International journal Public Anthropologist recently interviewed David Scott, Small Axe editor, on his relationship with Stuart Hall in light of his upcoming biography of the pioneering cultural theorist. Read below for an excerpt of the interview.

Sindre: First of all, David, I am going to cite one of my favorite passages from your own work on the late Stuart Hall (1932-2014). It is a moving tribute that you published already in 2005 in your journal Small Axe, entitled Stuart Hall’s Ethics. What strikes me is that this is in fact poetry. I have actually used it as an epigram in one of my own monographs. You wrote the following there, and this was at a time when Stuart Hall was still alive: “We live in dark times; they are not times that favor forbearance, they do not shelter generosity, they do not encourage receptivity. They are rather obdurate times, cynically, triumphalist and ruthlessly xenophobic times that seem to require new regime of silencing and assimilation. A new regime of prostration, submission and humiliation. Who, looking forward from a generation ago – in the middle of another imperial moment – could have imagined they would be living in a world that looks like this one. But Dark Times, as Hannah Arendt memorably said, need people who can give us illumination, and who calls them forth into the public realm.”

So, in order to talk about beginnings here David, who was your friend Stuart Hall and why does his work matter so much right here, right now?

David: Sindre, you begin with an impossible question. I thought you would begin with rather more elementary questions that would then take us gradually into the heart of the matter. But you begin with very, very large issues. So, let me try and find my way to your question. The passage that you read from was written roundabout in 2003-2004, and it was written for a really important event. Maybe we should begin there. It was the first time that a symposium had been organized at the University of the West Indies, Mona (the Jamaica campus of the University of the West Indies) in honor of Stuart Hall. It was a very telling and significant event, and as significant for Jamaican intellectuals as for Stuart. It was very significant for Stuart and for his relationship to Jamaica. My concern in my lecture (and it was the sort of keynote lecture delivered at the opening of the conference) was to try to present Stuart Hall in as broad a manner as possible—to try to characterize something about the texture of his orientation towards thinking, more so than to try to present the details of his particular conceptions of culture and politics. And so, part of what I wanted to evoke in the passage that you read was the signature way in which Stuart Hall entered conjunctures, as he might have called them, to try to unpack what he thought the dead-ends were, and to try to offer glimpses of alternative ways to think ourselves out of the present dark times. In many ways, that was his modus operandi. What was amazing about the character of the movement of his mind was a refusal to be imprisoned by the dark time of the present: the present was always for him a kind of challenge to unlock, to both re-describe the way in which the present appeared to us, and to re-describe it in such a way that we could see better where the present had come from—what kinds of pasts, and what kinds of pathways from the past, had led to this present. And to do so, moreover, in a way that would enable us to recognize the contingencies and the “constructedness” of the present so that we might think of the possibility of alternative futures. And that capacity, that uncanny capacity to re-describe the present as a way of thinking futurity, was to my mind unique.

Read the full interview here on Public Anthrologist's blog

The above interview excerpt was recorded at the House of Literature in Oslo on October 15, 2019. The interview has been transcribed by Gard Ringen Høibjerg (INN University College), and edited and amended for clarity by Sindre Bangstad, David Scott and Antonio De Lauri.

Date: Tuesday, Oct 15 2019
Venue: Barnard Hall
Time: 10:30am, 6pm and 6:30pm

Barnard Hall will welcome a scale replica of "I Am Queen Mary," a sculpture created by artists Jeannette Ehlers and sx60 cover artist La Vaughn Belle, on Tuesday October 15, 2019. The scale replica was commissioned by the Ford Foundation and will remain at Barnard for the next few years on an extended loan, facilitated by Ford Foundation Gallery Director Lisa Kim (Barnard class of 1996). The original monumental sculpture is on display in Copenhagen, Denmark. Read more about the original work here.

Attend the welcome ceremony on Tuesday at the following moments, all times approximate:

10:30am - Silent Welcome of the sculpture in the lobby of Barnard Hall 

6pm - Welcome Ceremony, featuring La Vaughn Belle (Barnard Center for Research on Women Artist-in-Residence and co-creator of "I Am Queen Mary") and Ariana Gonzalez Stokas (Barnard Vice-President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)

6:30pm - Post-Welcome Ceremony Celebration - a party/celebration at BCRW on the 6th floor of the Milstein Center

During the Barnard spring semester, there will be a more substantive panel discussion of the issues raised by the sculpture about the politics of public art, representations of Black women in public art, the role of this sculpture on the Barnard campus, and more. Please check the BCRW website and Spring 2020 calendar for forthcoming details.

Date: Friday, Oct 18 2019
Venue: Chaaya's Richmond Hill Center
121-18 Liberty Avenue, 2nd Fl.
Richmond Hill, NY
Time: 6-8pm

Editorial committee member Andil Gosine's latest work, "Deities, Parts I & II," will be exhibited by community development corporation Chhaya at their Richmond Hill Center gallery space, co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. As world leaders gather at the UN Climate Action Summit, and as some of Chhaya's community members prepare to celebrate Diwali, this exhibit merges universal precepts with local context. 

"Deities Part I & II" was born out of Gosine's participation in Project Prithvi, a monthly clean-up of Jamaica Bay led by Sadhana, a Queens-based organization. Chhaya is thrilled to provide an extension to this work and share it with local residents of Richmond Hill, Queens. The exhibit will showcase digital prints and debut new ceramic works that seek to "modernize" heritage objects.

Artist Statement from Gosine: 

I started to make these offerings to water as long as I’ve known myself. Every time we went to the beach, the first thing my grandmother taught me to do was to find a flower and offer it to the ocean, with a prayer to Mother Earth. Each Divali, a “puja” would be performed at my parents’ home and the (usually entirely biodegradable) materials from it were supposed to be left at a river bank. There was something quite beautiful about growing up with that practice. But rituals have to change with the times and context. Encountering those idols at Jamaica Bay, most of them made from plastic or other toxic materials, I felt conflicted: they were beautiful and ugly; they elicited a warm sentimentality but they were also evidence of my own self-destructive habits. These offerings were supposed to offer a kind of reverence for nature, but they were actually destructive to the environment.

Named "one of the most exciting Caribbean artists working right now" (Island Origins magazine 2019), Andil Gosine draws on themes of migration, ecology and desire to create multimedia conceptual works. Professor of Artistic Practices at York University in Toronto, Dr. Gosine's recent solo exhibitions include Coolie Coolie Viens which explored the legacy of Indian indentureship programs and the subsequent migrations of Indo-Caribbean peoples to cities in North America and Europe, and All the Flowers, which reflected on the impact of migration during adolescence. His work in the Queens community include the portraiture project Cane Portraiture: (Made In Love) at the inaugural Indo-Caribbean Alliance gala in 2013, his presentation of the performance Our Holy Waters, And Mine at the Queens museum in 2014, and part I of the Deities exhibition at RISE, Rockaways, earlier this year.
 

From Chhaya

Please click here to read Erica James' important op-ed about how Hurricane Dorian and its damage to the Bahamas demonstrates that the Caribbean bears the brunt of climate change, despite its minimal carbon footprint.

Small Axe is proud to announce Issue (3) of sx archipelagos, "Slavery in the Machine." This issue welcomes Jessica Johnson (Johns Hopkins U.) as guest editor, and is dedicated to the memory of late Caribbean scholar Linda Rodriguez. This special issue aims to highlight scholarship situated at the intersection of technology and hemispheric American slavery. The issue includes essays by Nick Nesbitt, Ada Ferrer, Linda Rodriguez, Marlene Daut, Jessica Johnson, and a speculative "research pocket" by Marisa Parham. Our projects section presents the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, including our peer-review exchange with Elizabeth Dillon and Nicole Aljoe, and project overviews from Parham, Laurent Dubois, David Kirkland Garner and Mary Caton Lingold. In our project review section Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert takes a close look at the Puerto Rico Syllabusby Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón.

Date: Tuesday Oct 15 2019
Venue: Wergeland Hall, Litteraturhuset Oslo
Time: 19:00-21:00 PM

The late Prof Stuart Hall (1932-2014) was born in Kingston, Jamaica. After his arrival to the UK on a Rhodes Scholarship to study literature at Oxford University in the 1950s, Hall became part of the New Left coalescing around what later became the New Left Review (NLR). As a director of the Centre For Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCS) at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s, Hall was one of the founding figures of Cultural Studies. Hall’s work, profoundly inspired by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, has been absolutely central to debates around authoritarian right-wing populism, popular culture, ‘race’, racism and nationalism. It inspired central contemporary postcolonial intellectuals not only in the UK but across the world, including scholars such as Paul Gilroy, and the artist John Akomfrah. After Hall’s death in 2014, Duke University Press and numerous other publishers have published volumes of and on Hall’s life and legacy. In the autumn of 2019, the Norwegian journal Agora-Journal For Metafysisk Spekulasjon publishes a special volume on ‘Critical theory from the South’ featuring the first Norwegian introduction to the work of Hall; in 2020, the Norwegian publisher Cappelen Damm publishes the first ever translated text of Hall in Norwegian in its prestigious series Cappelens Upopulære Skrifter.

Prof David Scott is Head of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in the USA. Like Hall, a native of Jamaica, Scott was a friend of Stuart Hall’s, and is currently writing an intellectual biography about Hall. The founding editor of the Caribbean Studies journal Small Axe, Scott is the author of inter alia Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton University Press, 1999), Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Duke University Press, 2004), Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory (Duke University Press, 2014) and Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of An Ethics of Receptive Generosity (Duke University Press, 2017). In his work on the life and legacy of Stuart Hall, Scott has been centrally concerned with questions pertaining to the role of what he refers to as the ‘Caribbean problem space’ in Hall’s work.
Courtesy of funding from the Fritt Ord Foundation, and as part of the ten year anniversary of the @Anthropology Of Our Times-series in public anthropology at the House of Literature in Oslo, we hereby invite you to a free special evening dedicated to the life and legacy of Prof Stuart Hall, featuring Research Professor Sindre Bangstad (KIFO, Institute For Church, Religion And Worldview Research, Oslo) in conversation with Prof David Scott (Columbia University, USA). Scott will be introduced by Senior Lecturer Louisa Olufsen Layne from the University of Oslo, Norway’s leading young Caribbean Studies scholar.

The event is free of charge and open to all, and organized in co-operation with the Norwegian Centre Against Racism (ARS) and KIFO. Please note that the event is in English. The conversation between Bangstad and Scott will be followed by a Q&A with the audience. Early arrival at the venue is advisable.

Photo of David Scott courtesy of David Scott and Columbia University.