Small AxePub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9724191
Patricia Noxolo
{"title":"Inside the Circle: A Response to Jovan Scott Lewis's Scammer's Yard","authors":"Patricia Noxolo","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9724191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9724191","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In a discussion of Jovan Scott Lewis's Scammer's Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020), the book is considered as ethnography written from \"inside the circle\" (Sadiya Hartman) of a generation of young Black men brought up in Jamaica. Nonetheless, Lewis shows genuine appreciation of the profound differences between himself and his respondents. However, the response ends by proposing that Lewis needed to widen the circle to include those who died in the terrible violence that was a consequence of the scamming practices that he describes, and that his arguments about Black repair might have been all the more convincing had he been able to do so.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"62 1","pages":"163 - 168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82003676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Small AxePub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9724023
Susan C. Méndez
{"title":"Ghosts in Nelly Rosario's Song of the Water Saints and Angie Cruz's Soledad","authors":"Susan C. Méndez","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9724023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9724023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Recent texts in Latinx literature have ghosts that demonstrate new knowledge about history, culture, and subjectivity. In Song of the Water Saints and Soledad, the first novels of authors Nelly Rosario and Angie Cruz, respectively, the figure of the ghost is a trope that imaginatively reconnects communities of women that are fractured by the corruptive influence of the United States and other Western nations in the Latin Caribbean. The ghost of Graciela in Song of the Water Saints and the \"living ghost\" of Olivia in Soledad allow readers to see how matrilineal bonds in families can be restored. These ties are cut by the prolonged and detrimental exploitation of the Dominican Republic by the United States and more generally the West. With a focus on women, the use of ghosts in these novels attends to the material, historical, and cultural practices between people and the geographies they inhabit.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"15 1","pages":"16 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90616148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Small AxePub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9724037
C. Stieber
{"title":"Mémoire and Vindicationism in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue","authors":"C. Stieber","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9724037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9724037","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay analyzes the genre of mémoire produced by gens de couleur (free people of color) within the colonial and military bureaucracy of revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Building on recent scholarship on Toussaint Louverture's 1802 \"Mémoire du général Toussaint Louverture,\" it situates the genre in broader conversation with the mass of bureaucratic and administrative writing in the colony by offering close readings of mémoires from Julien Raimond and André Rigaud. Though written for different purposes, these mémoires evince a shared formal and rhetorical strategy: they present textual evidence and employ forensic rhetoric to refute competing claims and vindicate their cause. By elucidating the generic conventions of the mémoire, this essay contributes to the growing body of scholarship on Black writing that has moved beyond the paradigm of the slave narrative toward other forms and genres of Black protest. In so doing, it refocuses vindicationism on these rhetorical evidentiary practices, rather than on the mythos of romance and romantic overcoming that has categorized vindicationist narratives of the Haitian Revolution.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"54 1","pages":"30 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85679632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Small AxePub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9724135
Gordon Rohlehr
{"title":"A Literary Friendship: Selected Notes on the Correspondence with Kamau Brathwaite","authors":"Gordon Rohlehr","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9724135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9724135","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay, an extract from a longer two-hundred-page manuscript, traces the author's literary friendship with Kamau Brathwaite from their first meeting in 1968 to Brathwaite's passing in 2020. It relies on correspondence over fifty years, memories of meetings, and critical responses to Brathwaite's work to trace their mutual admiration and scuffles amid a comradeship that is stronger than time.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"97 1","pages":"124 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81417244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Small AxePub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9724149
Elaine Savory
{"title":"The Questions Kamau Asked of Us","authors":"Elaine Savory","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9724149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9724149","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Kamau Brathwaite left us just before COVID-19 changed our world. This memoriam essay explores the questions his work poses in his role as mentor/teacher/Griot to other writers, toward whom he was always very generous and encouraging. He asks us to embrace uncertainty, making it an aesthetic value from which transformative understanding may come. We learn to deeply explore the relation of languages of the voice, the musical instrument, and visual image; to be eclectic with regard to influences; to have the courage to face loss and trauma; and to be honest about history. Kamau made revision into an art form, from which we can learn about ways to embrace change, not only in creative work but in social and political thinking.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"1 1","pages":"145 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74593252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Small AxePub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9724205
J. Lewis
{"title":"The Limits of Repair","authors":"J. Lewis","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9724205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9724205","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this response essay, the author returns to his arguments in Scammer's Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020) to further consider the limits of repair as advanced by the book's crew of Jamaican lottery scammers. The author reconsiders some of the arguments to examine more deeply the issues of respectability, violence, and refusal, doing so in conversation with Patricia Noxolo, Beverley Mullings, and Kevon Rhiney—Caribbean and Caribbeanist geographers who help explore the scam as representative of repair within Jamaica's violent, impoverished, and seemingly inescapable circumstances. Further analyzing the possibility of repair as advanced by the scammers, the essay identifies and contests the normative terms of politics that complicate those reparative claims, arguing that the scam moves past the politics of social incorporation and resistance in Jamaica and instead represents a form of political suspension that avoids the reconciliation of respectability and refusal typical of Caribbean postcolonial social production.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"26 1","pages":"191 - 204"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75579762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Small AxePub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9724177
Kevon Rhiney
{"title":"The (Im)Possibility of Black Repair","authors":"Kevon Rhiney","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9724177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9724177","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay draws on Jovan Scott Lewis's Scammer's Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020), a rich ethnographic study of lottery scammers in Jamaica and the ethical logic they use to justify scamming as a form of reparations, to think about the limits of Black reparative claims. Specifically, it draws on various theorizings of Black insurgent life to explore the inherent challenges in engendering a radical politics of change premised around principles of repair, alterity, and fugitivity. The author argues that theorizing Blackness and, by extension, Black repair necessitates exploring questions of the unimaginable, the liminal, and the otherwise.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"71 1","pages":"181 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73900195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Small AxePub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9724107
L. Goodison
{"title":"Not a Usual Man","authors":"L. Goodison","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9724107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9724107","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay takes the form of a brief tribute to the life and work of Kamau Brathwaite and his first wife, Doris Brathwaite. It is written from the point of view of a writer who knew Kamau personally and who considers herself to be the beneficiary of his immense wisdom and iconoclasm. The essay provides anecdotal accounts of an awards ceremony in London, when Kamau delivered a powerful exhortation to Caribbean writers, and of a New Year's Day party held at his house in Jamaica, at which Kamau and Doris demonstrated immense thoughtfulness to the assembled guests. It focuses briefly on X/Self, makes mention of the Zea Mexican Diary, and references Rex Nettleford and Philip Sherlock.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"113 1","pages":"108 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81035479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Small AxePub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9724051
Kathleen Donegan
{"title":"Not Dead Yet: Carrying History in a Song of Jamaica","authors":"Kathleen Donegan","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9724051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9724051","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay concentrates on the relation between song and history in the lives of the enslaved and the afterlives of slavery, particularly by tracing the history of the song \"Take Him to the Gulley,\" which became known as \"the famous slave song of Jamaica.\" Thinking alongside Katherine McKittrick's and Sylvia Wynter's work on plantation geographies, the author argues that the gulley, a site of mass burial in the center of the song, was also a site of Black cultural expression and futurity—a place where death and life, torture and escape, enslavement and freedom collided and shaped each other. The essay traces the song as both a mode and a performance of history, in which, through the workings of reclamation, remembrance, and redress, an enslaver's perverse punishment became a people's history.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"23 1","pages":"55 - 68"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90967827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}