Issues

This essay tells the story of Estrea Jean Gilles, a nineteen-year-old girl who was killed by marines during the US occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). Cataloged under miscellaneous and described as an “unavoidable” accident, Estrea’s archived life guides this study of transnational practices of anti-black violence and accounts for the possibilities of black women’s futures beyond their record of disappearance. Naming the layered applications, quotidian quality, and refusals of physical, psychological, and archival violence during the US occupation, this essay ultimately considers experimental historical practices as an opportunity to intervene in the presumed teleology of black women’s lives through the practice of archival offering.   

This essay presents a strategy for putting anticolonial thought in praxis through the critical application of historical thought. It suggests a method of inquiry that is problem oriented and geared toward countering hegemonic discourses. The methodological approach proposed argues for an analytical framework that is transnational in its framing, lines of inquiry that are grounded in historically informed interdisciplinarity, and analyses of the ways power interacts with memory and historicity in hegemonic discourses.

This essay revisits the early phases of the history of poetry written primarily in an anglophone Caribbean Creole by closely examining the circumstances in which the White Guyanese administrator Michael McTurk launched his Creole-speaking persona “Quow.” It focuses on an 1870 verse letter to the editor in which McTurk dons the racialized mask of his persona to warn that an inquiry into the abuse of indentured Indian laborers will provoke a violent response from the Afro-Guyanese community. The essay argues that the versification of Quow’s voice seeks to implant him as a “found” character from oral culture within the crossfire of heated yet formal public letters regarding the inquiry. The ballad supplies the means for McTurk to “Black up” the planter voice. In the process, he unwittingly inaugurated a regional tradition of public Creole verse authorship, one whose later exponents would, in different ways, have to contend with McTurk’s minstrel legacy.

While scholarship on Suzanne Césaire has illuminated the critical role of ecopoetics in her writing, the strong psychoanalytic resonances that underpin her theory of Caribbean aesthetics and identity remain underexplored. This essay suggests that these resonances must be read alongside her reflections on aesthetics—specifically, the relationship between art and nature—in order to elucidate a fuller picture of Césaire’s ecopoetic theory of Caribbean subject formation. The author examines Césaire’s writing on art and civilization within the context of her explicit engagement with surrealism and her more camouflaged engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis. Taken together, these threads reveal Césaire’s vision of Caribbean art as a collaborative rather than conquest-oriented relation between the self and the environment. The essay ultimately argues that Césaire’s investigations of aesthetics, visuality, and psychoanalysis led her to an ecologically grounded theory of Caribbean subject formation articulated through her vision of a totalité-vie (life-totality) that is accessed through artistic production.

This brief essay is an introduction to the work of Puerto Rican anarchist and feminist activist and writer Luisa Capetillo (1882–1922) and opens the special section on Capetillo in this issue of Small Axe.

“Nonconformist” is one of several ways to describe Puerto Rican feminist Luisa Capetillo (1882–1922). As a transnational figure who synthesizes a unique fusion of diverse influences such as anarchism, spiritism, and syndicalism, Capetillo presents a distinctive reader-writer persona as well. This essay explores how reading Capetillo invites one to listen to her like the workers at the tobacco factories where she was a lectora would. It focuses on Capetillo’s first essays—published in Ensayos libertarios (1907) and La humanidad en el futuro (1910)—in which she conveys an urgency for getting her message across in order to actively resist colonialist paradigms of exploitation.

This essay studies how the writings and praxis of loud-reading in tobacco factories of the Puerto Rican anarcha-feminist Luisa Capetillo (1882–1922) exemplifies what can be called a “pedagogy of unruliness.” This hypothesis is that unruliness is a teachable form of knowledge irreducible to the modern conceptualization of “power/knowledge.” The essay examines how in Capetillo’s writings knowledge, intelligence, and literature become something else through a pedagogical praxis, a “stealing” of knowledge from the institutions of power. It compares Capetillo’s praxis with the theoretical texts of Paulo Freire, Ángel Rama, Ivan Illich, and Jacques Ranciere. It also supports work on the increasing bibliography about Capetillo’s literary and political innovations.

Luisa Capetillo’s revolutionary power was recognized in her time by allies and detractors alike, both in Puerto Rico and abroad. The scarcely examined archive of Puerto Rican and US-based newspaper coverage between 1911 and 1913 shows the significance of Capetillo’s gesta (heroic feat) and gestos (gestures, movements), offering a powerful trace of her subversive walks and an instance of her own argument. Through her deliberately clothed and performed walks—as part of worker-led and anarchist manifestations and, on her own, as a de facto feminist statement—Luisa Capetillo became/was becoming an other woman. Not a single acera (sidewalk) or calle (street), nor any protest in the archipelago taking the form of a walk against power, has ever been the same after Luisa and her faldapantalón (skirt-pant). Attempting to reflect this premise, this essay traverses, on dreamy foot and bilingually, the author’s past-and-present walking duermevelas with Luisa alongside the newspaper archive.

At the turn of the twentieth century, workers, anarchists, and intellectuals created a global resistance culture through print media, migration, and their radical imaginaries. The networks that animated this resistance culture gave way to the Counter-Republic of Letters. It was (and still operates as) a transnational intellectual community and means of communications between those that were cast outside Western modernity—that is, most of the world’s population. This essay explores how Luisa Capetillo became one of the many individuals who actively participated in the creation and expansion of the Counter-Republic of Letters in the Caribbean. In the process, she articulated multiple identities as a writer and a labor organizer. One hundred years after her death, Capetillo’s work carries radical potential and urgency in the present day.

In the 1980s I lived in the East Village, and as I was strolling around the neighborhood one day with a couple of Puerto Rican friends, we noticed that a large group of drag queens were strutting up and down the street, and everyday people were going about their daily activities wearing wigs, not properly arranged on their heads but placed there as a hat, a quirky flourish, and a statement. It was Wigstock, the festival of drag performances founded in 1984 as a response to the hostile anti-LGBTQ environment fostered by the state’s reaction to the AIDS crisis and the neighborhood’s increasing gentrification. My friends and I quickly donned wigs and headed to Tompkins Square, where the stage had been set up for the performances. Dressed in extravagantly creative outfits and over-the-top, towering wigs, the queens on stage were by turns shady, empowering, and campy, all the while promoting...

Working as principal investigator and head of the translation team for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña / the Puerto Rican Literature Project (PRLP)—a free, bilingual, user-friendly, and open access digital portal that anyone can use to learn about and teach Puerto Rican poetry—has provided the author with insight about the colonial conditions that structure translation as word-making practice, survival strategy, and decolonial methodology. In collaborating with Puerto Rican writers, translators, investigators, and scholars and sustaining a dialogue with a long history of personal and collective archival work, the author has at times found, in collaboration with literary peers, that Puerto Ricans often act as self-translators, archivists, and historians, while navigating the conditional visibility and general invisibilization of their modes of speech, their literatures, and their lives.

This review essay on Laurie R. Lambert’s Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Revolution (2020) considers the narrative and rhetorical strategies that Black women political figures use in their memoirs to represent US imperial presence and violence in the aftermath of the Grenada Revolution. As it highlights Lambert’s attention to Joan Purcell’s truncated temporal framing of the Grenada Revolution, the essay offers a close reading of Phyllis Coard’s memoir to elaborate the significance of temporality in literary representations of the revolution and to question how the memoir as a genre both elaborates and dulls trauma. Rather than emphasize and celebrate the exceptional quality of Black women political figures and their careers, the essay points to a close reading practice that more seriously considers Black womanhood and empire.

This essay reflects on Laurie Lambert’s study Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (2020), which investigates contemporary Caribbean literary reimaginings of the Grenadian Revolution and makes visible how that history impacts Grenada today. Comrade Sister asks readers to wrestle with historical ghosts and uncomfortable truths that undergird liberation movements, including Grenada’s. For Lambert, those ghosts manifest as ancestral knowledge. This essay explores ancestral knowledge as an ontological project that, at its core, is concerned with pushing-into-consciousness revolutionary narratives that have been forgotten, hidden, or overlooked because they were produced outside of or do not align with revolutionary rhetoric and official accounts. By retrieving what has been lost, ancestral knowledge demonstrates how revolutionary tales can be told another way and, thus, how revolutions can be enacted differently.

This essay responds to the essays by Belinda Deneen Wallace and Randi Gill-Sadler on the author’s Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (2020). It uses the concepts of pushing-into-consciousness and narrative dulling, introduced by Wallace and Gill-Sadler, respectively, to inform a close reading of Phyllis Coard’s memoir Unchained: A Caribbean Woman’s Journey through Invasion, Incarceration, and Liberation (2019). The author argues that Coard’s representation of her body under incarceration serves to push her humanity into the consciousness of her readers. It also revisits how the author pushed Coard out of consciousness in order to write about the Grenada Revolution. Theorizing the different valences of omission that characterize certain writings on Grenada, the essay examines how this book discussion affords the opportunity to push beyond an earlier silence to situate Coard among the Caribbean feminists who helped shape the Revolution.