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.

You can also watch the livestream for "The Jamaican 1950s: A Small Axe Symposium" on Facebook.

The Small Axe Literary Competition encourages the production and publication of Caribbean fiction and poetry in English, Spanish and French. The competition focuses on poetry and short fiction from emerging writers whose work centers on regional and diasporic Caribbean themes and concerns. Read full bios for judges and winners on our website.

2018 Judges

Poetry                                               Short Fiction

Andre Bagoo                                     Marcia Douglas                                 
Ishion Hutchinson                             Brenda Flanagan
Anthony Kellman                              Alecia McKenzie

2018 Winners

Poetry

First place: “Kwas” by Sassy Ross from St. Lucia and the United States
Second place: “Ancestral Coda” by Suzanne C. Persard from Bronx, New York
 

Short Fiction

First place: "The Chicken Coup: A Distinctly Masculine Adventure for Distinctly Manly Men," by Caroline Mackenzie from Port of Spain, Trinidad
Second place:  "Poui" by Ira Mathur from Port of Spain, Trinidad
 

Short List

Karen Lee of Canada
Erica Mapp of Trinidad
Margarita Rosario of the Dominican Republic
Shannon Smith of Jamaica
Robyn Stephenson of Jamaica
Kirk Budhooram from The Republic of Trinidad & Tobago
Sharon Lake of Anguilla
Brandon McIvor of Trinidad
Cathy Thomas of California
Tracey-Ann Wisdom of Jamaica

The Small Axe Literary Competition consists of two categories: poetry and short fiction. First and second prizes are chosen from each category by a distinguished panel of judges. In 2017, the Small Axe Literary Competition entered an important new phase, and for the first time invites entries in Spanish, English, and French, in a three-year rotation. In 2019, we will welcome submissions in French. Visit our website for full details on our 2019 competition.

Funded in part by the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies