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.  

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. 

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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