Small Axe

Small Axe The Small Axe Project:
Small Axe, sx salon and sx art The Small Axe Project aims to provide a platform for such rethinking.

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. 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.

sx 76 has shipped! The new issue includes essays by Aristides Dimitriou, Celenis Rodríguez, René Kooiker, Sophie Maríñez...
07/06/2025

sx 76 has shipped!

The new issue includes essays by Aristides Dimitriou, Celenis Rodríguez, René Kooiker, Sophie Maríñez, and Wayne Modest and Esmee Schoutens. It features a special section titled "Mervyn Morris: Critic of Literary Voice." We highlight Lisandro Suriel’s work on the cover and in our visual essay. We close the issue with a book discussion of Nick Nesbitt's The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean.

Check it out https://tinyurl.com/2s4kdx97

Small Axe celebrates Pride Month 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️We are sharing our Caribbean Q***r Visualities catalog, from the archives and ...
06/01/2025

Small Axe celebrates Pride Month 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️
We are sharing our Caribbean Q***r Visualities catalog, from the archives and freely available. Access the PDF here:https://smallaxe.net/cqv/issue-01/pdfs/CQV-001%20fullCATALOGUE.pdf

The catalog grows out of two symposia organized by Small Axe the first at Yale University, 14–15 November 2014; and the second at Columbia University, 2–3 April 2015. Read more about this important project by following the link provided above.

In response to the various review essays, this essay ponders the afterlives of _Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism...
05/04/2025

In response to the various review essays, this essay ponders the afterlives of _Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction_ (2022) by reflecting on the presence and absence in Caribbean literature of Haitian girls’ dreams for the future. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles examines the Haitian girl characters in novels by Kettly Mars, Yanick Lahens, and Évelyne Trouillot, as well as in a poem by Claudine Michel.

Full Text@Duke https://tinyurl.com/34hdvwby

In Looking for _Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction_ (2022), Régine Jean-Charles evokes revolutionary figur...
05/01/2025

In Looking for _Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction_ (2022), Régine Jean-Charles evokes revolutionary figures such as Sanité Bélair and Victoria Montou, who fought in the Haitian Revolution. She also revisits the legacy of Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, who was said to have fought back a siege by the French army during the Revolution. In this review essay, Nathalie Batraville asks, What might it mean to extend Jean-Charles’s celebration of revolutionary fighters Bélair, Montou, and Lamartinière into the present?


-Charles
FullText@Duke https://tinyurl.com/4ejkxy7r

Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022) by Régine Jean-Charles engages scholarship across mu...
04/29/2025

Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022) by Régine Jean-Charles engages scholarship across multiple disciplines and fields—Haitian studies, Caribbean studies, Black feminist studies, media studies, ecofeminism, anthropology, geography, and history—and employs diverse methods that include archival research, social media and artwork analysis, and literary critique. This review essay by Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper posits that Jean-Charles uses Black feminism rather than Haitian feminism, arguing for a Black feminist project that is transnational and global and that allows for both/and.


-Charles
Full Text@Duke https://tinyurl.com/484bc8kz

This Nadève Ménard’ review essay takes the liberty of offering reflections toward an alternate coda on Régine Michelle J...
04/27/2025

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_. The author expected the book to end with a look forward into the work currently being created and published by younger women writers. It did not; this essay attempts to provide such a glimpse.


-Charles

Full Text@Duke https://tinyurl.com/2x4t9t4p

Available and free for three months Mónica B. Ocasio Vega’s essay, “From Loíza to Yauco’s Mountainous Area: Two Instance...
04/25/2025

Available and free for three months Mónica B. Ocasio Vega’s essay, “From Loíza to Yauco’s Mountainous Area: Two Instances of Fugitive Food Practices in Puerto Rico,” which received an honorific mention in the Latin American Studies Association-Puerto Rico Section and was published in our issue 74.

Read it https://tinyurl.com/2j6k8cwk

Congratulations to Mónica B. Ocasio Vega on this honorific mention in the Latin American Studies Association-Puerto Rico...
04/22/2025

Congratulations to Mónica B. Ocasio Vega on this honorific mention in the Latin American Studies Association-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, https://tinyurl.com/22d6shve

Presented here are three chapters from Marie Léticée’s _Camille’s Lakou_, translated from her 2016 novel Moun Lakou. The...
04/06/2025

Presented here are three chapters from Marie Léticée’s _Camille’s Lakou_, translated from her 2016 novel Moun Lakou. The book presents a double-protagonist coming-of-age story in which the narrator relates her autobiographical tale to a younger character facing crises similar to those of the narrator and the narrator’s single-parent mother. The excerpted chapters all come from the narrator Camille’s embedded tale and describe scenes of the impoverished, urban, Guadeloupean 1960s milieu from which the narrator emerged.

Full text @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/4cz86ucs

The Small Axe Project stands in support of public serving national cultural institutions such as the National Endowment ...
04/05/2025

The Small Axe Project stands in support of public serving national cultural institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities which are now under threat of being defunded. For 60 years, the National Endowment for the Humanities has supported projects and programs that are indispensable for the cultivation of an enlightened public sphere. Please help us resist these retrograde efforts by contacting your members of Congress and local officials to let them know that you condemn these actions and support the National Endowment for the Humanities! You can use the links below to reach out to your elected officials.

On Monday, March 31, 2025 we learned that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is targeting the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) with the aim of substantially reducing its staff, cutting the agency’s grant programs, and rescinding grants that have already been awarded. Learn w...

SX current issue’s visualities are by Geoffrey Holder, and this text analyzes how because Holder’s artistic range, the a...
04/04/2025

SX current issue’s visualities are by Geoffrey Holder, and this text analyzes how because Holder’s artistic range, the artist is too often seen as a dilettante, and his seminal accomplishments in multiple areas of the arts dismissed collectively. Erica Moiah James, from The Geoffrey Holder Project, sees this as a systemic error in the academy and, in its wake, an error of interpretation of Caribbean and African diasporic artists like Holder, whose work exceeds the disciplinary frames that make knowledge visible.

Full text @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/ycyccse9

“Afterword: The Black Archives and the Archive of Black Marxism,” by Minkah Makalani, takes up some of the conceptual an...
04/03/2025

“Afterword: The Black Archives and the Archive of Black Marxism,” by Minkah Makalani, takes up some of the conceptual and historiographical concerns raised in the special section on Hermina and Otto Huiswoud.

Read it all https://tinyurl.com/yfy2h8nt

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