Heritage

SX 77, July 2025

Moderated by:
Ryan Cecil Jobson and Vanessa Pérez-Rosario

The fourth iteration of our Keywords project will be published in Small Axe 77, July 2025. In these essays contributors trace and explore the concept "heritage" across the region and from a range of approaches. Join us for a conversation with the authors..

Read more about our Keywords project here: smallaxe.net/sx/issues/68
Contact: Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, vpr@smallaxe.net

Contributors

Khadene Harris is an assistant professor of anthropology at Rice University. As a historical archaeologist, she explores the intersection of race, slavery, and capitalism in the Caribbean. Her current research project focuses on the transition from slavery to freedom on the island of Dominica, with special emphasis on the social and economic networks of the laboring class.

Alyssa A. L. James is a Jamaican Canadian sociocultural anthropologist whose research examines colonial and commodity histories in the French Caribbean. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California, where she is developing her book project “Vexed Temporality: Cultivating Coffee Pasts and Heritage Futures in the French Caribbean.”

Ayana Omilade Flewellen is a Black feminist, an archaeologist, an artist scholar, and a storyteller. Flewellen is the cofounder and current board chair of the Society of Black Archaeologists and sits on the board of Diving with a Purpose. In July 2022, they joined the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University as an assistant professor.

Nadia Mosquera Muriel is a Black feminist ethnographer and an assistant professor in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. She examines the intersections of culture and political mobilization among Black populations in Latin America and the Caribbean, focusing on race, class, and gender inequalities. Her research appears in the Bulletin of Latin American Research and Transforming Anthropology.