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.

Pick up your favorite issues of Small Axe @ 50% OFF 📣📣 See details below 👇🏿👇🏿

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

In this interview by Wayne Modest and Esmee Shoutens, artist Iris Kensmil explores recurring themes in her practice, such as Black feminist memory, histories of Black emancipation in the Netherlands, and the genre of portraiture as a practice of presencing. Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/yc34vc9a

In this essay, Sophie Maríñez analyzes the music of Luis “Terror” Días (1952–2009), a composer recognized today as the most innovative in Dominican musical history. youtu.be/akZGhf5Smig?... Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/58sjteur

René Johannes Kooiker focuses on the magazine Watapana, which published poetry, criticism, fiction, and translations from the Dutch Caribbean between 1968 and 1972, and hosted debates about the politics of language in the Papiamento- and Dutch-speaking islands. Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/ycxah3bx

Introduciendo ideas de la metamorfosis del género y la plantación, Celenis Rodríguez propone un nuevo abordaje sobre el género y la formación de las subjetividades sexo genéricas de la población negra esclavizada en la plantación caribeña. Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/4abn6yue

Aristides Dimitriou explores how the “epistemological deficiency” that characterizes the past becomes a necessary part of the historical imagination—the historical content becomes part of the narrative form through which Édouard Glissant envisions the past. Read @ Duke tinyurl.com/mn9vmbad

In the preface, our editor David Scott reflects on memory and time, and what they bring with them when it comes to remembering what matters. The text invites us all to metaphorically —and literally— pay a visit at the Library of Things We Forgot To Remember. Read it @ Duke tinyurl.com/5d7r8jkm

sx 76 has shipped! It includes essays by Aristides Dimitriou, Celenis Rodríguez, René Kooiker, Sophie Maríñez, and Wayne Modest and Esmee Schoutens. It features the section "Mervyn Morris: Critic of Literary Voice." We highlight artwork by Lisandro Suriel. Check it out tinyurl.com/2s4kdx97

sx 76 has shipped! It includes essays by Aristides Dimitriou, Celenis Rodríguez, René Kooiker, Sophie Maríñez, and Wayne Modest and Esmee Schoutens. It features the section "Mervyn Morris: Critic of Literary Voice." We highlight artwork by Lisandro Suriel. Check it out tinyurl.com/2s4kdx97

Announcing the launch of sx salon 48. The issue includes essays by Amandla Thomas-Johnson and Stéphane Martelly, reviews by Sasha Ann Panaram, Oriana Méjías Martinez, Maddi Chan and Linzey Corridon, poems by Letitia Marie Pratt, and stories by José Darío Martínez Milantchi and Alicia Valasse-Polius.

In this review essay, Mamyrah A. Dougé-Prosper posits that Régine Jean-Charles uses Black feminism rather than Haitian feminism in her book _Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction_ (2022). #BookDiscussion #RégineMichelleJean-Charles Full Text@Duke tinyurl.com/484bc8kz

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_ #BookDiscussion #RégineMichelleJean-Charles Full Text@Duke tinyurl.com/2x4t9t4p

Read Mónica B. Ocasio Vega’s essay, “From Loíza to Yauco’s Mountainous Area: Two Instances of Fugitive Food Practices in Puerto Rico.” Thanks to Duke for making it available for free three months, tinyurl.com/2j6k8cwk

Congratulations to Mónica Ocasio on this honorific mention in the @Lasa-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, tinyurl.com/22d6shve

In “Otto Huiswoud and the Demise of the Red Black Atlantic,” Holger Weiss focuses on the activities of Otto Huiswoud from 1934 to 1937, when he was secretary of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. Full text @Duke tinyurl.com/n6naw3r8

On Otto and Hermina Huiswould, this essay by @mayakikimba proposes that depictions of them as foot soldiers of the Communist International (Comintern), if not as doctrinarian Stalinists, misunderstand the registers in which Black radicals speak. Available @Duke tinyurl.com/3546m36y

Wayne Modest, in this essay, introduces a special section on Otto and Hermina Huiswoud, Black Caribbean internationalists whose anticolonial and Communist organizing spanned several decades and continents. Available @Duke tinyurl.com/37p2zs2c

David Scott delivered the inaugural George Padmore Lecture, Queen Mary University of London. “Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and the Genealogy of Caribbean Intellectual Traditions” was the lecture delivered on January 30th that can be watched here, youtu.be/CmfIKN4LIFA?...

In this essay, Donna M. E. Banks argues that the physical and cultural landscape of Bristol, England, has been transformed through the creation of seven large-scale commemorative murals featuring noted men and women of the Windrush generation. Available@Duke tinyurl.com/ycye5hxw

In “The Intuitive Lianas of My Hands,” Jane Hiddleston takes Fanon’s response to Negritude as a starting point for an analysis of the figure of the liana as a symbol of relationality and transformation in the work of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire Available@Duke tinyurl.com/2aszhbcf

“In recent years, there has been a noticeable drift, within certain intellectual circles and practices, in the direction of thinking again about universalism and its cognates,” writes SX editor, David Scott, in the preface to our issue 75. Read the whole piece tinyurl.com/5enbhf8y

Meet the participants of our upcoming Keywords conversation! Date: Friday, 7 March 2025 Time: 12:00pm - 2:00pm EST RSVP: tinyurl.com/sxsexuality

SX 75 is already out! Check it out: smallaxe.net/sx/issues/75

If you happen to be in the Chicago, don’t miss out on the talk, “On Losing and Gaining Conceptual Languages: Walter Rodney’s ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ between Revolution and Reparation,” by our very own David Scott. 📅 March 4, 4:30 📍The John Franklin Room. The University of Chicago