SX art 8 is out!
Nicole Smythe-Johnson interviews Deborah Anzinger, award-winning Jamaican artist and founder of non-profit visual art initiative, New Local Space (NLS).
Link 🔗: smallaxe.net/sxart/projec...
SX art 8 is out!
Nicole Smythe-Johnson interviews Deborah Anzinger, award-winning Jamaican artist and founder of non-profit visual art initiative, New Local Space (NLS).
Link 🔗: smallaxe.net/sxart/projec...
This essay meditates on the dual meaning of power—radiant power and political power—that surfaced in the anticolonial struggle for Chaguaramas. The scientific fact of radiation remained secondary to the political fact of radiation as a basis for working-class power.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/2u67sbs7
By analyzing Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s novel Daughters of the Stone and Josefina Báez’s long poem Comrade, Bliss Ain’t Playing, this essay investigates how Afro-Latina writers depict Afro-Latinx subjectivities in the hispanophone Caribbean and the United States.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/3h9uhn79
Focusing on Frederick Douglass’s “A Trip to Hayti” (1861) and the first installment of James Theodore Holly’s “Thoughts on Hayti” (1859), this essay examines the strategic idealization of Haiti in mid-nineteenth-century African American propaganda.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/37wzebzz
This essay describes Claude McKay’s historical imagination: the history of former and current empires; the influence of economic systems on how time is experienced in the West and the Caribbean; and art’s historical function as a portal to lost customs.
Read @ Duke, tinyurl.com/3pd257u8
SX editor David Scott writes, in the preface to the issue 78, about the betrayal of the leadership of the communist Left in Jamaica who, after the dismantlement of the party back in the 70s, were “reabsorbed into middle-class respectability and conformity.”
Read @ Duke, tinyurl.com/38a8jeyd
In our Book Discussion of the SX 78, authors Marisel Moreno, Elizabeth S. Manley, and Lorgia García Peña colabore with essays on García Peña’s Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective.
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/mr3ajeex
In the Small Axe 77 issue, our Keywords in Caribbean Studies section is devoted to the concept Heritage, with essays by Alyssa James, Ayana Omilade Flewellen, Khadene Harris, and Nadia Mosquera Muriel
Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/48txdj6r
Commemorating and critiquing the author’s nearly three-month stint living with and being possessed by the Trinidad and Tobago Memorial Quilt, this essay demonstrates a way not only to write about a Caribbean AIDS quilt, but to approach quilting as methodology.
Read it @ Duke tinyurl.com/2jmmkb64
This essay explores the representation of same-sex eroticism and love between women in Ana-Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt (2008) which offers a decolonial poetics that counters the whitewashing, anti-Blackness, and Christian nationalism of Dominican identity.
Read It @ Duke tinyurl.com/yc8mmwfj
This essay revisits Nancy Morejón’s Lengua de pájaro not only because “it is a book of which little has been said” but because it provides a compelling lens to examine the intricate dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the Cuban cultural landscape of the 1960s.
Read it @ Duke tinyurl.com/4mt744sr
With great pleasure, the Small Axe Project welcomes Simone A. James Alexander to the sx salon editorial team, taking over the role of Book Reviews Editor from Ronald Cummings. Welcome Simone!
smallaxe.net/sxblog
This essay by C.C. McKee is grounded in the unsolved early modern mathematical problem of “squaring the circle” to explore geometrical form as a force that undergirded colonial violence in the Caribbean.
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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