keywords
Keywords in Caribbean Studies: A Small Axe Project debuted in July 2022 and grows out of the work of criticism that the Small Axe Project has engaged in for more than twenty-five years. Refashioning and revising the model of Keywords advanced by Raymond Williams in his monograph of the same title in 1973, our project of critical vocabulary stages the productive tensions across disparate genealogies rather than enforcing a settled regional consensus. Our Keywords embrace the polyvocal character of Caribbean criticism as a project that cuts across vectors of difference—to include language, size, and geography, as well as attendant histories of plantation slavery, indenture, and Indigenous dispossession. Through the study of the keywords and organizing concepts of Caribbean studies, our project is a testing ground for the geopolitical frameworks and analytical trends that have defined the field. The inaugural Keywords essays, “Zwart, Negro/a/x*, Nègre, Black,” in Small Axe 68 are organized around distinct colonial linguistic geographies, but remain attentive to the sites of clash and moments of spillover in Caribbean discourse. The Keywords forum is staged and published annually in July. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario and Ryan Cecil Jobson serve as its inaugural and present co-editors.
Contact
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
vpr@smallaxe.net
Ryan Cecil Jobson
rjobson@uchicago.edu
Editorial Assistant
Luis Escamilla Frías
socialmedia@smallaxe.net
past issues
Organizers
Vanessa Perez-Rosario is a professor of English at Queens College and doctoral faculty in the
Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures program at the Graduate Center, City University of
New York. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon
(2014), published in Spanish as Julia de Burgos: la creación de un ícono puertorriqueño (2022);
editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave
2010); and translator of Boat People, by Mayra Santos-Febres (2021). Her critical edition
titled I Am My Own Path: The Writings of Julia de Burgos is forthcoming with the University of
Texas Press 2025. She is managing editor of Small Axe.
Ryan Cecil Jobson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University
of Chicago. His research is preoccupied with questions of energy, sovereignty, race, and
capitalism. His writing is featured in Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, The
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Small Axe. His book
The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago is
a historical ethnography of the Caribbean petrostate. Jobson is a member of the Small Axe editorial committee.