Mar 22, 2018 | 6:00pm
James Room, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Co-Sponsors: Barnard Center for Research on Women, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism

Please join us as we host a conversation between authors Erna Brodber (Nothing’s Mat; The Rainmaker’s Mistake, among others)  and Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun) as the first event in the newly-expanded series, Critical Caribbean Feminisms. These authors will discuss issues including the Caribbean and its diaspora, method, feminism, and gender in their work. The conversation with be followed by a moderated discussion.

RSVP here: http://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/critical-caribbean-feminisms-a-dialogue/

sx archipelagos is now accepting submissions for our upcoming special section "Slavery in the Machine," guest edited by Jessica Marie Johnson. This special section aims to highlight scholarship situated at the intersection of technology and hemispheric American slavery. Topics may include but are not limited to:

• black code studies through a hemispheric lens
• plantation societies and the socio-technics of enslavement
• digital archives of slavery
• representations of slavery on the open web or social media
• cultural analytics and slavery

Deadline for abstracts 16 April
Article submission deadline 16 July

sx archipelagos is a born-digital articulation of the Small Axe Project. It is a peer-reviewed publication platform devoted to creative exploration, debate, and critical thinking about and through digital practices in contemporary scholarly and artistic work in and on the Caribbean. Given the wide implications of the “digital turn” for our very conceptions of knowledge, our mission is to discern the ways in which the digital may enhance and transform our comprehension of the regional and diasporic Caribbean. sx archipelagos responds to this challenge with three distinct dimensions of critical production: scholarly essays; digital scholarship projects; and digital project reviews

Latina Life Stories Speaker Series Presents: 

Date: 27 February 2018

Time: 3:40-5:15pm

Location: Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library 

Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor at Columbia University, where she is the founding director of the Media and Idea Lab and founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive at Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Among her books and publications are: Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004), The Latino Media Gap (2014), and Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism in Native Nations and Latinx America (forthcoming). Her most recent films include Small City, Big Change (2013), War for Guam (2015) and Life Outside (2016).

For her work as a scholar and filmmaker, Negrón-Muntaner has received Ford, Truman, Scripps Howard, Rockefeller, Pew, and Chang-Chavkin fellowships. Major funders such as Social Science Research Council, Andy Warhol Foundation, and Independent Television Service have also supported her work. In 2008, the United Nations' Rapid Response Media Mechanism recognized her as a global expert in the areas of mass media and Latin/o American studies; in 2012, she received the Lenfest Award, one of Columbia University's most prestigious recognitions for excellence in teaching and scholarship. Negrón-Muntaner also served as director of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race from 2009-2016. In 2017, she was the recipient of an inaugural OZY Educator Award.

Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is associate professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY, managing editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, and founder of the Latina Life Stories speaker series. She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon. For her work as a scholar, Pérez-Rosario has received Woodrow Wilson, Mellon, American Association of University Women, and Rockefeller fellowships. 

Latina Life Stories speaker series co-sponsors: 

Small Axe Project

Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Office of the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Women's and Gender Studies Program, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College, CUNY

American Studies Program, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Organizer: Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, vperezrosario@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Saturday, 10 February. The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College will officially open The Art of Haiti: Loas, History and Memory, a title which curator Anthony Bogues calls “deliberate and precise,” features contemporary Haitian artwork, commenting on the cultural memory of Haiti, the Loas (spirits) that embody the Vodou religion, and the history that informs the art and culture of Haiti today. 

Learn more about the exhibition here.

02 February. Curated by Brent H. Edwards, Projecting the New Thing: Black Experimental Film in the Wake of the Black Arts explores the aesthetic experiments of black filmmakers in the 1960s and 70s, when a number of African American artists began to explore 16mm film as a medium for black aesthetics. Working independently, taking advantage of sporadic and fleeting government funding or institutional support when they could, a number of black writers and musicians turned to film with an eye to the possibilities of crafting a visionary cinema. Their projects emerged in a variety of circumstances: More than simply a documentary, Amiri Baraka’s 1968 The New-Ark offers a bold and formally innovative portrait of the cultural nationalism of the Spirit House Movers and the Committee for a Unified Newark. Saxophonist Alan “Juice” Glover’s 1969 Birth — supported in part by a Columbia outreach effort after the controversy over the university’s plans to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park — depicts the coming to consciousness of a young black man in surrealistic tones inspired by Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. A fragmented diasporic dream suite set against the stark realities of St. Louis, the 1972 Sweet Willie Rollbar’s Orientation (with an evocative soundtrack by Julius Hemphill) is one of the legendary productions of the Black Artists’ Group. Taken together, these seldom-seen short films amount to a remarkable record of trans-medium experimentation in the years before the emergence of independent black feature film directors such as Bill Gunn, Kathleen Collins, Larry Clark, Charles Burnett, and Julie Dash.

Proceedings from The Jamaican 1970s Symposium now available via the Heyman Center for Humanities website!

On June 23, 2017, Haus der Kunst opened "Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi," a comprehensive survey of monumental and mid-sized paintings by the distinguished Guyanese-born, British painter Frank Bowling.

The goal of this symposium, "The Sea is History: Art and Black Atlantic Cultures," is to examine the intersection of the artistic, theoretical, literary, and cultural dimensions of Bowling’s practice. Invited participants, ranging from literary scholars, cultural theorists, and art historians to artists, will bring into sharp focus the ways in which the Black Atlantic continues to inform the production of art today by a new generation of artists. Theorist David Scott here examines questions surrounding the Caribbean as an active site of aesthetic and philosophic imagination.

The most recent issue of Small Axe features a special section, “The Jamaican 1960s.” This section prompts contributors to rethink the cultural-political historiography of Jamaica, as well as question the normative narrative of the making of modern Jamaica.

The revisionary historiographic starting point of the section is the 1960s. Contributors revisit this decade through varied forms of analysis, considering topics from Creole Nationalism to radical skepticism in 1960s Jamaican fiction to post-1952 U.S. foreign policy’s effect on local and colonial perceptions of people’s struggles for sovereignty. The impetus of these essays is not to find fault with the older paradigm but to explore, provisionally and experimentally, how or to what extent this paradigm is helpful in illuminating contemporary Jamaica. The essays themselves grew out of a symposium organized around the theme of the Jamaican 1960s held at the University of Miami in October 2015.

Read the introduction to the section, “On the Very Idea of the Making of Modern Jamaica,” by David Scott, made freely available.

In this talk, Nadia Huggins, an artist affiliated with Small Axe's Caribbean Queer Visualities project, explores the in-between spaces of the shoreline and beneath the water. Through the use of her images, she explores the moments of vulnerablities of moments at the boundaries of the shorelines and how constructs emerge in these spaces. Nadia Huggins is a self-taught visual artist and self-employed graphic designer. She was born in Trinidad & Tobago, grew up in Saint Vincent & the Grenadines, and has lived and worked in Saint Vincent, Saint Lucia, and Trinidad. While she has been a practicing artist for over a decade, the loss of a parent deepened her connection with visual arts where she found creative potency in the catharsis of making images. Nadia’s practice is dedicated to challenging perceptions about what the Caribbean and Caribbean photography look like. Her main preoccupation has been with the sea which she feels presents an opportunity to explore new ways of imagining ourselves.

You can view her talk here.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. 

Popcaan Where We Come From album cover by Small Axe 54 cover artist Ricardo Edwards

by Tiana Reid

For the playlist to accompany Small Axe's latest issue, we stayed close to the Jamaican 1960s special section. And yet the afterlife of music—Peter Tosh's "I Am That I Am" (1977) or even Popcaan's "Where We Come From" (2014)—suggests that the 1960s as an era lived much longer than its nominal decade.

Small Axe 54 playlist.