By Anna Jayne Kimmel

France abolished slavery in 1848. 178 years later, and just this May 2026, the National Assembly voted to
repeal the Code Noir, an edict from Louis XIV that defined conditions of slavery throughout its colonial
empire since 1685. Heinous endorsement of human violence features large in its 60-articles. Many were
surprised to learn that the Code Noir continued on the books at all, including lawmakers themselves.

There seems to be a Mandela effect, a collective fabulation of formal justice as if abolition had already
occurred in full. France had previously abolished slavery in 1794, although this reform was short lived as
Napolean Bonaparte reinstated slavery in 1802. ‘There are no slaves in France!’ rallied advocates of the
Freedom Principle, a legal maxim of the seventeenth century. But chattel slavery and dehumanizing laws
continued across France’s overseas territories. The Code Noir carried on throughout these periods as the
regions addressed by the edict were not acknowledged under the first two efforts of abolition, only
continental Europe. Inequality persists today even as France claims equal treatment.

People remain skeptical that this symbolic act of removal now will materialize meaningful redress. Macron
himself equivocated reparations as “a question we cannot refuse” but a ceded “we must not make false
promises.” Earlier this spring, France and the United States were in the minority of countries to not favorably
vote in the United Nations General Assembly resolution to acknowledge trans-Atlantic slavery as the “gravest
crime against humanity.”

But the Code Noir and its performative afterlives persist in other sites. The law exists not only in the
documents of the courts, but repeats through performance stages, literary forms, aesthetic works and public
consciousness This includes theatrical works, such as the opera Code Noir, staged in Paris 1842 by Louis
Clapisson and Eugène Scribe, as well as narrative texts such as Mulatten by Hans Christian Anderson in 1840.
“When one is considering the crimes of slavery,” writes scholar Saidiya Hartman, “the popular theater is as
central as the courthouse.” While Hartman stresses that racial violence is no less cruel in theater than in law,
elsewhere I shift interpretation slightly to emphasize:

“performance as no less imperative to the securitization of the Code Noir than the courthouse. To
understand the codes fully, one must look toward its staged performance: not only for its
sentimentality or affective reception, but as a vital site for its mechanics of reproduction.”

The politics are uncertain; reproductions might arrive as reinvestment or refusal. Such is the challenge of
symbolic nature of law. It is not only justice done, but justice seen to be done.

As Ghanaian journalist Mustapha Bature Sallama reflects on these passing events, “Macron has been
performing a careful choreography around this moment” of abolition. New methods are required to
understand this legal dance, one that attends to lived experience and performative afterlives even as erasure
occurs on the page, least we cede again to a legal confabulation that abolition and justice had already arrived.

Anna Jayne Kimmel is the Deputy Director at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George
Washington University, where she is also an Assistant Professor of Dance. A scholar of legal humanities,
performance studies, and francophone culture, her books include Legal Moves: Choreographies of Race, Law, and Empire (Stanford University Press) and Performing Law (Cambridge University Press). Kimmel holds a PhD
from Stanford University and AB from Princeton University.

When the war criminal, Benjamin Netenyahu, took to the podium of the General Assembly of the United Nations on Thursday 24 September 2026 to deliver his address, delegates from an estimated 77 countries walked out of the hall in protest against the continuing genocide being perpetrated by his regime on Palestinians in Gaza. Seven supposedly sovereign Caribbean nation-states remained seated: the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. What an unspeakable shame! Why did they sit there? What compels this sort of supine cowardice? Do their complicit actions represent the views of their citizens? Think of Jamaica for a moment, whose Prime Minister, Andrew Holness, has been very cosy with US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio (holding "talks" with him on the "sidelines" of the February 2026 CARICOM meetings in Basseterre). In early September 2026 the Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment, and Sport, the Honorable Olivia Grange, led the Jamaican delegation to the United Kingdom to petition King Charles to refer legal questions pertaining to the atrocity of the transatlantic slave trade and Britain's obligations to the descendants of the enslaved to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. It was a grand, prideful gesture. And yet, there Jamaica remained, tacitly condoning the genocide of the racist-Zionist state of Israel. Is this hypocrisy? Should anyone take them seriously? Where is the moral principle? Has Jamaica no shame?

— David Scott

By Michelle Patiño-Flores

The Cuban Revolutionary project occupies a privileged space when thinking about alternatives to North Atlantic systems of domination. And rightfully so. The Revolution came into power on January 1, 1959, as the United States entrenched itself as an imperialist force to contend with the scientific and cultural interventions born in the Soviet Union. Revolutionary Cuba emerged at a necessary and pivotal moment in global history, demonstrating once again that the Caribbean engenders life, sovereignty, and freedom. The Cold War era — which many scholars propose has not concluded — formalized a polar spectrum of political possibilities arranged as: left:right, indexed by communism:capitalism. This artificial binary, while a useful heuristic for organizing important political propositions, has unfortunately sedimented the possibilities of governance that we have been able to imagine as scholars, generally speaking.

This is most clear now that well over half of Cubans on the island have a more accessible connection to the internet, an enormous upgrade from the 43% of Cubans who had access just ten years ago (World Bank). Online today, it’s impossible to ignore the politically heterogenous multitudes of Cubans and write them off as anomalous when they categorize their government as authoritarian, dictatorial, and otherwise violent. In the streets of Havana, these expressions are multiplied, and they are contextualized by the trash and trash fires that speckle the city, the exorbitant price of food (when it is available), constant stream of blackouts, and growing list of arrests of public dissenters and especially artists (with whom I conduct my ethnographic work). The instinctive explanation for these circumstances that many non-Cuban scholars offer proposes the history and recent exacerbation of US sanctions as the cause of such suffering. However, Cubans insist that it’s not only the US embargo that wrought these conditions, but also, crucially, internal corruption, abuse of power, and overall failure of the Revolutionary system. Many of us in academic circles in the North Atlantic choose to overlook these local theorizations or categorize them as outlying perspectives, insisting that such comments are ignorant to the sacred truth of socialism and simply products of US propaganda. Are these dismissals not forms of epistemological violence?

As ethnographers, we are tasked with making meaning out of the raw material of life. We couch our practice–sometimes–upon a position of cultural relativity, from which we develop narratives and explanations for how and why things come about and, oftentimes too, what they mean. So it’s worth deeply considering what it is that Cubans mean when they say they live under authoritarian conditions. And what if what they mean is exactly what they say? It’s preposterous to have to propose what we have long ago already accepted as feminist, activist, and other avowedly decolonial scholar praxis: to trust the knowledge of our interlocutors when they explain their experiences–especially when they are all almost invariably saying the same thing. So why is it so hard to accept that what many Cubans are saying may be true? This truth does not dilute other truths: that the US has effectively waged war on the world, and on Cuba and the Caribbean in particular, through its foundational ethos of imperialism; or that the present US government has tightened its violent grip on the embargo. Acknowledging that Cuba, but more specifically that the Cuban government, is a complex system that, like many others, is not impervious to corruption, violence, and abuse of power can only strengthen our understanding of political organizations and refine our efforts for alternative projects that affirm life.

Academia loves the Cuban Revolution. We might say it satisfies our need for an Other to aspire towards. And it’s clear that it was able to secure rights and privileges to Cubans, especially impoverished (, and) Black, and otherwise peripheralized Cubans, for some decades, though it has always done so at a great cost (like labor camps and censorship, sometimes targeting those very people it sought to enfranchise). The haze of the Revolution, what it symbolizes for the Cold War, and its significant but limited constellation of successes in the face of surrounding imperialist violence, has convinced us that it is the only or at least a worthwhile alternative to sustain against the neoliberal global order. But is it, really? Many of us are students of abolition. But it appears we get confused when the police are socialists. Why uphold the power of a system that deploys military and secret police to surveil, persecute, and arrest children, adults, and elders who post dissenting personal videos online or create art that critiques the government? Why side with power, when we can side with freedom? Cuba must not be made to occupy a hopeful slot for academics to project partisan fancies.

The solution to the Cuban Revolution is not capitalist domination. The way out of this political binary is still being imagined and prefigured in everyday fugitivity. We must dare to dream with and plainly listen to the screams, whispers, dances, and songs that countervail power and gestate the as-yet “unthinkable” paradigm shift towards an otherwise, against a binary we have invented for ourselves.

Michelle Patiño-Flores is an artist and PhD Candidate in Anthropology with a minor in Art History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Through multimodal ethnographic research, she learns from and collaborates with Black (and) queer Cuban artists to understand practices of creative freedom in contemporary Cuba. She is an arts and culture writer and has exhibited her photography across various states. Michelle is a student editor at American Ethnological Society.

by Rocío Aranda-Alvarado

Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures at El Museo del Barrio is a much needed and long awaited retrospective of the photographer's work. Active from the late 1960s through the early aughts, Sophie Rivera is a key figure of the Nuyorican arts movement of the 1970s and 80s, lending her sharp photographer’s eye to a beautiful variety of portraits and street scenes, all unmistakably of New Yorkers in the glory of their urban environment.

Perhaps the most gratifying surprise in the exhibition is the group of Halloween portraits Rivera took during the traditional Greenwich Village Halloween parade (c. 1986-87). This grid of large color photographs highlights several of the artist’s most traditional ways of working, including catching people in the moment and asking them to pose as-is for her lens. The images unveil the truly creative nature of New Yorkers and the amazing costumes they fashioned from ordinary materials, long before widely-available and inexpensive plastic and polyester costumes could be shipped to one’s home. One of the best examples is a group of three young women covered in transparent pink plastic bags with rubber gloves, syringes, face masks, and ziploc bags filled with unidentifiable “medical waste” attached to them. The final touch is the three beauty-queen style sashes they wear that read “Jones Beach,” “Staten Island” and “Jersey Shore” (🤣).

Her penchant for the abject and her feminist lens also led her to create a series of photographs of a toilet, sometimes featuring a discarded bloody tampon, sometimes presenting human waste. Installed as a grid in the exhibition, the elegantly titled Rouge et Noir (1976-78), offers an unexpected view of a woman’s excretions and makes reference to so many other historic works of art that evoke toilets and related content, not to mention, bathroom humor more generally.

Rivera got her start working for leftist publications like the Liberation News Service in the late 1960s. Her perceptive eye and progressive inclinations led her to document protests over the Vietnam War, the New York City Department of Education, the cancellation of a Latinx focused television show from public media and other scenes. Her training with the noted street photographer Lisette Model is evident in these kinds of images and a host of others that show, for example, MTA workers painting the overpass bridge of the number 1 train.

This will to show regular folks in ordinary circumstances also led Rivera to the interior of the NYC Subway, featuring a host of people on their daily rides. Mothers and children, the unhoused, graffiti artists, regular New Yorkers are all presented with dignity and tenderness.

Among the most well-known works in the exhibition is the monumental series titled Latino Portraits, which have been the most shown and most collected works by the artist. Rivera gathered these individuals in the hope of showing a group of Latinx “archetypes,” that were generally missing from all media, including books, magazines, films and television

This invisibility that the artist tries to counter is the main drive of her work and underscores her sensitivity to her subjects and their appearance. The large-scale images have now been acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In this way, they have managed to complete the task that Sophie Rivera set out for them, to highlight representation in a way that is both unassuming and proud, featured in the velvety light and dark, black and white of her gelatin silver prints. Shown in 1989-1990 in a Bronx subway station under the auspices of the Public Art Fund, they underscore the “belonging” of these subjects to their community but also to the larger world of “art.”

I end with one of the most beautiful images in the exhibition, of falling snow [Fig. 5]. The attempt to take such an image is nearly impossible for an untrained photographer. Rivera’s image is magical, with subtle layers of glowing, fuzzy, sparkly dots of snow in all different sizes. It is yet another example of the unexpected, the beautiful, the quotidian as presented by this artist with loving care. For Puerto Ricans on the island, the magic of a snow falling from the skies is unknowable. For Nuyoricans like Sophie Rivera, it presents another chance to capture a lived experience in a singular and poetic image.

Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures through August 2, 2026 at El Museo del Barrio (1230 Fifth Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan). The exhibition is organized by El Museo’s Chief Curator, Susanna V. Temkin, and is accompanied by a color catalog published by Aperture, available at El Museo and online.

Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, is an art historian and a curator and is currently a Senior Program Officer in Arts and Culture at the Ford Foundation. She worked for nearly 10 years at Jersey City Museum, where she organized an exhibition of Sophie Rivera’s large portraits and another 9+ years at El Museo del Barrio. Her curatorial work and research explores modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with a focus on US Latinx art. 
@artyrocio @100latinxartists

We at Small Axe invite you to check out Kiskadee Watch. On 14 June 2026, the independent, digital-first media company launched, "with the intent ... to provide the public with the news that it needs on a daily basis and to serve as a watchdog for accountability in all parts of society". The project is led by former Stabroek News employees following the publication's closure three months prior. Read the first installation of the publication's Diaspora Voices, written by Small Axe contributor Dr. Alissa Trotz, on the successful grassroots movement imposing a moratorium on offshore drilling in Belize.

On Wednesday, 20 May 2026, US Federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against Raúl Castro, former president of Cuba. The indictment accuses the 94 year old (and a number of others) of ordering the shoot-down in February 1996 of two civilian planes operated by the Miami-based group, Brothers to the Rescue. Castro was the Minister of Defense at the time. Now, whatever the purported legal standing is of this action, no one is in any doubt that the United States government has hit upon a saleable rationale for invading Cuba in order to kidnap Castro and topple the regime of current president Miguel Díaz-Canel. We can now see more clearly the reasons for the US imposition of an inhumane oil blockade on the island-state since the beginning of the year: to weaken the resolve of the Cuban people to resist, to increase the likelihood that the American forces will be welcomed as saviors. Unable to score decisively in its illegal war on Iran, the US government believes it can secure a cheap victory against Cuba. We in the Small Axe Project condemn this groundswell of aggression, an expression of barbarism and evil. Will Iran issue criminal charges against US president Donald Trump for the wholesale slaughter of 168 people, including more than 100 children, in the missile attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, on 28 February 2026, that Amnesty International has now determined was carried out by the US? And what if it does, since the US believes itself answerable to no law but its own. As Caribbean people we have a real challenge before us: either we submit supinely to these threats and transgressions of our sovereignty and dignity, or we stand up for our right to determine our collective futures.

We in the Small Axe Project view with alarm and deep dismay the Trump administration's intensification of threats against the Cuban regime, and what appears to be its preparations for some kind of military intervention. We urgently call upon the leaders of the Caribbean community of nations to vigorously protest this US aggression in the region in every available diplomatic forum, and to defend the sovereign right of the Cuban people to self-determination.

Small Axe 79 includes essays by Anasa Hicks, Elizabeth Jackson, Raul Fernandez, Max Gruber, and Jessica Adams. It features the special section "Rhoda Reddock: Scholar, Activist, Relentless Optimist", with essays by Kamala Kempadoo, Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, Jocelyne Guilbault, Carole Boyce Davies, and Rhoda Reddock. The visualities section features Shoshanna Weinberger's work. The Book Discussion explores Ryan Jobson's The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago, with essays by J. Brent Crosson and Chelsea Angela Schields.

The Small Axe Project joins others in the Caribbean and elsewhere in condemning the US imposed oil blockade on Cuba, significantly worsening an already acute energy crisis in the country and threatening the health and economic well-being of millions of ordinary Cubans. We condemn such strategies blatantly aimed at precipitating regime change, one more illustration of the new imperialism shaping US policy. The Small Axe Project calls on CARICOM and Caribbean peoples to speak out in the strongest terms against this and other threats to Caribbean sovereignty.

The Small Axe Project team joins others in the United States and around the world in unequivocally condemning the U.S. abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores on January 3rd, 2026, and their forced transport to New York to stand trial on drug-related charges. We utterly condemn the murder of the 32 Cubans and nearly 50 Venezuelans this act of wanton state violence entailed. We condemn the flagrant U.S. breach of those articles of the United Nations charter that enshrine the rights of sovereignty: Article 2(1), protecting the sovereign equality of member-states; Article 2(4), prohibiting the use of force against the territorial integrity of member-states; and Article 2(7), protecting the right of non-interference in domestic affairs. We are alarmed that the U.S. administration has now issued threats against the sovereignty of Colombia and Cuba. It is a sad reflection of the supine posture of Caribbean states when the Conference of Heads of Government of CARICOM, which met later that morning, could rise no further than to meekly offer that the “situation is of grave concern” to the region. Where are our leaders?