Small Axe

22/10/2025

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.

20/10/2025

Shop our inventory of journals on the Duke University Press website at 50% off See details below 👇🏽 👇🏽

https://www.instagram.com/p/DQCJvbSgSAI/?igsh=MTJkcHh4NGVyZjBydQ==ry

18/10/2025

What Is the “Contemporary” in Contemporary Caribbean Art?
This essay 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? Assuming the concept of “contemporaneity” has critical value, the author seeks to expand on Terry Smith’s and David Scott’s musings with time and temporality.
Read it @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/ys4zuf6n

15/10/2025

We want to spotlight (again) this definitive, bilingual selection of poetry, essays, and letters by one of Puerto Rico’s most beloved poets!

Julia de Burgos (1914–1953) is best known for her poetry, but she is also an important cultural figure famous for her commitment to social justice, feminist ideas, and the independence of Puerto Rico. Admirers cultivated her legacy to bring to light the real Julia de Burgos, the woman behind the public figure, which this remarkable collection further illuminates by supplying a complex portrait using her own powerful and imaginative words.

Beginning with a critical introduction to Burgos’s life and work, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario then presents a selection of poems, essays, and letters, that offer a glimpse into this formidable talent and intellect. Burgos left Puerto Rico, spending the 1940s in both New York City and Havana, where she cultivated a new kind of identity refracted through her pathbreaking work as a poet and journalist. Both poetry and prose are alive with politically charged insights into the struggle of national liberation, literary creation, and being a woman in a patriarchal society. I Am My Own Path is essential reading for anyone interested in Puerto Rican literature and culture as well as a foundational text of Latinx literature and culture in the United States.

Our very own SX managing editor Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is a translator and a professor at the City University of New York. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon, which is also available in Spanish.

14/10/2025

HAPPY PUB DAY to small axe managing editor, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario!! 🎉

Read more about her newest book 👇🏽 👇🏽

Professor Vanessa Pérez-Rosario offers the first comprehensive bilingual, English-Spanish collection of the poetry, essays, and letters of writer and activist Julia de Burgos.

12/10/2025

Our very own editor Davis Scott analyzes why the Marxist Left collapsed in his home country, Jamaica. “Is it merely a symptom of a wider malaise in the intellectual life of the country, or of the specific poverty—of courage as well as ideas—of the former Left intelligentsia?”

Read his Preface of SX 77 here, https://tinyurl.com/3td2jfxv

30/09/2025

Small Axe 77 is now available!

This issue includes essays by Carlos Garrido Castellano, C.C. McKee, Gabriel Arce Riocabo and Anna Forné, F. Joseph Sepúlveda Ortiz, and Lyndon Gill. In the section Keywords in Caribbean Studies, the discussion of the term "Heritage" is explored by Alyssa James, Ayana Omilade Flewellen, Khadene Harris, and Nadia Mosquera Muriel. This issue features the special section "Reflections on Gordon Rohlehr", with essays by Maureen Warner-Lewis and Hannah Regis. Angel Otero's abstract work "Prose" is featured on the cover and in the visual essay. The issue closes with a book discussion of Lorgia García Peña's "Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective" with essays by Marisel Moreno, Elizabeth S. Manley, and a response essay by the author.

24/09/2025

Watch the video of the most recent edition of our project Keywords in Caribbean Studies titled “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.
https://smallaxe.net/sxprojects/keywords/sexualities-pateria-makoume-kambrada-friend-family

23/09/2025

Did you miss our Keywords/ Sexualities conversation? You can now watch it on our website.

Sexualities
patería/ makoumé/ kambrada/ friend & family

Contributors:
Jacqueline Couti
Krystal Ghisyawan
Wigbertson Julian Isenia
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

Moderated by:
Ryan Cecil Jobson and Vanessa Pérez-Rosario

patería/ makoumé/ kambrada/ friend & family Small Axe 74, July 2024 Sexualitiespatería/ makoumé/ kambrada/ friend & family7 March 2025 Contributors:

16/09/2025

🗓️ Mark your calendars!
Join us in this conversation between .0 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 .

11/09/2025

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), focusing on the problems of abstraction, Marxist humanism, and social reproduction theory in relation to capitalist slavery and Marx’s critique of political economy.
Read @ Duke https://tinyurl.com/2mxde23r