Small AxePub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9724093
Aaron Kamugisha
{"title":"Kamau at Ninety","authors":"Aaron Kamugisha","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9724093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9724093","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This introduction opens a special section featuring a series of tributes in homage to Kamau Brathwaite. The author's generational perspective becomes the occasion for a reflection on Brathwaite's legacy, creative voice, and sustained vision of the future of the Caribbean. The essay further presents an account of the author's attempt to shelter and represent this legacy in the form of Kamau at Ninety, a university course in Brathwaite's honor, offered in the surreal months of January to May 2020.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"39 1","pages":"102 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85732468","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9583544
R. Jaffe
{"title":"Where and When Is Crisis?","authors":"R. Jaffe","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583544","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This review essay enters into conversation with Greg Beckett’s 2019 There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince to think through the geographies and temporalities of how crisis is known. Focusing on the urban Caribbean, it interrogates broadly circulating understandings of the city-as-crisis, asking how the “where” of crisis connects to a geographical imagination that sites Caribbean cultural authenticity in the countryside. Next, it reflects on the temporalities of crisis, in relation to Beckett’s conceptualization of crisis as a chronic condition, as the routinized anticipation of rupture. Despite a rich tradition of Caribbean scholarship on temporalities, there has been limited engagement with the region’s urban time-spaces. The author suggests that a more thorough consideration of Caribbean urban futures in particular might allow us to read an anticipatory attunement to insecurity and instability as an urban mode of temporal experience, in which future making in and through uncertainty can be not a source of despair but of hope.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"225 1","pages":"178 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77552365","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9583390
Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi
{"title":"“Macandal. Makandal. Mackandal.”: Man and Protean Pluralema","authors":"Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583390","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay extends and contributes to existing scholarship by uncovering instances of cooperation and collaboration that suggest alternative views of Hispaniola and complicate contemporary political and social realities in the Dominican Republic. It focuses on Manuel Rueda’s 1998 Las metamorfosis de Makandal, in which François Makandal is imagined as a protean god. The author argues that Rueda’s Makandal is best understood as the embodiment of the vanguard poetic movement, Pluralismo. The Maroon becomes a central figure in the island’s story, as well as a figure of aesthetic possibilities and boundless exploration, like a pluralema. Rueda imagines a cosmic Makandal who is unhindered by racial or gender constructs, by space or time. Ultimately, he is a figure whose metamorphosis rewrites Hispaniola’s story and challenges rigid binaries that limit the way we view the Dominican Republic as a nation, Dominican national identity, Dominican-Haitian relations, and—more broadly—the island of Hispaniola.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"117 1","pages":"24 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77600891","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9583404
Éric Morales-Franceschini
{"title":"Epic Humor: Elpidio Valdés and the Mythopoetics of Populist Laughter","authors":"Éric Morales-Franceschini","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583404","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Whether emplotted as epic or as tragedy, the tales told about a nation’s revolutionary past do not tend to elicit laughter as much as awe and solemnity. This is the case with Cuba’s national epic, the story of its nineteenth-century wars for independence (1868–98)—the story of Cuba Libre. This essay analyzes how the animated cartoon shorts and film series Elpidio Valdés (1974–2003) comically inflects the story of Cuba Libre with ridiculing laughter and choteo (folk humor). The series puts forth both a hero more akin to a populist trickster than a Spartan and a revolutionary war more akin to carnivalesque drama than to the Homeric epic. In so doing, it subtly critiques the didactic and panegyric rhetoric that has shrouded the national (as well as the socialist) epic and, in its stead, offers a jocular and fallible revolutionary subject in a more participatory and less austere epic.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"60 1","pages":"45 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83133591","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9583587
G. Beckett
{"title":"The Specificity of the Ordinary","authors":"G. Beckett","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583587","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583587","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay, anthropologist Greg Beckett responds to Rivke Jaffe’s, Nadège T. Clitandre’s, and Jhon Picard Byron’s critical engagements with his 2019 ethnography, There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. Beckett discusses issues of representation and form, how gender and age shape people’s experience of crisis, the discourse of Haitian exceptionalism, and the need to rethink crisis in Haiti from the standpoint of the conceptual categories and lived experiences of those who most directly feel the brunt of the destructive forces of predatory capitalism, political instability, and foreign intervention.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"101 1","pages":"210 - 219"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72907115","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9583516
Khalila Chaar-Pérez
{"title":"“The Antilles for the Sons of the Antilles”: On Translating Ramón Emeterio Betances","authors":"Khalila Chaar-Pérez","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583516","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In sharing the original French version as well as Spanish and (first-ever) English translations of “Speech at the Masonic Lodge of Port-au-Prince” (ca. 1870–71), the author argues for the importance of the work of Afro–Puerto Rican activist Ramón Emeterio Betances in the history of Caribbean decolonization. This speech represents a unique inter-Caribbean intervention in the anti-imperial struggle of the time. With the Cuban Ten Years’ War against Spain in the background, Betances, in contrast to his fellow Cuban and Puerto Rican activists, advocates a vision of Caribbean sovereignty that is inclusive of Haiti. Although the limitations of revolutionary masculinity and regional sameness are evident in the text, Betances proposes a politics of unity beyond nationhood that interconnects with later decolonial projects of coliberation.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"38 1","pages":"160 - 165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76293597","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9583432
E. Brathwaite
{"title":"Caribbean Man in Space and Time","authors":"E. Brathwaite","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583432","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"31 1","pages":"104 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76002485","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9583376
Jennifer Baez
{"title":"Anacaona Writes Back: The Columbus Statue in Santo Domingo as a Site of Erasure","authors":"Jennifer Baez","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583376","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:When Christopher Columbus’s human remains were discovered in a lead box inside Santo Domingo’s Basilica Cathedral of Santa María la Menor in 1877, Santo Domingo City Hall proposed commissioning a statue and a mausoleum. The Columbus statue featured an india, or a Native woman, presumably Taino chieftain Anacaona, on the pedestal base, writing words of praise to the admiral, who stood atop the monument. This essay explores how Anacaona’s racialized and gendered body symbolically validated a public nationalist discourse, while arguably erasing the roles that Blacks and Indigenous peoples had played in shaping island life since 1492.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"242 1","pages":"1 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73965216","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}