Date: Saturday, March 13th
Time: 3-4pm EST

sx editorial assistant Alyssa James will co-facilitate "Honoring the Ancestors: Black Feminist Citational Praxis, an interactive workshop" alongside her Zora's Daughters podcast co-host Brendane Tynes as part of Strategies for Survival: Black Feminist Manifestos. This series by Weeksville Heritage Center is an online public program engaging with a series of historical and contemporary manifestos resonant with the explosive reality we experience now. Zakiya Collier, a Project Archivist for the Weeksville Heritage Center, will also co-facilitate the event. 

Written by Black feminist artists, activists, and writers and performed by Weeksville community members, these texts point to circumstances that are unacceptable and in need of change. But most importantly, they propose pathways to move forward in order to overcome the status quo and create new realities. In the midst of political uncertainty and a physically isolating pandemic, these statements offer visions that can help us connect with one another and transcend what feels like a never-ending crisis.

Book here and read more about the event here.

An anthropologist, an artist, a writer, and a philosopher collaboratively engaged the prison records of four Afro Caribbean women who led a 19th century labor riot in St. Croix, Danish West Indies (now U.S. Virgin Islands). Join the VI Studies Collective for a panel about intimate histories, collaborative research, and Black feminist decolonial archival interventions.

The VI Studies Collective consists of:

Tami Navarro, Associate Director, Barnard Center for Research on Women; Small Axe editorial committee member
La Vaughn Belle, Artist in Residence, University of the Virgin Islands
Hadiya Sewer, Research Fellow, African and African American Studies Program, Stanford University
Tiphanie Yanique, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emory University

Register for the event here.

Date: Monday, March 8th
Time: 6pm EST

From the screening's Eventbrite:

On International Women's Day 2021, the Center for Experimental Ethnography is pleased to present Haitian filmmaker Etant Dupain's feature "Madan Sara: Pouvwa Fanm Aysiyen" (Madan Sara: The Power of Haitian Women) followed by a discussion between Etant Dupain (Director, Madan Sara), Dr. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles (Associate Professor of French and the Graduate Program Director at Boston College), and Lunise Cerin (Editor, Madan Sara). The CEE screening of Madan Sara follows a four-day series of free, public screenings of the film throughout Haiti, supported by matenmidiswa pwodiksyon. 

Spaces are limited, so reserve your spot today by following this link to register for the event. 

For more information on future film screenings and to support the efforts of the Madan Sara Project as they work to share the film across Haiti, please visit MadanSaraFilm.com.

Small Axe editorial committee member Régine Jean-Charles also wrote "'Madan Sara' Tells the Story of Haitian Women Both Ordinary and Extraordinary," a review of the film, for Ms. magazine. Read it here.

Date: Tuesday, March 9th
Time: 7pm EST

From the event website:

During this International Women’s Day conversation moderated by W. Ford Schumann Faculty Fellow in Democratic Studies Régine Jean-Charles, Évelyne Trouillot and Edwidge Danticat will read from their fiction and share their unique perspectives about Haiti’s past, present, and future.

In a recent essay, the award-winning Haitian author Trouillot writes, “…my writings, stemming from my lived experience and my aesthetic and social vision for a more beautiful and just world, are presented to readers who are not always acquainted with my reality…” The same can be said of the internationally acclaimed author Danticat whose writing set in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora reflects a commitment to humanity, beauty, and justice.

Register for the event here.

Historian Richard Hofstadter haunts US history. And for good reason. An academic and public intellectual who passed away over half a century ago, Hofstadter authored works, in a relatively short but astonishingly prolific lifetime, that diagnosed the nation with ailments that seem chronic today.  In books like The American Political Tradition (1948), The Age of Reform (1955) The Paranoid Style of American Politics (1965), Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) and American Violence (1970), he depicted capitalism, racism, cultivated ignorance and violence as endemic to hegemonic US political culture.

Yet even as the national intelligentsia increasingly has acknowledged Hofstadter’s profound relevance, especially since the emergence of Trumpism, they have not quite appreciated the radical depths and subtlety of his sophisticated skeptical mind.  Above all, they have repressed that at the core of his scholarship was a post-nationalist warning, an historically informed counsel that the premise and promise of American greatness imperiled the Republic and the world.  Commentators, it seems, have been wilfully blind to the urgency of Hofstadter’s criticism.  It is almost as if they have been afraid to admit what he actually said about the US.

Hofstadter’s corpus is too rich for easy summary, but it is not difficult to realize that he wrote to upset a certain complacency about the dominant nationalist tradition. Drawn to the dark side of American life, he refused to indulge the patriotic liberal romance of ineluctable progressive change.  Rather, Hofstadter made it his intellectual duty to disenchant, to illuminate the national experience from what he called the “nether end.” Regarding his native civilization in the middle of the century, Hofstadter offered these words: “I do not like to be unduly pessimistic, but it seems to me that in the race between education and catastrophe, catastrophe thus far is ahead by several lengths.”  

Notoriously schooled as a nationalistic cheerleader, Hofstadter was anything but.  His first public facing book, The American Political Tradition explicitly warned against “hero-worship and national self-congratulation.” This 1948 work also came out swinging against capitalist greed. US democracy, observed the introduction, was a “democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity.”  During the next decade, Hofstadter persisted with his critically diagnostic ways, emphasizing what he dubbed the “paranoid style of politics” in the US.  Detractors today often dismiss his line of argument by mistakenly assuming that he saw the irrationality as an attribute exclusively of the radical right. To the contrary, however, Hofstadter plainly stated that although his book focused on “pseudo-conservatives,” the paranoid mentality that believed itself to be “in the grip of a vast conspiracy’ was “not a style of mind confined to the right wing.” 

One of the most underappreciated aspects of Hofstadter’s writing about the nation’s dysfunctional cultural politics was the centrality of white supremacy (anti-Semitism, it is often forgotten, was at the center of the controversy set off by The Age of Reform).  “Ethnic animosities,” he explained in The Paranoid Style, “at times almost a substitute for the class struggle and in any case have always affected its character.”  Moreover, Hofstadter, whose father was Jewish, had betrayed a concern with racism from incipience; his very first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), climaxed with a chapter on “racism and imperialism.” In that same year, Hofstadter jointed others at the Journal of Negro History in the attack on the racist scholarship of Ulrich B Philips.  In this move, he was likely influenced by the work of his then wife Felice Swados, who also published historical scholarship about plantation slavery.  A few years later, Hofstadter would take a sardonic swipe at Jefferson’s slave-owning privilege, noting in the American Political Tradition that the “leisure that made possible his great writings on human liberty was supported by the labors of three generations of slaves.” 

Furthermore, while it would be too much to present Hofstadter as some kind of apostle of intersectionality, his work consistently connected anti-Semitism and Negrophobia to other social power struggles and prejudices.  Anti-intellectualism was part of a primitivism inseparable from militant sexism, he insisted.  Far more sensitive to issues of gender than might be expected of a stereotypical male historian in the middle of the century, Hofstadter not only published work concerned with representations of masculinity and femininity but also did so in an American Quarterly article co-authored with his second wife, Beatrice Hofstadter (fascinating footnote: his first wife, Felice, penned the classic prison novel, House of Fury, a work that entangled race, class, gender and sexuality with such an authentically militant spirit of protest that the author was mistaken for a “Negro.”)

Finally, while professional folklore has linked Hofstadter to “American exceptionalism,” his approach to the US in a global context was almost unthinkable for its radically humbling implications.  After all, which native political observer can we imagine at the height of the Cold War conceiving of a scenario in which the war turned hot, the superpowers wound up inferior to Africa and Asia and Latin America and the resultant new “diffusion of power through the globe” produced a “healthier situation”? Yet this is exactly what Hofstadter wrote in American Perspectives in 1950.  This subversive anti-imperial vision never disappeared.  One of Hofstadter’s last public comments offered the national diagnosis that “part of our trouble is that our sense of ourselves hasn’t diminished as much as it ought.”

In the end, if Hofstadter saw anything exceptional about the United States it was the society’s self-deceptive attitude toward its wasteful unjustifiable and largely conservative violence -- a violence that, in his view, left the Republic resembling countries in AFrica Asia and Latin Americas (countries now infamous for their “shitholery”).   One of Hofstadter’s final publications, “Reflections on Violence in the United States,“ put the matter this way: “What is most exceptional about the Americans is not the voluminous record of their violence but their extraordinary ability in the face of that record to persuade themselves that they are among the best behaved and best regulated of peoples.”

Those of us concerned with comprehending the US past and the possibilities for present rehabilitation ignore the work of Richard Hofstadter at our peril.  Until we wrestle with his sobering historical diagnosis of the Republic as one that “seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb,” Hofstadter will continue to haunt us.  

Author Bio

Harvey R. Neptune is an Associate Professor of History at Temple University. Neptune is the author of several published articles (appearing in journals including The American Historical Review, Small Axe and Radical History Review) and a book, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the US Occupation (UNC Press, 2007).   Interested generally in the cultural politics of imperial and nation-building, Neptune is currently working on a book titled The Big Lie in US History: the making of the “Consensus school," which reconsiders the politics of US historiography in the postwar decades.

The latest issue of sx salon is now available online.

In sx salon 35, we are pleased to present Andil Gosine on the work of artist Wendy Nanan (whose self-titled solo exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas has been postponed because of the pandemic); Ronald Cummings on the 2019 film Shella Record: A Reggae Mystery, a Canadian filmmaker’s search for the story of Jamaican singer Sheila Rickards; Kelly Baker Josephs on the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Savacou and how we might consider the afterlives of journals, their “futures in our presents”; and finally, Ren Ellis Neyra on blackness, brownness, and the ethics of conscripting the former into the semiotic construction of the latter.

In our reviews section, reviews of Kaie Kellough’s poetry collection Magnetic Equator (Canadian winner of the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize); Lorna Goodison’s Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures; Orlando Patterson’s The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament; Aaron Kamugisha’s Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition; Jeb Sprague’s Globalizing the Caribbean: Political Economy, Social Change, and the Transnational Capitalist Class; Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens’s collection Archipelagic American Studies. Plus new Caribbean creative writing: poems by Vladimir Lucien and John Robert Lee and a short story by Kirk V. Bhajan.

Enjoy, and stay safe.

Rachel L. Mordecai
Editor

Small Axe editorial committee member Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo recently featured on the panel, "Situating the Kardashians: Skin, Theft, Ops," where she discussed how the Kardashian's exploitation of Black femininity has a long history in the French and Spanish Americas. The panel was part of the Conversations on Race series by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Watch the recording of the discussion here on YouTube and read more information about the roundtable below:

From the Annenberg UPenn website:

This roundtable explored how Kim Kardashian West extracts from Black women. In so doing, the panelists situated the Kardashian enterprise in a long U.S. tradition of extracting and repackaging Black cultural forms for mass (white and violent) consumption, highlighting the particular harm their enterprise of white womanhood does to Black women. The conversation was moderated by Brandy Monk-Payton (Fordham University) and participants included Elizabeth K. Hinton (Yale University/Yale Law School), Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo (Brown University), Ren Ellis Neyra (Wesleyan University), and Vanessa Díaz (Loyola Marymount University).

Small Axe editorial committee member Vanessa K. Valdés has edited Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, which was published this month by Suny Press. Read the book's blurb and Valdés' bio below and order the book here.

As a Francophone nation, Haiti is seldom studied in conjunction with its Spanish-speaking Caribbean neighbors. Racialized Visions challenges the notion that linguistic difference has kept the populations of these countries apart, instead highlighting ongoing exchanges between their writers, artists, and thinkers. Centering Haiti in this conversation also makes explicit the role that race—and, more specifically, anti-blackness—has played both in the region and in academic studies of it. Following the Revolution and Independence in 1804, Haiti was conflated with blackness. Spanish colonial powers used racist representations of Haiti to threaten their holdings in the Atlantic Ocean. In the years since, white elites in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico upheld Haiti as a symbol of barbarism and savagery. Racialized Visions powerfully refutes this symbolism. Across twelve essays, contributors demonstrate how cultural producers in these countries have resignified Haiti to mean liberation. An introduction and conclusion by the editor, Vanessa K. Valdés, as well as foreword by Myriam J. A. Chancy, provide valuable historical context and an overview of Afro-Latinx studies and its futures.

Vanessa K. Valdés is Director of the Black Studies Program and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the City College of New York, City University of New York. Her books include Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, also published by SUNY Press.
 

Watch the recording of the University of the Virgin Islands' Distinguished Culture & History Lecture Series here.

For those who missed David Scott's discussion of his book Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity with Ben Davis, the recording of the event is now available on YouTube. Click the link here to view it.

David Scott, the editor of Small Axe, spoke about Stuart Hall's ethics for the University of Toronto Center of Ethics' "Ethics and Caribbean Philosophy" series. To read more about the event, visit the sx live blog post.