Small Axe

The Small Axe Project:
A Caribbean Platform of Criticism
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small axe: a caribbean platform for criticism

The Small Axe Project consists of this: to participate both in the renewal of practices of intellectual criticism in the Caribbean and in the expansion/revision of the scope and horizons of such criticism. We acknowledge of course a tradition of social, political, and cultural criticism in and about the regional/diasporic Caribbean. We want to honor t

hat tradition but also to argue with it, because in our view it is in and through such argument that a tradition renews itself, that it carries on its quarrel with the generations of itself: retaining/revising the boundaries of its identity, sustaining/altering the shape of its self-image, defending/resisting its conceptions of history and community. It seems to us that many of the conceptions that guided the formation of our Caribbean modernities—conceptions of class, gender, nation, culture, race, for example, as well as conceptions of sovereignty, development, democracy, and so on—are in need of substantial rethinking. The Small Axe Project aims to provide a platform for such rethinking. We aim to enable an informed and sustained debate about the present we inhabit, its political and cultural contours, its historical conditions and global context, and the critical languages in which change can be thought and alternatives reimagined. Such a debate, we would insist, is not the prerogative of any one genre, and therefore we invite fiction as well as nonfiction, poetry, interviews, visual art, and discussion pieces.

01/05/2026

Introducing our 2026 Editorial Assistants! 🎉

We warmly welcome our new assistants J Jokhai, Master’s student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, and Carlos Montes Jiménez, PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.

We also welcome back Dantaé Garee Elliott, Ph.D., visiting lecturer at NYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Laura Berríos, PhD student in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, who are returning to the team.

We extend our gratitude to our outgoing editorial assistant, Luis Frías, for all of his intellectual and organizational contributions to the Small Axe Project.

Take a look at our latest SX Blog post to learn more about our team: 🔗 https://smallaxe.net/content/1382

For our latest issue, other platforms, and social media accounts: 🔗 https://seemlify.com/smallaxe

12/11/2025

Turning to the neglected writings of the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James on a hazardous radiation issue from 1959, this essay meditates on the dual meaning of power—radiant power and political power—that surfaced in the anticolonial struggle for Chaguaramas. For James, the scientific fact of radiation remained secondary to the political fact of radiation as a basis for working-class power and self-organization.
Read @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/2u67sbs7

12/07/2025

Through the analysis of Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s novel Daughters of the Stone(2009) and Josefina Báez’s long poem Comrade, Bliss Ain’t Playing (2011, 2013), this essay investigates how Afro-Latina writers depict Afro-Latinx subjectivities in the hispanophone Caribbean and the United States.

Read @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/3h9uhn79

12/05/2025

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 https://tinyurl.com/37wzebzz

12/01/2025

This essay describes Claude McKay’s historical imagination as it emerges in his views of the following: first, the history of former and current empires; second, the influence of economic systems on how time is experienced in the West and the Caribbean; and third, art’s historical function as a portal to lost customs.
Read @ Duke, https://tinyurl.com/3pd257u8

11/23/2025

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, under whose complacent security they tried as best as they could to put their wayward past behind them.”
Read @ Duke, https://tinyurl.com/38a8jeyd

11/22/2025

Two upcoming lectures on Walter Rodney by our editor, David Scott. Details below.

Annual Walter Rodney Lecture, Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, Tuesday, 25 November 2025
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ccs/

The Otolith Group hosts David Scott for a talk on Walter Rodney at LIbrary Transmissions project at Ibraaz, London, Friday, 28 November 2025:
https://ibraaz.org/whats-on/library-transmissions-on-losing-and-gaining-conceptual-languages

David Scott

11/16/2025

Book Discussion: Lorgia García Peña, Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective
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 https://tinyurl.com/mr3ajeex

11/11/2025

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 https://tinyurl.com/48txdj6r

11/09/2025

Commemorating and critiquing the author’s nearly three-month stint living with and being possessed by the Trinidad and Tobago Memorial Quilt, this essay is an offering in response to that haunting, an offering that demonstrates a way not only to write about a Caribbean AIDS quilt—honoring and preserving in print some of the lives gathered within it—but also to approach quilting as methodology.

Read it @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/2jmmkb64

11/04/2025

This essay explores the representation of same-sex eroticism and love between women in Ana-Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt (2008). As a q***r narrative about two women of Haitian Dominican and Afro-Dominican descent, Erzulie’s Skirt offers a decolonial poetics that counters the whitewashing, anti-Blackness, and Christian nationalism of Dominican normative identity.
Read It @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/yc8mmwfj

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