Pub Date : 2020-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8604538
A. Garriga-López
Abstract: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.
{"title":"Debt, Crisis, and Resurgence in Puerto Rico","authors":"A. Garriga-López","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8604538","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8604538","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: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.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"79 1","pages":"122 - 132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76353906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8604598
B. Plummer
Abstract:This discussion of Peter James Hudson's Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean focuses on the way transnational banks are revealed to be players of multiple roles in the development of past and present Caribbean economies. The banks were hardly mere stalking horses for imperialism, and their considerable autonomy and self-interest were sometimes at odds with the objectives of both host governments and metropoles. They acquired a cosmopolitan character that allowed them to bypass particular national identities when convenient. Caribbean markets lay at the epicenter of their financial projects, which employed racism as a technology to banking interests, and racial capitalism grafted itself onto existing hierarchical systems. Hudson has shown the banks to be heirs to a long history of Caribbean commerce that tracks the shadowy line between the legal and the illicit and the piracy and smuggling of the past to the money laundering, tax evasion, and drug smuggling of the present.
{"title":"Dark Finance, Dark People","authors":"B. Plummer","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8604598","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8604598","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This discussion of Peter James Hudson's Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean focuses on the way transnational banks are revealed to be players of multiple roles in the development of past and present Caribbean economies. The banks were hardly mere stalking horses for imperialism, and their considerable autonomy and self-interest were sometimes at odds with the objectives of both host governments and metropoles. They acquired a cosmopolitan character that allowed them to bypass particular national identities when convenient. Caribbean markets lay at the epicenter of their financial projects, which employed racism as a technology to banking interests, and racial capitalism grafted itself onto existing hierarchical systems. Hudson has shown the banks to be heirs to a long history of Caribbean commerce that tracks the shadowy line between the legal and the illicit and the piracy and smuggling of the past to the money laundering, tax evasion, and drug smuggling of the present.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"6 1","pages":"187 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80927893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8604454
S. Bertacco
Abstract:This essay weaves together translation and postcolonial literary studies to propose a translational model of reading for Caribbean literature. Translation and creolization provide the conceptual and aesthetic lens for reading Caribbean literary texts: If translation is an apt model, since it captures languages in transit toward other languages and other contexts, creolization embodies the points of contact among what Naoki Sakai calls the "uncountable languages within the literary texts," unlocking novel ideas of language and literature. The essay offers "translational reading" of texts by Derek Walcott, Velma Pollard, and Dionne Brand as an alternative to the traditionally monolingual model of reading.
{"title":"Translation in Caribbean Literature","authors":"S. Bertacco","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8604454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8604454","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay weaves together translation and postcolonial literary studies to propose a translational model of reading for Caribbean literature. Translation and creolization provide the conceptual and aesthetic lens for reading Caribbean literary texts: If translation is an apt model, since it captures languages in transit toward other languages and other contexts, creolization embodies the points of contact among what Naoki Sakai calls the \"uncountable languages within the literary texts,\" unlocking novel ideas of language and literature. The essay offers \"translational reading\" of texts by Derek Walcott, Velma Pollard, and Dionne Brand as an alternative to the traditionally monolingual model of reading.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"37 1","pages":"17 - 34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84203180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8604610
P. Hudson
Abstract:This essay offers a response to two critical commentaries—from diplomatic historian Brenda Gayle Plummer and political theorist Clarisse Burden-Stelly—on the author's Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. While locating both commentaries under the epistemological and political purview of the radical wing of black studies, the essay focuses on four topics that appear in Plummer's and Burden-Stelly's comments: (1) the question of class, and in particular the role of the Caribbean middle classes, in the history of finance, banking, imperial expansion, and Caribbean sovereignty; (2) the particular status and nature of the Caribbean region within the history of capitalism; (3) the nature and the meaning of the well-worn term racial capitalism; and (4) the idea of "war" as a fundamental aspect of the modes of regulation and accumulation of said racial capitalism.
{"title":"Rogue Bankers, Black Radicalism, and the Caribbean History of Racial Capitalism","authors":"P. Hudson","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8604610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8604610","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay offers a response to two critical commentaries—from diplomatic historian Brenda Gayle Plummer and political theorist Clarisse Burden-Stelly—on the author's Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. While locating both commentaries under the epistemological and political purview of the radical wing of black studies, the essay focuses on four topics that appear in Plummer's and Burden-Stelly's comments: (1) the question of class, and in particular the role of the Caribbean middle classes, in the history of finance, banking, imperial expansion, and Caribbean sovereignty; (2) the particular status and nature of the Caribbean region within the history of capitalism; (3) the nature and the meaning of the well-worn term racial capitalism; and (4) the idea of \"war\" as a fundamental aspect of the modes of regulation and accumulation of said racial capitalism.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"43 1","pages":"197 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83486198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8604526
Sarah E. Vaughn
Abstract:This essay offers a critical perspective on the role technology plays in the Caribbean formation of climate adaptation. It locates this critical perspective in "the embodiment of technology," a concept in the writings of the late political economist Norman Girvan that helped him describe how Caribbean states acquire technology and related infrastructures despite at times not having resources to maintain them. The embodiment of technology is still important today for mapping the possibilities of climate adaptation—that is, if technology transfer is a historically embodied process, then climate adaptation is a measure of how people recognize the political failures and the potentials of technology over time. The essay suggests that attention to Girvan's writings is central to critical Caribbean scholarship on climate change for two reasons: his writings reflect the forms of intergenerational responsibility that shape climate adaptation, and they examine the shifting meaning of technology to regional identity.
{"title":"Caribbean Technological Thought and Climate Adaptation","authors":"Sarah E. Vaughn","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8604526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8604526","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay offers a critical perspective on the role technology plays in the Caribbean formation of climate adaptation. It locates this critical perspective in \"the embodiment of technology,\" a concept in the writings of the late political economist Norman Girvan that helped him describe how Caribbean states acquire technology and related infrastructures despite at times not having resources to maintain them. The embodiment of technology is still important today for mapping the possibilities of climate adaptation—that is, if technology transfer is a historically embodied process, then climate adaptation is a measure of how people recognize the political failures and the potentials of technology over time. The essay suggests that attention to Girvan's writings is central to critical Caribbean scholarship on climate change for two reasons: his writings reflect the forms of intergenerational responsibility that shape climate adaptation, and they examine the shifting meaning of technology to regional identity.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"42 1","pages":"110 - 121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72655130","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8190662
J. Fuste
Abstract:This essay uses Vanessa Valdés’s Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017) to reflect on the different stakes surrounding debates about Schomburg as a historical figure and also as a heuristic for grasping the complex vicissitudes of Afro-Latinx life. It challenges historicizations that presume Afro-Latinidad to be a stable and additive political ontology and that possibly foreclose black Latinx strategies of disidentification or refusal that transcend racial or ethnic nationalisms. It also provokes readers to think of what it would be like to write about Schomburg outside of frameworks that cast him as a heroic rescuer of memory and therefore as an avatar of idealized masculine respectability. Lastly, this essay asks that we consider not just the historical actors and cultural producers that Schomburg devoted himself to illuminating but also how his posthumous heroization cast a shadow over nonanglophone black activist-intellectuals who did not conform to normative early twentieth century US black nationalisms.
{"title":"Schomburg’s Blackness of a Different Matter: A Historiography of Refusal","authors":"J. Fuste","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8190662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8190662","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay uses Vanessa Valdés’s Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017) to reflect on the different stakes surrounding debates about Schomburg as a historical figure and also as a heuristic for grasping the complex vicissitudes of Afro-Latinx life. It challenges historicizations that presume Afro-Latinidad to be a stable and additive political ontology and that possibly foreclose black Latinx strategies of disidentification or refusal that transcend racial or ethnic nationalisms. It also provokes readers to think of what it would be like to write about Schomburg outside of frameworks that cast him as a heroic rescuer of memory and therefore as an avatar of idealized masculine respectability. Lastly, this essay asks that we consider not just the historical actors and cultural producers that Schomburg devoted himself to illuminating but also how his posthumous heroization cast a shadow over nonanglophone black activist-intellectuals who did not conform to normative early twentieth century US black nationalisms.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"34 1","pages":"120 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88028287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8190541
Y. M. Miguel, K. Seligmann
Abstract:This essay introduces the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation,” which interrogates the literary, intellectual, social, and political imaginaries fomented by the Confederación Antillana (Antillean Confederation) and the West Indies Federation, with the aim of promoting comparative studies and dialogue among scholars working on these two political projects. The Confederación Antillana was conceived to bring together three Spanish Antilles in dialogue with Haiti and Jamaica from the 1860s to 1898; the West Indies Federation became a governing body in the British Caribbean territories from 1958–62. These “con-federated” forms reverberate together in the idea of trans-Caribbean unity as a utopian reference for anti-imperial sovereignty and the decolonial achievement of racial equality. The guest editors provide a historical trajectory of both confederation projects in order to identify points of convergence and divergence between these two collective political projects to guide future comparative studies.
{"title":"Con-Federating the Archipelago: Introduction","authors":"Y. M. Miguel, K. Seligmann","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8190541","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8190541","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay introduces the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation,” which interrogates the literary, intellectual, social, and political imaginaries fomented by the Confederación Antillana (Antillean Confederation) and the West Indies Federation, with the aim of promoting comparative studies and dialogue among scholars working on these two political projects. The Confederación Antillana was conceived to bring together three Spanish Antilles in dialogue with Haiti and Jamaica from the 1860s to 1898; the West Indies Federation became a governing body in the British Caribbean territories from 1958–62. These “con-federated” forms reverberate together in the idea of trans-Caribbean unity as a utopian reference for anti-imperial sovereignty and the decolonial achievement of racial equality. The guest editors provide a historical trajectory of both confederation projects in order to identify points of convergence and divergence between these two collective political projects to guide future comparative studies.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"24 1","pages":"37 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86238551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8190625
Jossianna Arroyo
Abstract:This response essay reviews the six contributions to the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation.” These key interventions on the Spanish Caribbean Confederation projects in the nineteenth century and the West Indies Federation in the twentieth century provoke the following questions: Could we call these two Caribbean confederation projects failures if their centrality in Caribbean political imaginaries suggests otherwise? What are some of the insights that these two projects could offer to Caribbean sociohistorical processes, culture, and political developments? Even though these two projects seem to share a similar political goal, they are also radically different. The author reviews the contributions to the special section in dialogue with examples from Puerto Rico in order to assess the critical intervention in theories of nationalism produced by the past projects of federation and the possible futures they give rise to.
{"title":"Future Impossible Communities","authors":"Jossianna Arroyo","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8190625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8190625","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This response essay reviews the six contributions to the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation.” These key interventions on the Spanish Caribbean Confederation projects in the nineteenth century and the West Indies Federation in the twentieth century provoke the following questions: Could we call these two Caribbean confederation projects failures if their centrality in Caribbean political imaginaries suggests otherwise? What are some of the insights that these two projects could offer to Caribbean sociohistorical processes, culture, and political developments? Even though these two projects seem to share a similar political goal, they are also radically different. The author reviews the contributions to the special section in dialogue with examples from Puerto Rico in order to assess the critical intervention in theories of nationalism produced by the past projects of federation and the possible futures they give rise to.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"16 1","pages":"102 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76435763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8190686
V. Valdés
Abstract:This response essay is a reflection on the composition of Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017) by its author and a sustained conversation with three of her peers, each of whom illuminate distinct aspects of Schomburg’s life and the scholarship surrounding him and his contemporaries. The exchange includes ruminations about marronage and Maroon subjectivity; the futurity of the archive, including its omissions; and a redefining of blackness as a force that ruptures and disrupts facile categorization.
{"title":"The Afterlives of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg","authors":"V. Valdés","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8190686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8190686","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This response essay is a reflection on the composition of Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017) by its author and a sustained conversation with three of her peers, each of whom illuminate distinct aspects of Schomburg’s life and the scholarship surrounding him and his contemporaries. The exchange includes ruminations about marronage and Maroon subjectivity; the futurity of the archive, including its omissions; and a redefining of blackness as a force that ruptures and disrupts facile categorization.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"384 1","pages":"142 - 151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74010148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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