Small AxePub Date : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9583446
Kelly Baker Josephs
{"title":"Caribbean Studies in Digital Space and Time","authors":"Kelly Baker Josephs","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583446","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay is part of a special section on Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s 1975 essay “Caribbean Man in Space and Time” (reprinted in the issue), briefly tracing the dis- semination history of Brathwaite’s essay, then focusing on two main lines of argument in it to explore their significance for current practices and possibilities in Caribbean studies. Using three contemporary digital projects as examples, the author elaborates on the potential affordances and limitations of digital platforms and technologies as (in Brathwaite’s terms) “agents of change,” while arguing the case for “how the digital allows us to think the Caribbean differently.”","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"21 1","pages":"105 - 115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90049990","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: 10.1215/07990537-9583460
Rinaldo Walcott
{"title":"“Inner Plantation”: Caribbean Studies, Black Studies, and a Black Theory of Freedom","authors":"Rinaldo Walcott","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583460","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay suggests that Caribbean studies and Black studies might be constituted as twins, arguing that Blackness and Black people are the foundational instituted terms of both studies. This argument is based in the author’s reading of the anglophone Caribbean and draws on Kamau Brathwaite’s insights of how a psycho-poetics of thought shapes Caribbeanness.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"9 1","pages":"116 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81810291","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: 10.1215/07990537-9583572
Jhon Picard Byron
{"title":"Représentations de l’Afrique dans l’imaginaire haïtien au vingtième siècle","authors":"Jhon Picard Byron","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583572","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:La nation est au cœur des débats de l’école haïtienne d’anthropologie/ethnologie. Malgré les désaccords autour de la question nationale animant les tenants de cette école, une certaine historiographie, inspirée par les lectures des postcolonial studies et des Africana studies, reprenant à leur compte le corpus de la négritude, met en avant, en son sein, une communauté de vue sur l’Afrique. Partant de ce constat et pour illustrer les changements intervenus, en Haïti, dans les représentations de l’Afrique, cet cet essai critique de There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince (2019) par Greg Beckett revient sur le hiatus entre les pensées de Joseph Anténor Firmin et de Jean Price-Mars, deux grandes figures de l’école haïtienne d’anthropologie/ethnologie. Se dévoilent ainsi l’évolution lente puis la brusque mutation qui, des années 1910 aux années 1950, accompagnent l’image d’une « Afrique » articulée à différents paradigmes.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"47 1","pages":"199 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80956212","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: 10.1215/07990537-9583474
N. Edwards
{"title":"The Politics of Style in “Caribbean Man in Space and Time”","authors":"N. Edwards","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583474","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay reads Kamau Brathwaite’s seminal 1975 essay “Caribbean Man in Space and Time” in terms of its rhetorical politics. Conceptually, the essay’s hybrid and heterogeneous discourses and registers are theorized in terms drawn from Clifford Geertz, Leah Rosenberg, and Mandy Bloomfield. Brathwaite’s style effectively instantiates “Caribbean Man” as an exemplary model of the practice of Caribbean studies. The essay is posited as a palimpsestic text, haunted by Brathwaite’s prior creative and critical texts as well as the work of other Caribbean writers and intellectuals and animated by metaphors of creolization that derive from the archipelago’s geology, geography, and history. Ultimately, “Caribbean Man,” while immured in the nationalist sensibility of the 1970s, eschews a reductive nationalist politics for a more expansive notion of nation and community akin to Wilson Harris’s shamanic espousal of Indigenous and ancestral presences in the Caribbean imaginary.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"12 1","pages":"127 - 133"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77739719","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: 10.1215/07990537-9583558
Nadège T. Clitandre
{"title":"Notes on Radical Hope; or, The Ethical Turn in Anthropology","authors":"Nadège T. Clitandre","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583558","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Examining Greg Beckett’s 2019 There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince, this critical essay explores the notion of radical hope in the midst of tragedy and crisis in Haiti. It attempts to reframe the idea of hope from the perspective of a Haitian American who studies Haiti through the lens of literary texts and within a global analysis, arguing that Beckett’s book is more than an anthropological study of crisis; it is an act of memorializing the various ways a generation reflects on the idea of hope. The author’s reading of There Is No More Haiti calls for more critical studies on what Haitians can teach us about the importance of hope in times of disaster, about the understanding of hope as a pervasive feeling.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"23 1","pages":"186 - 198"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85578217","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: 10.1215/07990537-9583418
G. de Ferrari
{"title":"The Clandestine Philosophy of Graffiti in Port-au-Prince","authors":"G. de Ferrari","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9583418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583418","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Inspired by the enigmatic phrase “Le poème tué” (the murdered poem) that the author saw written on the walls of Port-au-Prince, this essay explores street art in Port-au-Prince as staging a public debate about different ways of approaching a life of precarity and crisis. It analyzes “Le poème tué” graffiti by young Haitian poet Ricardo Boucher, along with murals by Jerry (Jerry Rosembert Moïse) and Francisco Silva, political graffiti about the PetroCaribe corruption scandal, and the writing and artwork on tap-tap buses, as emergent affects and ideologies about the art of flourishing “in spite of all.” In a succession of accidental encounters, the author claims, passersby find in the public city competing ideas about how to negotiate unlivable circumstances through moral character, the building of community, or revolution.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"6 1","pages":"63 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84776584","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 : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9384286
D. S. Benson
{"title":"Redefining Mestizaje: How Trans-Caribbean Exchanges Solidified Black Consciousness in Cuba","authors":"D. S. Benson","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9384286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9384286","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay recovers the history of 1960s and 1970s black movements in Cuba through an examination of works by Afro-Cuban intellectuals and their meetings with Caribbean thinkers to show the coexistence of mestizaje and black consciousness as a defining, but overlooked, feature of black activism in Cuba. While the existing literature locates black consciousness in the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, this essay highlights how Afro-Cubans in Spanish-speaking countries were not only aware of but also adapted Caribbean ideologies to local circumstances. Using oral histories, cultural productions, and meetings between Caribbean intellectuals, this examination of Afro-Cuban activism reframes the period leading up to Nancy Morejón's 1982 Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén to show that the poet was one of many artists-activists who resurrected black history, revalued African culture and black identity, and promoted Caribbean black consciousness in Cuba despite state attempts at censorship. For Morejón that meant offering a definition of mestizaje that goes through and coexists with black consciousness.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"83 1","pages":"108 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88107581","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 : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9384388
R. Chetty
{"title":"Abduction and the Grounds of Caribbean Reasoning","authors":"R. Chetty","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9384388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9384388","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This review essay engages with Aaron Kamugisha's 2019 Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition by focusing on its methodological commitment to seeking Caribbean answers to Caribbean political and social problems. The author argues that Kamugisha powerfully offers something other than a methodology through which the circulation of Caribbean geographies, politics, epistemologies, and its people's lived experiences moves outward to provide analytical and conceptual service for metropolitan centers, even if for ostensibly decolonial purposes. The essay demonstrates how by turning to two of the Caribbean's major thinkers, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and their far-less-studied Caribbean writings, Kamugisha takes seriously the centering of Caribbean thinkers in their own histories of political becoming. The essay ends with sustained focus on Kamugisha's elaboration of two of Wynter's conceptualizations: indigenization as an alternative to creolization and abduction as a kind of theorizing out from Caribbean reasonings.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"159 1","pages":"182 - 189"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74877853","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 : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9384328
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Nancy Morejón
{"title":"Mas yo resto: Entrevista con Nancy Morejón","authors":"Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Nancy Morejón","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9384328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9384328","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this interview, Cuban poet Nancy Morejón talks about her early work, her involvement with Ediciones El Puente, her poetry publishing hiatus from 1967 to 1979, and her literary criticism on the work of Nicolás Guillén. (In Spanish; an English translation is available online)","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"21 1","pages":"142 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81650057","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}