The November 2017 issue of Small Axe is now available. This issue includes a special section entitled "The Jamaican 1960s," with essays by David Scott, Donette Francis, Deborah A. Thomas, Sheri-Marie Harrison, Obika Gray, Maziki Thame, Faith Smith, and Charles Carnegie.  The issue also includes a book discussion of SX's managing editor, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario's, book Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon.

You can browse the new issue's full table of contents at Duke University Press's website, where it is also available for purchase. 

In light of the Small Axe Project's continued attention to recent hurricane-wrought devastation across the Caribbean, we would like to share our own, Yarimar Bonilla's recent writings and interviews on Puerto Rico and the political, economic, and environmental situation on the island before and after Hurricane Maria. You can see her on an interview for Democracy Now!, read a recent article written for the Washington Post, or read her in conversation with Bill Moyers for his website. 

We in the Small Axe Project are watching with deep concern and anguish the path of Hurricane Maria. The wreckage in human life and the destruction of the livelihoods of ordinary people that it is leaving behind in its wake is incalculable, perhaps irreparable. Our thoughts are with family, friends, and colleagues in the affected regions, especially those with whom we have not been able to make contact as a consequence of the widespread collapse of communication systems. Let us seek to support, wherever we can, however we can, those in most need.
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David Scott and the Small Axe Project Team 

The sx archipelagos editorial team is excited to present our sophomore issue. Since launching the journal last year we’ve both shored up and expanded our community of contributors and collaborators, and we hope sxa (2) does justice to this evolution. The essays in the issue all turn around the question of Haiti, history, and the digital – from Laura Wagner on curating and preserving oral/aural history, to Sarah Juliet Lauro on gaming the Haitian Revolution, to Nathan H. Dize, Kelsey Corlett-Rivera, Abby R. Broughton, and Brittany M. de Gail on the thrills of interactive pedagogy. Our expanded digital project section includes both a featured peer-review of the Ramble Bahamas! platform as well as a behind-the-curtains look at the making of The Archive of Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies (ESSSS). Rounding out the issue, our project reviews present two extraordinary, established online research platforms – The Digital Archeological Archive of Comparative Slavery and The Caribbean Memory Project – both of which our readers would do well to check out. Onward!

To read the second issue of sx archipelagos, please visit our site.

A Reading and Conversation with Sandra Cisneros

Latina Life Stories series curated by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario

Date: September 18, 2017

Time: 11:00am - 12:50pm

Location: Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, whose work explores the lives of the working-class.  Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, several honorary doctorates and book awards nationally and internationally, and most recently Chicago’s Fifth Star Award,  the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the National Medal of the Arts, awarded to her by President Obama in 2016..  The House on Mango Street has sold over five million copies, been translated into over twenty languages, and is required reading in elementary, high school, and universities across the nation. Founder of awards and foundations that serve writers and a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico, Sandra Cisneros earns her living by her pen. 

Contact: Vanessa Pérez-Rosario Associate Professor

Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies

Managing Editor, Small Axe 

vpr@smallaxe.net 

As Hurricane Irma makes its way up the Caribbean archipelago, with such devastating effect, we in the Small Axe Project wish to extend our thoughts to all those in the region who have already been affected, and to urge those in its path to do everything possible to protect themselves, their families, their friends and neighbors, their communities, from harm and injury. And as we (intellectuals and artists) contemplate its wake—in conjunction with the wakes before and the wakes to come—let us seek, more receptively, more boldly, to think the implications of the eco-poetics of catastrophe that constitute our Caribbean worlds.

David Scott and the Small Axe Project Team 

The Humanities and Technology Camp in the Caribbean

(THATCamp Caribe)

3 October 2017
10 am – 4 pm
Alma Jordan Memorial Library
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad

The third THATCamp Caribe will take place at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, in partnership with The 36th Annual West Indian Literature Conference. 

THATCamp Trinidad will consist of a full day of shared conversation and learning on 3 October 2017. It is free to register and attend. THATCamp is an “unconference,” where attendees discuss issues related to the intersections of technology, cultural heritage, history, research, art and the humanities in general in an informal environment. Please visit their About page to learn more about this event and how to get involved right away.

The organizers expect to combine discussion with workshops and a Wikipedia collective writing session, but it all depends on attendees indicating their own interests. A THATCamp is usually organized in the month prior to the event, and during the first hour of the day. To sign up, visit the registration page, and suggest topics for workshops on 3 October 3.

THATCamp Trinidad is organized by Kevin Browne (University of the West Indies, St. Augustine), Schuyler Esprit (Dominica State College), Alex Gil (Columbia University), and Kelly Baker Josephs (York College, CUNY).

Visit the THATCamp website for more information here.