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.  

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