We congratulate our editorial committee member Andil Gosine for receiving the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award. His winning book, Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean, will be published in September 2021 by Duke University Press.

Gosine is an Associate Professor in Artistic Practices for Social and Environmental Justice at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. His writing, research and artistic practice explore imbricated iterations of ecology, desire and power, and reference personal experiences growing up in Trinidad and Tobago and Canada, and living in the USA, UK and France, and their social histories. Read the blurb for Nature’s Wild below, courtesy of Duke University Press.

In Nature’s Wild, Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean. Surveying colonial law, visual art practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially influenced human/animal divide. Gosine refutes this presupposed binary and embraces animality through a series of case studies: a homoerotic game called puhngah, the institution of gender-based dress codes in Guyana, and efforts toward the decriminalization of sodomy in Trinidad and Tobago—including the work of famed activist Colin Robinson, paintings of human animality by Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Gosine's own artistic practice. In so doing, he troubles the ways in which individual and collective anxieties about “wild natures” have shaped the existence of Caribbean people while calling for a reassessment of what political liberation might look like.

In anticipation of her translation of Boat People by Mayra Santos-Febres, Small Axe managing editor Vanessa Pérez-Rosario was interviewed for Poesía en acción's micro-interview series. Poesía en acción also featured excerpts of Boat People on their blog. Read Pérez-Rosario's micro-interview here and excerpts of Boat People here.

Boat People will be out on June 15th.

Includes essays by Yohann C. Ripert, Katey Castellano and Sarah Phillips Casteel. Editorial committee member Aaron Kamugisha  guest-edits our special section "On Caribbean Intellectual History," which features essays by Anne Eller, Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi, Margo Groenewoud, Monique Bedasse and Marlene L. Daut. The work of St. Martin audiovisual artist Deborah Jack graces our front cover and her series "what is the value of what if it doesn't quench our thirst for . . ." features as our visual essay. The book discussion of this issue focuses on Imperial Intimacies Child of Empire: A Tale of Two Islands by Hazel V. Carby

Read the issue here.

Adriana María Garriga-López's article, "Debt, Crisis, and Resurgence in Puerto Rico" has received honorable mention for the 2021 Blanca G. Silvestrini Award for Outstanding Article in Puerto Rican Studies. The article appeared in issue 64 of Small Axe. 

Read the full article on Duke University Press' website and the abstract below:

This essay addresses the epistemic limits of crisis as a trope for thinking about the future of Puerto Rico in the context of fiscal austerity programs and the combined effects of multiple disasters. Small-scale agriculture and mutual aid offer models of resistance to US colonialism as the underlying power structure reinforcing debt and political subservience. What can be perceived or accomplished outside the self-perpetuating frame of crisis? This essay sketches the contours of a different approach, one that considers what Puerto Ricans owe to each other as well as accounts for those debts owed to Puerto Ricans that will likely never be paid.

Date: Friday, April 30th
Time: 3:00 pm EST

Register via Zoom

LACS' Other Feminisms: Hemispheric Interventions series present: “Echarpalantismo: Neoliberal Subjectivities in the Colony of Puerto Rico” by Rocío Zambrana, Emory University. The event will be followed by a conversation with Megan Craig (Philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook)

Rocío Zambrana’s work examines critiques of capitalism and coloniality in various philosophical traditions, especially Marxism, Decolonial Thought, and Feminisms of the Américas (Latinx, Latin American, Caribbean). Her current work explores coloniality as the afterlife of colonialism, considering the articulation and deployment of race/gender as crucial to the development and resilience of capitalism. She considers the manifestations of coloniality in a colonial context by examining fiscally distressed Puerto Rico. She is the author of Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (forthcoming 2021, Duke University Press) and Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), in addition to articles, book chapters, and columns on related themes. She is Co-Editor, with Bonnie Mann, Erin McKenna, and Camisha Russell, of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and columnist for 80grados (San Juan, Puerto Rico).

For "Earth, World, Ethics: Conversations in Black and Caribbean Studies," the hosts asked participants to consider several thematics and questions, which the hosts locate in Black Critical Theory, Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Caribbean Poetics. How do we conceive of various formulations of disposability, life, nature, and the earth, against the apocalyptic tendencies in the discourses of the Anthropocene? What do we do with the category of the human vis-à-vis the senses—the senses and blackness, the senses and indigeneity, the senses and the elements? How do we think with geographical specificity in formulations of black ecology? What notion of nature renders our current ecological crisis so “monstrous” and “unnatural”? Must the thought of ecology at this geological and historico-political conjuncture yield its own “earth ethics”? Can we envisage a thinking of life and nature without falling prey to the violent history of vitalism and biologism?

April 30th @ 1-3 P.M. EDT 

Tiffany Lethabo King | Georgia State University
Dixa Ramírez D'Oleo | Brown University
Selamawit Terrefe | Tulane University
Moderated by Ren Ellis Neyra | Wesleyan University

Zoom Conference: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/92843208608

May 7th @ 1-3 P.M. EDT

Denise Ferreira da Silva | University of British Columbia, Vancouver
R.A. Judy | University of Pittsburgh
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz | Artist
Moderated by Mlondi Zondi | Wesleyan University

Zoom Conference: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/92843208608

May 14th @ 1-3 P.M. EDT

Zakiyyah I. Jackson | University of Southern California
David Marriott | Penn State University
Ronald Mendoza de Jesús | University of Southern California
Moderated by Axelle Karera | Emory University

Zoom Conference: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/92843208608

Date: Friday, April 9th
Time: 6:30 pm EST

Poet and sx salon creative editor Rosamond S. King will celebrate the launch of her new book, All the Rage, at a special edition of Gibney’s Living Gallery. RSVP here.

All the Rage addresses everyday pleasure as well as the present condition of racism in the United States—a time marked both by recurring police violence and intense artistic creativity—from a variety of perspectives: being Black, an immigrant, a woman, and queer. At its core dwells “Living in the Abattoir,” a series in which people of color live out their days as both workers and meat. All the Rage simultaneously invokes both anger at ongoing systemic violence and the frivolity of something that is, perhaps temporarily, “trending.” Read more & buy All the Rage here.

Date: Tuesday, April 20th
Time: 7pm EST

From the Kupferberg Center for the Arts website:

OFF THE PAGE: Conversations with Writers is a Queens College series produced by Kupferberg Center for the Arts, the Department of English, the Provost’s Office, and the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities. Curated by QC professor, author and Small Axe managing editor Vanessa Pérez-Rosario.

This event with Julia Alvarez is funded in part by Poets & Writers through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Read more about the event and register here.

About Julia Alvarez

Born in New York City in 1950, Julia Alvarez’s parents returned to their native country, Dominican Republic, shortly after her birth. Ten years later, the family was forced to flee to the United States because of her father’s involvement in a plot to overthrow the dictator, Trujillo.

Alvarez has written novels (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, Afterlife), collections of poems (Homecoming, The Other Side/ El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself), nonfiction (Something to Declare, Once Upon A Quinceañera, and A Wedding in Haiti), and numerous books for young readers (including the Tía Lola Stories series, Before We Were Free, finding miracles, Return to Sender and Where Do They Go?).

Alvarez’s awards include the Pura Belpré and Américas Awards for her books for young readers, the Hispanic Heritage Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. In 2013, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.

Date: Wednesday, March 31st
Time: 6:30 pm EST

From LACS Stony Brook:

CuCa Cuir is back! Join us for the third installment of this LACS' graduate student-initiated series. This session focuses on independent queer presses.

CuCa3: Cuir Caribbean Voices/ Voces Queer del Caribe

Voces Cuir Editoras

Organized by PhD candidate Mario Henao (Hispanic Languages and Literature)