The Small Axe Project salutes the people of Barbados on the important political step it has taken (30 November 2021), removing the queen as head of state, and assuming the identity of a republic. There is much more to be done. We hope that other anglophone Caribbean nation-states will follow suit. And we hope that this is but the beginning of a renewed conversation in the region about the relation between the colonial past and the postcolonial present, between dependence and sovereignty.

David Scott

From the University of Johannesburg's Center of the Study of Race, Gender & Class  

Date: Wednesday, November 124h
Time: 18:00 SAST / 11:00 EST
Register here.

“How Can We Think About the Implications & Local/Trans-national Resonances of Hemispheric Creole Whiteness”

Global Blackness Summer School ‘21 / Black Articulation Otherwise

Join us as 18:00 SAST (11:00 EST) on Zoom for Session 2 of our Global Blackness Summer School with Donette Francis

In this session, Donette Francis works from the site of contemporary Miami, asking us to consider the implications and local/transnational resonances of what she calls “hemispheric creole whiteness”. Because local histories of place matter to the complexities of racial formation, she uses geography to shift the terms of the current debate around immigration and new racial formations in the United States. She asks: what happens when we centre a space like Miami, where migrations from the Americas fundamentally disrupt US models, transplanting their own hemispheric practices of white supremacy and anti-blackness to restructure operations of place and power?

Our 2021 Global Blackness Summer School is organised around critical ideas and practices of Black Articulation Otherwise, with Donette Francis, Gabrielle Goliath, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Phumi Mtetwa & Tavia Nyong’o. Running from 15 November to 9 December, the programme will include a series of seminars, screenings, listenings, workshops and an exhibition, hosted by an exceptional group of invited thinkers, creative practitioners and activists.

Through this online and hybrid programme, we hope to cultivate a productive space for community, care and imagination. Join us as we seek to collectively refuse the ‘transparency’ of heteropatriarchal whiteness (and its attendant conditions of enclosure, illegibility and death), and look to the otherwise possibilities opened through speculative Black, queer and feminist aesthetic practices.

Small Axe editorial committee member Aaron Kamugisha will deliver the keynote address at the University of the Bahama's 9th Annual Critical Caribbean Symposium: Celebrating the Cultural and Intellectual Legacy of Sylvia Wynter.

The symposium will also include presentations by previous Small Axe contributors Rinaldo Walcott (sx57) and Tonya Haynes (sx49).

Date: Friday, November 19th
Time: 10am-1:30pm EDT
Register here

sx editorial committee member Tami Navarro and journalist Brian Goldstone will discuss their book-writing process in the upcoming event, From PhD to Book: How Ethnography Is An Important Step, sponsored by Duke University's Ethnography Workshop.

Date: Friday, October 15th
Time: 12pm EDT
Register here.

Navarro's first book, Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands will be published by SUNY Press in November. Read Virgin Capital's blurb below:

Virgin Capital examines the cultural impact and historical significance of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) in the United States Virgin Islands. A tax holiday program, the EDC encourages financial services companies to relocate to these American-owned islands in exchange for an exemption from 90% of income taxes, and to stimulate the economy by hiring local workers and donating to local charitable causes. As a result of this program, the largest and poorest of these islands—St. Croix—has played host to primarily US financial firms and their white managers, leading to reinvigorated anxieties around the costs of racial capitalism and a feared return to the racial and gender order that ruled the islands during slavery. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during the boom years leading up to the 2008–2009 financial crisis, Virgin Capital provides ethnographic insight into the continuing relations of coloniality at work in the quintessentially "modern" industry of financial services and neoliberal "development" regimes, with their grounding in hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geopolitical positioning.
 

Read sx editorial committee member Regine Jean-Charles' essay, "The Biden Administration’s Expulsion of Haitians Is Unconscionable—and a Missed Opportunity," here.

From Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art:

This celebration is co-organized with scholar and artist Andil Gosine for the New York launch of his new book Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean. The evening will include readings and conversations to honor the “godfather” of LGBTQI+ Caribbean communities by Audre Lorde Project co-founder Johnny Manzon-Santos, writers Rosamond King and Anton Nimblett, and Robinson’s sister, Charmaine M. Robinson.

Among his many contributions to New York City, Colin Robinson co-founded Gay Men of African Descent, the Audre Lorde Project and the Caribbean-identified Lesbian and Gay Alliance. Robinson held leadership positions at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the Centre for LGBTQ Studies, and New York State Black Network. Gosine’s essay from Nature’s Wild, “The Father, A Godfather and the Specter of Beasts Old and New,” examines Robinson’s work as a champion of sexual justice in Trinidad and Tobago, following his return home in 2007.

We in the Small Axe Project deplore in the strongest moral terms the slave-era-like treatment of Haitians trying to cross the border into the United States from Mexico. Ordinary men, women, and children fleeing political instability, economic misery, and quasi-natural catastrophes ought never to be treated as though there were "No Humans Involved" (as Sylvia Wynter might have said). There is a history here in which the dark hand of the United States is deeply implicated, and therefore responsible.

David Scott 

We are shocked and saddened to learn of the passing of Charles W. Mills (1951-2021). Mills passed away on the evening of Monday 20 September. Our condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues. A distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, Mills was a philosopher of wide-ranging interests who was perhaps best known for his critique of the white supremacist sources and character of liberalism and the disavowal of race in academic philosophy. He will be missed by many.
 

sx65 presents essays by Nadège Veldwachter, Mark Harris, César Colón-Montijo, Sarah Margarita Quesada and Lomarsh Roopnarine. Antonio López guest-edits the special section, "On Nancy Morejón’s Nación y Mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén" which includes essays by Devyn Spence Benson, Odette Casamayor, Aisha Z. Cort, and an interview with Morejón by Vanessa Pérez-Rosario. Dominican textile artist/designer Carol Sorhaindo doubles as our cover artist and visual essayist with her series "The Nature of Ruins." The issue then concludes with a book discussion of Aaron Kamugisha's Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition.

Adapted from University of Illinois Press

sx managing editor Vanessa Pérez-Rosario's book Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon has been translated into Spanish by Isabel Zapata. Becoming Julia de Burgos was the first book-length study of the poet written in English. Pérez-Rosario examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City, the poet's home after 1940.

Read more about Julia de Burgos: La creación de un ícono puertorriqueño