Small Axe

03/06/2025

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

03/01/2025

SX 75 is out!

This issue includes essays by Jahan Ramazani, Jane Hiddleston, Rashana Lydner, Donna Banks, and Nicole Ramsey. It features a special section titled “Otto and Hermina Huiswoud: Modern Black Diasporic Radicals” edited by Wayne Modest.

We highlight Geoffrey Holder’s work on the cover and in our visual essay.

Translating the Caribbean presents an excerpt of Marie Léticée's Camille’s Lakou. We close the issue with a book discussion of Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction.

02/26/2025

Join us in this Keywords event!

The third iteration of our Keywords project was published in Small Axe 74, July 2024 and is now available. In these essays contributors trace and explore the keywords patería, makoumé, kambrada, friend and family across the region and from a range of approaches. Join us for a conversation with the authors.

Contributors:

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

Moderated by:
Ryan Cecil Jobson and Vanessa Pérez-Rosario

Read more about our Keywords project here: https://smallaxe.net/sxprojects/keywords/sexualities-pateria-makoume-kambrada-friend-family

02/25/2025

If you happen to be in the Chicago area in this early March, don’t miss out on the talk by our very own David Scott, PhD, and editor of sx.

He’ll be presenting his paper, “On Losing and Gaining Conceptual Languages: Walter Rodney’s ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ between Revolution and Reparation.”

📅 March 4, 4:30 pm
📍The John Franklin Room (SSRB 224)
The University of Chicago

02/23/2025

sx salon: a small axe literary platform invites submissions of:
- short reviews of recent creative literary works by Caribbean authors (1,000-1,200 words)
- short reviews of recent scholarly works related to Caribbean literary studies (1,000-1,200 words)
- short interviews with Caribbean authors and/or literary scholars (2,000-2,500 words)
- short discussion essays that engage issues relevant to Caribbean literary studies (2,000-2,500 words).
- poems and short fiction (maximum 4,000 words) that engage regional and diasporic Caribbean themes and concerns.

We publish three issues per year and accept submissions on a rolling basis. Please review the style requirements below before submitting.

Visit our webpage: https://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/submissions

02/20/2025

Dialogues in Caribbean Modernisms was the second iteration of the Small Axe Caribbean Modernisms project, at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, 22-24 October 2024. It brought writers and visual artists of different generations into conversation with intellectuals and scholars to think about the impact of "modernism" (as style, as ethos, as value, as vocabulary, as infrastructure) on the arts across the regional and diasporic Caribbean. The aim was to listen to these writers and artists and to hear the ways in which modernism, and issues related to it, shaped (or not) their creative practice. Now are available the three-day event's talks, conversations, and round tables in this open repository.

https://smallaxe.net/sxprojects/modernisms -modernisms-wake

02/05/2025

Join us for the third iteration of our Keywords project. Free and open to the public. Registration is required: tinyurl.com/sxsexuality

01/28/2025

sx art 5 is now published!

Andil Gosine begins to honor the legacy of visual and performance artist Lorraine O’Grady, through recollection of the making of her work “Landscape (Western Hemisphere).”

https://smallaxe.net/sxart/projects/landscape-western-hemisphere

01/26/2025

Small Axe Project is now on Bluesky! We'll be archiving our X account soon. Follow us
bsky.social

01/18/2025

Join us!!
Keywords in Caribbean Studies:
Sexualities
Date: 7 March 2025
Time: 12pm - 2pm EST
(Virtual event)
Open to the public - Registration required

Join us for a virtual conversation with Jacqueline Couti Krystal Ghisyawan Wigbertson Julian Isenia Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes Moderated by Ryan Cecil Jobson and Vanessa Pérez-Rosario The third iteration of our Keywords project was published in Small Axe 74, July 2024 and is now available. In thes...

11/25/2024

In this essay, Ernesto Blanes-Martinez analyzes the problem of subjectivity in Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021) from a phenomenological perspective.



tinyurl.com/3heemsjh

11/17/2024

Natalie Wood’s visual essay is inspired by the late social justice activist and artist Colin Robinson and his love of carnival. “Robinson’s activist work with CAISO and his q***r Caribbean liberation practices allowed me to directly draw on my experience as a Caribbean diasporic le***an for the creation of the artwork presented here”, Wood says.
Follow the link: https://tinyurl.com/bw6s98em

11/10/2024

In this essay, engages a SPIT! manifesto, a column by Karla Claudio-Betancourt, and scholarly pieces on q***r language around the term patería, a synonym for “q***rness” as a sign of gender and sexual transgression.
tinyurl.com/yh7a6tst

11/01/2024

Read here the essay by Louis Chude-Sokei on Carolyn Cooper’s _Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture_(1993), where the author discusses the book’s impact across and against the “Black Atlantic” paradigm

shorturl.at/TzoqJ

10/31/2024

Nadi Edwards examines Carolyn Cooper’s project as a practice of disturbance that anchors her conceptualization of Jamaican discourses within the concrete materiality and exteriority of the island’s socioeconomic and linguistic realities.

shorturl.at/EHiq3

10/29/2024

Meet our 24-25 Editorial Assistants: Caprie, Laura, Luis, and Dantaé. We also thank our outgoing assistants, Tyler and Mayaki, for all of their intellectual and organizational contributions to the Small Axe Project.