Small Axe

07/09/2025

Grégory Pierrot argues In The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022), Nick Nesbitt revisits the relation between Atlantic slavery and capitalism, questioning the paradoxical nature of their relation, and further engaging with critiques of the system in the Black Jacobin radical tradition. 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, suggesting the essential relation between unfreedom in its many forms and capitalism.
Read @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/24sbm5rm

06/09/2025

We are back! We had our first Small Axe editorial office meeting of the semester. We are dreaming big as we plan for Small Axe volume #30 - #2026 . In these photos: David Scott, editor; Vanessa Perez-Rosario, managing editor; our editorial assistants, Dantaé Elliott and Laura Berríos. Missing from these photos is Luis Escamilla Frías (another one of our editorial assistants) who couldn’t make it.

05/09/2025

"On Bad Bunny's Residency" 🐰🇵🇷 by Wilfredo José Burgos Matos

The Fragile Joy of Staying – If Only in Song: On Bad Bunny’s Residency 2 September 2025 My seat neighbors, two best friends clinging to each other, voices breaking and tears streaming as they chanted every lyric of ‘Debí Tirar Más Fotos” (I Should Have Taken More Photos): their friendsh...

03/09/2025

This essay by Jackqueline Frost discusses the political poignancy of Aimé Césaire’s Marxist humanism through a reading of his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism. It asserts the contemporary necessity of revisiting the category of the human and Caribbean anticolonial humanisms in light of the racialized militarism of imperial projects today. All of it in an open dialogue with Nick Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022)
Read @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/3dzejhxm

02/09/2025

Happy pub day to sx salon creative editor Roque Raquel Salas Rivera!! 🇵🇷📚From “ALGARABÍA, a Puerto Rican trans epic that blends poetic play and speculative fiction, by a Lambda Literary Award winner. / Una epopeya puertorriqueña trans que mezcla poesía y narrative especulativa, por un ganador del premio Lambda.”

31/08/2025

This essay by Gavin Arnall enters into critical dialogue with Nick Nesbitt’s The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean (2022). It explores the original insights but also the blind spots of the book’s interpretation of capitalist slavery, which hinges on a specific understanding of Karl Marx’s value-form analysis and his monetary labor theory of value.
Read @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/y3p8e53r

28/08/2025

“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 this issue’s section visualities titled “The Riddle at Bizmoune: The Jinn, the Jumbee, and the Arrival of Ě̌là.”
Read @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/2wmprx7p

25/08/2025

Small Axe Project welcomes poet and translator Roque Raquel Salas Rivera as sx salon creative editor. Roque is a Puerto Rican poet, educator, and translator of trans experience. His honors include being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, the Premio Nuevas Voces, and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. Among his six poetry books are lo terciario/ the tertiary (Noemi, 2019), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds LLC, 2019), which inspired the title for no existe un mundo poshuracán at the Whitney Museum. In September 2025, Graywolf Press will publish his epic poem Algarabía. Roque currently teaches in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, and serves the needs of a fierce cat named Pietri.

17/08/2025

Invited to write an autobiographical essay on “Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously,” sixty years after its initial publication, Mervyn Morris questions some of the attitudes and opinions he expressed then, having learned from Bennett’s Jamaica Labrish (1966) and some responses to it to pay more attention to Bennett’s performance choices and her sociopolitical commentary.
Read @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/yhn4k2s6

16/08/2025

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 https://tinyurl.com/ypnrszrc

12/08/2025

https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2025-08-11-caribbean-intellectual-prof-david-scott-brings-small-axe-and-big-questions-to-south-africa/

The Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study recently hosted one of the Caribbean’s most formidable intellectuals, Prof David Scott, to discuss the postcolonial condition.

11/08/2025

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 https://tinyurl.com/5573fppw