28 September - 30 September 

The Graduate Center

Columbia University 

Today we have a special guest DJ for our series of Small Axe playlists: Yarimar Bonilla, associate professor in the departments of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Anthropology at Rutgers University, made a playlist for the discussion of her book, Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015), which appeared in Small Axe 53 (July 2017).

Listen to her selection of Guadeloupean music—including Admiral T’s reggae-dancehall, Jocelyne Labyll’s zouk, and more--here.

Kaiama Glover, of sx archipelagos, spoke to Book Culture this month about her work on Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Glover recently translated Vieux-Chauvet's Dance on the Volcano, and previous edited the volume Revisiting Marie Vieux-Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine. In the interview, Glover speaks about her role as a translator, as a woman and of women. To find the full interview, please visit Book Culture here. 

With its twenty-fifth issue, sx salon welcomes Rosamond S. King as creative editor. As a scholar, creative writer, activist, and performing artist, Rosamond brings a wealth of experience in Caribbean cultural production to sx salon, evident in her "Statement on Digital Literature" included in this issue. She is particularly interested in fostering the growth of Caribbean digital literature, a natural development not only of the sx salon platform but of Caribbean literature itself, with roots in earlier experimental forms and engagements with new technologies. Included in the issue is Rosamond’s own digital poem, “Bring Back.”

Alongside Rosamond’s statement and poem, in Poetry + Prose this issue features Patrick Chamoiseau’s poetic tribute to Derek Walcott, translated by Charly Verstraet and Jeffrey Landon Allen; a hauntingly short poem by Anu Lakhan; and original prose fiction by Katherine Atkinson and Cynthia James.

Reviews this issue include Warren Harding’s review of Shalini Puri’s monograph on the Grenada Revolution; Kristina Huang’s review of Elizabeth Nunez’s latest novel; and Sophie Harris’s review of Lawrence Scott’s recent short story collection. Also included are reviews of two ambitiously comprehensive studies of representations of the Haitian Revolution: Megan Jeanette Myers reviews Víctor Figueroa’s Prophetic Visions of the Past: Pan-Caribbean Representations of the Haitian Revolution and Erin Zavitz reviews Marlene Daut’s Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865.

For a full table of contents for this issue, see below. 

_____________________________

Table of Contents

Introduction and Table of Contents—Kelly Baker Josephs

Reviews

The Silences, too, Deserve a Place—Warren Harding
A review of The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory, by Shalini Puri

On Inheritance and Reinvention—Kristina Huang
A review of Even in Paradise, by Elizabeth Nunez

A Question of Home—Sophie Harris
A review of Leaving by Plane, Swimming Back Underwater, and Other Stories, by Lawrence Scott

The Haitian Revolution in Caribbean Literature: A Synechdochal Study—Megan Jeanette Myers 
A review of Prophetic Visions of the Past: Pan-Caribbean Representations of the Haitian Revolution, by Víctor Figueroa

Representing the Unthinkable: The Haitian Revolution in Print—Erin Zavitz
A review of Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, by Marlene Daut

Prose

Statement on Digital Literature—Rosamond S. King
The Man Who Took Up All The Space—Katherine Atkinson
In the Laundry Room—Cynthia James

Poetry

Patrick Chamoiseau, translated by Charly Verstraet and Jeffrey Landon Allen
Anu Lakhan
Rosamond S. King

Black Portraiture[s] IV: The Color of Silence - Call for Papers / Call for Proposals

Event Timing: March 15-17, 2018.
Event Address: Havana, Cuba

BLACK PORTRAITURE[S] IV: The Color of Silence is the eighth conference in a series of conversations about imaging the black body. We invite artists, activists, and scholars to reflect on the visual expressions of national imaginaries and political ideologies that negate racial differences and render black subjects invisible. Such ideologies are prevalent in Latin America and the Caribbean, where metaphors of mixture (mestizaje or mestiçagem) and racial harmony ignore inequality and discrimination. Similar formulations are to be found elsewhere, however, as in republican France, or among proponents of a post-racial United States, or in references to a South African “rainbow nation”, or in Jamaica’s well-known “out of many, one people” motto. Presenters will engage a range of historical and contemporary topics such as biennales, exhibitions, movements, individual artists and collectives, art markets, politics, tourism, sites of memory, Afrofuturism, fashion, dance, music, film, art, and photography. We invite papers and panel proposals on relevant topics.

Deadline for submissions: September 15, 2017
Notice of acceptance: October 27, 2017

All proposals must be submitted through completion of this online form.

The conference will be held on Thursday through Saturday, March 15-17, 2018, in Havana, Cuba. As the status of the US/Cuba relations are in flux, more information about travel will be available when the new Administration's policies are enacted. We will keep you posted.

Please note that as with most academic conferences, we are unable to provide institutional funding for travel to Black Portraitures.

Black Portraiture[s] IV is a collaboration with the U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, Jeffrey DeLaurentis; Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University; New York University’s LaPietra Dialogues, Tisch School of the Arts, and the Institute for African American Affairs.

Please contact blackportraitures@gmail.com with questions.

Read more about Black Portraitures here.

by Tiana Reid 

This second Small Axe playlist is more “listening with” than “listening to.” The music accompanying the new issue, 53, conjures hallucinations, sonic graffiti, gestures to freedom, dancing time, the afterlife of the beat, memory redoubled, kitchen talk, and the insistent pressure of noise. Those are just some keywords. The sounds—by Port-au-Prince-born and Montreal-raised KAYTRANADA, The Funkees and their afrorock digressions, the immortal Prince, and more— have an elastic correlation to the essays in the journal. But it's that filament connection between text and sound, the jump betweens vibration and vision, allusions and affect, references and romance, that constitutes the magic of music. That is how I hear it.

Small Axe 53 playlist

Vanessa K. Valdés, book review editor of sx salon, was recently interviewed for NPR's Latino USA podcast on the life of Arturo Schomburg-- a Puerto Rican living in New York City around the Harlem Renaissance. The podcast episode gives a brief history of Schomburg's life and role as the "father" of Black history.  The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in which Schomburg's donated personal papers comprise a majority of the collection, is one of the largest resources of Black history in the world. In the podcast, Valdés asks how we conceive of blackness. 

You can listen to the full episode, here. 

Edited by Kelly Baker-Joseph, editor of sx salon, this issue of Anthurium is collected around the work of Paule Marshall as seen today--how Marshall has influenced contemporary writing, predicted social stratification, and the enduring relevance of Marshall's work. You can access each publication from the issue, below. 

The Work of Paule Marshall Today
Kelly Baker Josephs

“You have permission to do this” : John Keene Reflects on Paule Marshall’s Influence
John Keene

“This house belong to me, now”: The “Slumming” and “Gentrification” of Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn as Experienced and Foretold by Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones
Marlene Clark

Ghosts in the Posthuman Machine: Prostheses and Performance in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People
Justin Haynes

Paule Marshall Reimagining Caliban and Prospero in The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
Shirley D. Toland-Dix

“Threads thin to the point of invisibility, yet strong as ropes” : Afrofuturistic Diaspora in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow
Janelle Rodriques

The Profane Ear: Regimes of Aural Discipline in Paule Marshall’sThe Fisher King
Petal Samuel

“Her Special Music”: Wild Women and Jazz in Paule Marshall’sThe Fisher King
Patricia G. Lespinasse

Water, Roads, and Mapping Diaspora Through Biomythography
Lia T. Bascomb

“How You Mean?” Speech, Resistance, and the Contemporary Relevance of Paule Marshall
Jason T. Hendrickson