rosario on her new book on Julia de Burgos!
www.gc.cuny.edu/news/new-boo...
Small Axe 77 is now available!
Angel Otero's abstract work "Prose" is featured on the cover and in the visual essay.
Check out all the contents on smallaxe.net
Watch the video of “patería/ makoumé/ kambrada/ friend & family,” a conversation between Jacqueline Couti, Krystal Ghisyawan, Wigbertson Julian Isenia, and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, moderated by Ryan Cecil Jobson and Vanessa Pérez-Rosario.
smallaxe.net/sxprojects/k...
🗓️ Mark your calendars!
Join us in this conversation between José del Valle and SX editor David Scott about Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity.📍Friday, September 26th, 5:00-6:00 pm at @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social
The essay responds to the critiques by Gavin Arnall, Jackqueline Frost, and Grégory Pierrot of the author’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022).
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/2mxde23r
Welcome Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, who joins the Small Axe Project as the incoming sx salon Creative Editor. Roque is a poet of alluring imagery and a translator of distinction, and it is a great honor to have him in our community in this capacity. Welcome Roque!
smallaxe.net/content/1362
Taking exception with Nick Nesbitt’s premise qua Marx —that only free labor can produce surplus value— this essay by Grégory Pierrot argues that the polymorphic nature of slavery belies Marx’s absolutist correlation of free labor and surplus value.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/24sbm5rm
"On Bad Bunny's Residency" 🐰🇵🇷 by Wilfredo José Burgos Matos
smallaxe.net/content/1361...
Jackqueline Frost discusses the political poignancy of Aimé Césaire’s Marxist humanism through a reading of his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism. All of it in an open dialogue with Nick Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022)
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/3dzejhxm
This piece by Gavin Arnall enters into critical dialogue with Nick Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022), by exploring the original insights but also the blind spots of the book.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/y3p8e53r
“Perhaps it is our ancestral connection to Mysteries that has allowed us to endure the traumas and institutionally induced amnesia incited by the violence of coloniality,” writes Lisando Curiel in the visualities section of our current issue.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/2wmprx7p
Mervyn Morris writes on “Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously,” questioning some ideas he expressed 60 years ago, having learned from Bennett’s Jamaica Labrish (1966), and focuses on Bennett’s performance choices and on her sociopolitical commentary.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/yhn4k2s6
This essay by Ben Etherington considers Mervyn Morris’s sustained efforts to decolonize practical criticism. It starts by revisiting the canonical references that play a central role in Morris’s early critical intervention, “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously.”
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/ypnrszrc
Mervyn Morris is well known as a poet, mentor, and literary critic. Carolyn J. Allen examines a lesser-known area of his activity as a theater reviewer, based on selected drafts over the most active decade of theater production in Jamaica.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/5573fppw
In “Mervyn Morris on Orality and Literature in the Critical Landscape,” Carol Bailey examines Morris’s field-defining and groundbreaking contribution to Caribbean literary and cultural criticism, with particular emphasis on the decolonizing orientations of his work.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/msm6zadw
In this interview by Wayne Modest and Esmee Shoutens, artist Iris Kensmil explores recurring themes in her practice, such as Black feminist memory, histories of Black emancipation in the Netherlands, and the genre of portraiture as a practice of presencing.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/yc34vc9a
In this essay, Sophie Maríñez analyzes the music of Luis “Terror” Días (1952–2009), a composer recognized today as the most innovative in Dominican musical history.
youtu.be/akZGhf5Smig?...
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/58sjteur
René Johannes Kooiker focuses on the magazine Watapana, which published poetry, criticism, fiction, and translations from the Dutch Caribbean between 1968 and 1972, and hosted debates about the politics of language in the Papiamento- and Dutch-speaking islands.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/ycxah3bx
Introduciendo ideas de la metamorfosis del género y la plantación, Celenis Rodríguez propone un nuevo abordaje sobre el género y la formación de las subjetividades sexo genéricas de la población negra esclavizada en la plantación caribeña.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/4abn6yue
Aristides Dimitriou explores how the “epistemological deficiency” that characterizes the past becomes a necessary part of the historical imagination—the historical content becomes part of the narrative form through which Édouard Glissant envisions the past.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/mn9vmbad
In the preface, our editor David Scott reflects on memory and time, and what they bring with them when it comes to remembering what matters. The text invites us all to metaphorically —and literally— pay a visit at the Library of Things We Forgot To Remember.
Read it @ Duke tinyurl.com/5d7r8jkm
sx 76 has shipped!
It includes essays by Aristides Dimitriou, Celenis Rodríguez, René Kooiker, Sophie Maríñez, and Wayne Modest and Esmee Schoutens. It features the section "Mervyn Morris: Critic of Literary Voice." We highlight artwork by Lisandro Suriel.
Check it out tinyurl.com/2s4kdx97
sx 76 has shipped!
It includes essays by Aristides Dimitriou, Celenis Rodríguez, René Kooiker, Sophie Maríñez, and Wayne Modest and Esmee Schoutens. It features the section "Mervyn Morris: Critic of Literary Voice." We highlight artwork by Lisandro Suriel.
Check it out tinyurl.com/2s4kdx97
Announcing the launch of sx salon 48. The issue includes essays by Amandla Thomas-Johnson and Stéphane Martelly, reviews by Sasha Ann Panaram, Oriana Méjías Martinez, Maddi Chan and Linzey Corridon, poems by Letitia Marie Pratt, and stories by José Darío Martínez Milantchi and Alicia Valasse-Polius.
07.05.2025 00:46 — 👍 7 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 1
In this review essay, Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper posits that Régine Jean-Charles uses Black feminism rather than Haitian feminism in her book _Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction_ (2022).
#BookDiscussion
#RégineMichelleJean-Charles
Full Text@Duke tinyurl.com/484bc8kz
This Nadève Ménard’ review essay takes the liberty of offering reflections toward an alternate coda on Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s _Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction_
#BookDiscussion
#RégineMichelleJean-Charles
Full Text@Duke tinyurl.com/2x4t9t4p
Read Mónica B. Ocasio Vega’s essay, “From Loíza to Yauco’s Mountainous Area: Two Instances of Fugitive Food Practices in Puerto Rico.”
Thanks to Duke for making it available for free three months, tinyurl.com/2j6k8cwk
Congratulations to Mónica Ocasio on this honorific mention in the @Lasa-Puerto Rico Section for her article, “From Loíza to Yauco’s Montainous Area: Two Instances of Fugiitive Food Practices in Puerto Rico,” published in our issue 74.
Read it here, tinyurl.com/22d6shve
In “Otto Huiswoud and the Demise of the Red Black Atlantic,” Holger Weiss focuses on the activities of Otto Huiswoud from 1934 to 1937, when he was secretary of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers.
Full text @Duke tinyurl.com/n6naw3r8
