Issues

An examination of the significance of dance performances in the demonstrations of the Puerto Rican Summer of 2019, this essay argues that these performances belong to a history of irreverent, extravagant mourning gestures that periodically irrupt in Puerto Rican culture as decolonial practices by dislocating the socially prescribed bind between performance and affect.  Using the theories of Saidiya Hartman, José Esteban Muñoz and Juana María Rodríguez, and connecting to the work of Rocío Zambrana on strategies that address the island’s colonial legacy, the essay explores the mournfully irreverent dance performances of the Afro-Boricua bomba dancer Clara Isabel Díaz, the patería combativa or combative queer voguing of Aldrin Manuel Cañals, and the reggaetón perreo of queer feminist activists Perra Mística and Kaya Té as gestures of loss and mourning that both demand redress and enact what Puerto Rican artists, activists and critics have begun to call “decolonial joy.” 

Although the signs of Indo-Jamaican and Afro-Jamaican co-habitation is present in a late nineteenth-century photographic archive, the visual power of an imperial picturesque obscures the evidence that exists in plain view. Photographs that create the illusion of self-contained villages of imported Indian workers is informed by even as it reinforces a colonial order of racial segregation. By identifying the photographic traces of their indentureship, this essay introduces time and motion into a still photography that reduce Indian lives to single ethnographic instances. It also deploys dougla—the name for people of mixed Indian and African descent who exist as a flaw in the British colonial hierarchy of race—as a critical lens for exposing photographic flaws that rupture the smooth surface of the picturesque in ethnographic tableaus of “coolies” and Orientalizing portraits of “coolie belles.” 

This essay considers the stories of Blaccucini and Ángel Daniel, two Black transgender drag performers from Cuba, dwelling in particular on the relationship they imagine between their work as performers and their subjectivities as trans people. The author situates these narratives within queer Cuban and Caribbean studies, noticing the ways they push back against renderings of gender and sexuality as inherently distinct categories. Instead, for these artist-thinkers trans subjectivity is informed by various experiences related to gender, sexuality, race, class, and geography. The essay offers some possibilities for greater nuance in accounts of sexual subjectivity in Cuba and the Caribbean and locates the stakes of these discussions in broader transnational LGBT rights discourses. 

The late Marilyn Houlberg (1939-2012) was an artist, photographer, art historian, anthropologist professor, curator, and collector. During her lifetime she helped advance the scholarship and increase the recognition of artists from Haiti, particularly in her role as co-curator of the exhibitions, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995) and In Extremis: Death and Life in 21 st Century Haiti (2012). In her commitment to support the creative endeavors of artists living in historically marginalized communities in urban Haiti, Houlberg blurred cultural and professional boundaries, raising questions about her roles and responsibilities within the communities of artists and religious practitioners with whom she worked. This essay addresses problems and complexities in Houlberg’s work and activities in Haiti by relying on her extensive field notes, photographs, published works, and other archival materials. 

"Keywords for Caribbean Studies: A Project Statement" introduces a new featured section to be published in Small Axe annually that explores the critical vocabulary of the field of Caribbean studies. 

In this essay I tell a narrative of various contexts in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora that share a struggle around the meanings of Black. What happens to Black in the Afro-Surinamese Transatlantic Diaspora? Some of the questions I take up are: Which terms have African descendant people in Suriname and in The Netherlands used for themselves in different periods? What have whites called African descendant people in Suriname and in The Netherlands in different periods? When does Black come to the fore? Who mobilizes the term and for what purposes? This exercise brings important features of the Afro-Surinamese “cultural archive” to the fore: the orderings of the world, specifically terms of ethnic self-reference, that Afro- Surinamese forged historically, which also travelled to The Netherlands. There they met with clashing cultural-political terms and understandings in the dominantly white Dutch world. 

This article takes on the task of reflecting of the keyword negro from a transnational standpoint that considers how negro/a/x, a socio-political identity, falls in and out of AfroLatinidad in Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean diasporas. In particular, the author is concerned with re-centering Blacknesss in AfroLatinidad in response to the de-politicized usage of this identity. Through a focus on diaspora, movement, the embodied fact of Blackness Zamora argues that when thinking about negro (Black) and negritud (Blackness) from a transnational Spanish Caribbean context, we should remember that AfroLatinidad, or Black Latinidad is first and foremost about Black lives, embodied experiences, movement, translatability and untranslatability.

This article presents and studies five different words used in French to express the notion of blackness. The five words analyzed in the article—nègre, noir, black, renoi and négro—entered the French language between the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century and the 1980s, often borrowed from other languages. The way they have been used and continue to be illustrates France’s complicated and shifting relation to people of African descent, notably within its own population. In the context of culture wars that have been shaking the country in the past decades and seen the rise of organized Black political groups on the French public stage, how one speaks blackness in France has become especially fraught.

In this essay, I show that despite the variegated experience of black-identified people globally and the unstable and processual nature of blackness as a category, the meaning of blackness remains anchored in the geography of the plantation and the deathliness this produces still haunts the anglophone Caribbean. I focus on how this haunting is palpable to the criminalized urban poor in Trinidad. Yet, black has never simply denoted abjection. From the vantage point of postcolonial Caribbean nation-states founded on anti-colonial projects of black sovereignty, we can see not only the resilience of anti-blackness that conditions what it feels like to be black but also the “iterations of black life that cannot be contained by black death.”  

A curatorial essay in which the author explains his research and process for the conception and production of everything slackens in a wreck, a visual arts exhibition running at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York from June to September 2022. Gosine elaborates his thinking about the title of the exhibition, which is taken from a Khal Torabully poem, and explains the relevance and his intrigue with the four artists whose works comprise the exhibition: Margaret Chen (Jamaica/Canada), Andrea Chung (USA/Jamaica), Wendy Nanan (Trinidad and Tobago) and Kelly Sinnapah Mary (Guadeloupe). All four women are descendants of indentured workers who traveled to the Caribbean in the late 19th/early 20th century, and for whom this history is a reference point in their practice. Gosine proposes a consideration of the Americas as a consequence of three wreckages: ship landings of European colonizers, and arriving ships of enslaved and, later, indentured peoples. 

My reflection on Ren Ellys Neyra’s The Cry of the Senses engages their reading of Santiago Muñoz’s cinema, paying particular attention to sensorial actualities that offer apprehension of the past of colonial violence that is the present. I focus on Santiago Muñoz’s Otros Usos (2014), which specifically explores Vieques, Puerto Rico. To apprehend the past that is the present requires indexing the continuity of the plantation economy, hence its racial order, in the military complex, in the tourist economy, in the current new rounds of colonial settlement through tax haven conditions in the realm of real estate. I shift the language of anticolonial sensorial errancy to decolonial sensorial errancy in order to focus on the forms of “slow violence” of economic invasion/control, the productivity of which presses us to attend to the forms of insidious, ubiquitous racial violence they represent. 

This article applies Ren Ellis Neyra’s concepts of defiance, solidarity, and mulitpoetic sensorial listening from their book, Cry of the Senses. I apply their concepts to a family story about how my great-aunt ate the telegram announcing her brother’s death in the Korean War. Through interpreting the story with multipoetic sensorial listening as a potential methodology, I uncover how this brief act that is so ingrained in our family lore might serve as a form of defiance against colonialism and militarization in Puerto Rico. I also question what it means to have a productive form of defiance and protest. Overall, I use the story of my aunt eating the telegram to demonstrate how Ellis Neyra’s multipoetic sensorial listening could excavate alternative archives and ways of knowing left out of Western modernity. 

This essay sketches out a protocol for reading Ren Ellis Neyra’s The Cry of the Senses from the vantage point of their more recent work on brownness and (non)relation. The essay aims to explore further the tensions that Ellis Neyra has identified across the fault lines of “Black/Brown” racial formations in a post-1492 context by paying specific attention to how these tensions crystalize in Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean studies. To do so, the essay unpacks Ellis Neyra’s account of the breakdown of the concept of brownness as articulated in José Estebán Muñoz’s work in order to detect an analogous breakdown in Bolívar Echevarría’s influential work on racial modernity. In conclusion, the essay poses a question about the emancipatory potential of abjection by putting Ellis Neyra’s compelling reading of Pedro Pietri’s The Masses are Asses in dialogue with the work of the late feminist-deconstructionist thinker, Mara Negrón. 

“White mythologies” engages the three book discussion essays of The Cry of the Senses by Ronald Mendoza de Jesús, Petra Rivera-Rideau, and Rocío Zambrana. Following questions of antiblackness in Spanish Caribbean (especially Puerto Rican) aesthetics, culture, and history, distinctly presented and theorized in each of the scholarly interlocutors’ book-forum-pieces, “White mythologies” thinks about reading itself and other perceptual modes, such as listening, qua antiblackness, "the ontic," and "slow violence." In its (re)considerations of the senses, it additionally critiques several foci of contemporary aesthetic and cultural theory and production, such as the current fashion of hyperbolizing aesthesis and poiesis as salvific and unquestionably relational in lieu of reckoning with ethical questions of reading, the perilous return of “vitalism,” and the discourse of cultural nationalism afoot in representations of Puerto Rico today.