Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-10211709
Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo
Abstract:At the turn of the twentieth century, workers, anarchists, and intellectuals created a global resistance culture through print media, migration, and their radical imaginaries. The networks that animated this resistance culture gave way to the Counter-Republic of Letters. It was (and still operates as) a transnational intellectual community and means of communications between those that were cast outside Western modernity—that is, most of the world's population. This essay explores how Luisa Capetillo became one of the many individuals who actively participated in the creation and expansion of the Counter-Republic of Letters in the Caribbean. In the process, she articulated multiple identities as a writer and a labor organizer. One hundred years after her death, Capetillo's work carries radical potential and urgency in the present day.
{"title":"Luisa Capetillo and the Counter-Republic of Letters","authors":"Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo","doi":"10.1215/07990537-10211709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-10211709","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:At the turn of the twentieth century, workers, anarchists, and intellectuals created a global resistance culture through print media, migration, and their radical imaginaries. The networks that animated this resistance culture gave way to the Counter-Republic of Letters. It was (and still operates as) a transnational intellectual community and means of communications between those that were cast outside Western modernity—that is, most of the world's population. This essay explores how Luisa Capetillo became one of the many individuals who actively participated in the creation and expansion of the Counter-Republic of Letters in the Caribbean. In the process, she articulated multiple identities as a writer and a labor organizer. One hundred years after her death, Capetillo's work carries radical potential and urgency in the present day.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"52 1","pages":"112 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73200712","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-10211864
Júlio Ramos
Abstract:This brief essay is an introduction to the work of Puerto Rican anarchist and feminist activist and writer Luisa Capetillo (1882–1922) and opens the special section on Capetillo in this issue of Small Axe.
{"title":"The Legacies of Luisa Capetillo","authors":"Júlio Ramos","doi":"10.1215/07990537-10211864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-10211864","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This brief essay is an introduction to the work of Puerto Rican anarchist and feminist activist and writer Luisa Capetillo (1882–1922) and opens the special section on Capetillo in this issue of Small Axe.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"24 1","pages":"67 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91263392","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-10211779
Laurie R. Lambert
Abstract:This essay responds to the essays by Belinda Deneen Wallace and Randi Gill-Sadler on the author's Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (2020). It uses the concepts of pushing-into-consciousness and narrative dulling, introduced by Wallace and Gill-Sadler, respectively, to inform a close reading of Phyllis Coard's memoir Unchained: A Caribbean Woman's Journey through Invasion, Incarceration, and Liberation (2019). The author argues that Coard's representation of her body under incarceration serves to push her humanity into the consciousness of her readers. It also revisits how the author pushed Coard out of consciousness in order to write about the Grenada Revolution. Theorizing the different valences of omission that characterize certain writings on Grenada, the essay examines how this book discussion affords the opportunity to push beyond an earlier silence to situate Coard among the Caribbean feminists who helped shape the Revolution.
{"title":"The Complicated Legacies of a Comrade Sister","authors":"Laurie R. Lambert","doi":"10.1215/07990537-10211779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-10211779","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay responds to the essays by Belinda Deneen Wallace and Randi Gill-Sadler on the author's Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (2020). It uses the concepts of pushing-into-consciousness and narrative dulling, introduced by Wallace and Gill-Sadler, respectively, to inform a close reading of Phyllis Coard's memoir Unchained: A Caribbean Woman's Journey through Invasion, Incarceration, and Liberation (2019). The author argues that Coard's representation of her body under incarceration serves to push her humanity into the consciousness of her readers. It also revisits how the author pushed Coard out of consciousness in order to write about the Grenada Revolution. Theorizing the different valences of omission that characterize certain writings on Grenada, the essay examines how this book discussion affords the opportunity to push beyond an earlier silence to situate Coard among the Caribbean feminists who helped shape the Revolution.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"8 1","pages":"164 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89013225","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-10211878
Nancy Bird-Soto
Abstract:"Nonconformist" is one of several ways to describe Puerto Rican feminist Luisa Capetillo (1882–1922). As a transnational figure who synthesizes a unique fusion of diverse influences such as anarchism, spiritism, and syndicalism, Capetillo presents a distinctive reader-writer persona as well. This essay explores how reading Capetillo invites one to listen to her like the workers at the tobacco factories where she was a lectora would. It focuses on Capetillo's first essays—published in Ensayos libertarios (1907) and La humanidad en el futuro (1910)—in which she conveys an urgency for getting her message across in order to actively resist colonialist paradigms of exploitation.
{"title":"Reading Luisa Capetillo","authors":"Nancy Bird-Soto","doi":"10.1215/07990537-10211878","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-10211878","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:\"Nonconformist\" is one of several ways to describe Puerto Rican feminist Luisa Capetillo (1882–1922). As a transnational figure who synthesizes a unique fusion of diverse influences such as anarchism, spiritism, and syndicalism, Capetillo presents a distinctive reader-writer persona as well. This essay explores how reading Capetillo invites one to listen to her like the workers at the tobacco factories where she was a lectora would. It focuses on Capetillo's first essays—published in Ensayos libertarios (1907) and La humanidad en el futuro (1910)—in which she conveys an urgency for getting her message across in order to actively resist colonialist paradigms of exploitation.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"1 1","pages":"74 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90911207","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9901668
G. Pierrot
Abstract:This essay presents and studies five different words used in French to express the notion of Blackness. The five words analyzed—nègre, noir, black, renoi, and négro—entered the French language between the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century and the 1980s and were often borrowed from other languages. The way the terms have been and continue to be used illustrates France's complicated and shifting relation to people of African descent, notably within its own population. In the context of culture wars that have been shaking the country in the past decades and have seen the rise of organized Black political groups on the French public stage, how one speaks Blackness in France has become especially fraught.
{"title":"Nègre (Noir, Black, Renoi, Négro)","authors":"G. Pierrot","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9901668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9901668","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay presents and studies five different words used in French to express the notion of Blackness. The five words analyzed—nègre, noir, black, renoi, and négro—entered the French language between the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century and the 1980s and were often borrowed from other languages. The way the terms have been and continue to be used illustrates France's complicated and shifting relation to people of African descent, notably within its own population. In the context of culture wars that have been shaking the country in the past decades and have seen the rise of organized Black political groups on the French public stage, how one speaks Blackness in France has become especially fraught.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"6 1","pages":"100 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87423901","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9901710
Rocío Zambrana
Abstract:This reflection on Ren Ellys Neyra's The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (2020) engages their reading of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's cinema, paying particular attention to sensorial actualities that offer apprehension of the past of colonial violence that is the present. It focuses in particular on Santiago Muñoz's Otros Usos (2014), which specifically explores Vieques, Puerto Rico. To apprehend the past that is the present requires indexing the continuity of the plantation economy, and thus its racial order, in the military complex, in the tourist economy, and in the current rounds of colonial settlement through tax haven conditions in the realm of real estate. The essay shifts the language of anticolonial sensorial errancy to decolonial sensorial errancy to focus on the forms of "slow violence" of economic invasion/control, the productivity of which presses us to attend to the forms of insidious, ubiquitous racial violence they represent.
摘要:对Ren Ellys Neyra的《感官的呐喊:聆听拉丁和加勒比诗学》(2020)的反思,涉及到他们对Beatriz Santiago Muñoz电影的阅读,特别关注感官现实,提供对过去殖民暴力的理解,即现在。它特别关注圣地亚哥Muñoz的Otros Usos(2014),它专门探索了波多黎各的别克斯岛。要理解过去即是现在,需要索引种植园经济的连续性,从而索引其种族秩序,在军事综合体中,在旅游经济中,以及在房地产领域通过避税天堂条件进行的当前几轮殖民定居。这篇文章将反殖民的感官偏差的语言转换为非殖民的感官偏差,以关注经济入侵/控制的“缓慢暴力”形式,其生产力迫使我们关注它们所代表的阴险的、无处不在的种族暴力形式。
{"title":"Sensorial Errancy in Decolonial Key","authors":"Rocío Zambrana","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9901710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9901710","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This reflection on Ren Ellys Neyra's The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (2020) engages their reading of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's cinema, paying particular attention to sensorial actualities that offer apprehension of the past of colonial violence that is the present. It focuses in particular on Santiago Muñoz's Otros Usos (2014), which specifically explores Vieques, Puerto Rico. To apprehend the past that is the present requires indexing the continuity of the plantation economy, and thus its racial order, in the military complex, in the tourist economy, and in the current rounds of colonial settlement through tax haven conditions in the realm of real estate. The essay shifts the language of anticolonial sensorial errancy to decolonial sensorial errancy to focus on the forms of \"slow violence\" of economic invasion/control, the productivity of which presses us to attend to the forms of insidious, ubiquitous racial violence they represent.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"118 1","pages":"144 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87099915","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9901640
G. Wekker
Abstract:This essay tells a narrative of various contexts in the Afro-Surinamese diaspora that share a struggle around the meanings of Black. What happens to Black in the Afro-Surinamese transatlantic diaspora? Some of the questions addressed are, Which terms have African descendant people in Suriname and in the Netherlands used for themselves in different periods? What have Whites called African descendant people in Suriname and in the Netherlands in different periods? When does Black come to the fore? Who mobilizes the term and for what purposes? This exercise brings forward important features of the Afro-Surinamese "cultural archive": the orderings of the world, specifically the terms of ethnic self-reference, that Afro-Surinamese forged historically. These terms also traveled to the Netherlands, where they met with clashing cultural-political terms and understandings in the dominantly White Dutch world.
{"title":"What Happens to Black in the Afro-Surinamese Transatlantic Diaspora?","authors":"G. Wekker","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9901640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9901640","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay tells a narrative of various contexts in the Afro-Surinamese diaspora that share a struggle around the meanings of Black. What happens to Black in the Afro-Surinamese transatlantic diaspora? Some of the questions addressed are, Which terms have African descendant people in Suriname and in the Netherlands used for themselves in different periods? What have Whites called African descendant people in Suriname and in the Netherlands in different periods? When does Black come to the fore? Who mobilizes the term and for what purposes? This exercise brings forward important features of the Afro-Surinamese \"cultural archive\": the orderings of the world, specifically the terms of ethnic self-reference, that Afro-Surinamese forged historically. These terms also traveled to the Netherlands, where they met with clashing cultural-political terms and understandings in the dominantly White Dutch world.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"12 1","pages":"85 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74563238","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9901583
J. Sharpe
Abstract:Although the signs of Indo-Jamaican and Afro-Jamaican cohabitation are present in a late-nineteenth-century photographic archive, the visual power of an imperial picturesque obscures the evidence that exists in plain view. The illusion of self-contained villages of imported Indian workers that photographs create is informed by even as it reinforces a colonial order of racial segregation. By identifying the photographic traces of Indians' indentureship, this essay introduces time and motion into still photography that reduces Indian lives to single ethnographic instances. It also deploys dougla—the name for people of mixed Indian and African descent who exist as a "flaw" in the British colonial hierarchy of race—as a critical lens for exposing photographic flaws that rupture the smooth surface of the picturesque in ethnographic tableaux of "coolies" and Orientalizing portraits of "coolie belles."
{"title":"Life, Labor, and a Coolie Picturesque in Jamaica","authors":"J. Sharpe","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9901583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9901583","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Although the signs of Indo-Jamaican and Afro-Jamaican cohabitation are present in a late-nineteenth-century photographic archive, the visual power of an imperial picturesque obscures the evidence that exists in plain view. The illusion of self-contained villages of imported Indian workers that photographs create is informed by even as it reinforces a colonial order of racial segregation. By identifying the photographic traces of Indians' indentureship, this essay introduces time and motion into still photography that reduces Indian lives to single ethnographic instances. It also deploys dougla—the name for people of mixed Indian and African descent who exist as a \"flaw\" in the British colonial hierarchy of race—as a critical lens for exposing photographic flaws that rupture the smooth surface of the picturesque in ethnographic tableaux of \"coolies\" and Orientalizing portraits of \"coolie belles.\"","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"58 1","pages":"24 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75102586","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9901696
A. Gosine
Abstract:This is a curatorial essay in which the author explains his research and process for the conception and production of everything slackens in a wreck, a visual arts exhibition running at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York from June to September 2022. Gosine elaborates his thinking about the title of the exhibition, which is taken from a Khal Torabully poem, and explains the relevance of and his intrigue with the four artists whose works comprise the exhibition: Wendy Nanan (Trinidad and Tobago), Margaret Chen (Jamaica/Canada), Andrea Chung (Jamaica/United States), and Kelly Sinnapah Mary (Guadeloupe). Each of the four women is a descendant of indentured workers who traveled to the Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and for each this history is a reference point in her practice. Gosine proposes a consideration of the Americas as a consequence of three wreckages: the ship landings of European colonizers and the arriving ships of enslaved and, later, indentured peoples.
{"title":"Everything Slackens in a Wreck","authors":"A. Gosine","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9901696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9901696","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This is a curatorial essay in which the author explains his research and process for the conception and production of everything slackens in a wreck, a visual arts exhibition running at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York from June to September 2022. Gosine elaborates his thinking about the title of the exhibition, which is taken from a Khal Torabully poem, and explains the relevance of and his intrigue with the four artists whose works comprise the exhibition: Wendy Nanan (Trinidad and Tobago), Margaret Chen (Jamaica/Canada), Andrea Chung (Jamaica/United States), and Kelly Sinnapah Mary (Guadeloupe). Each of the four women is a descendant of indentured workers who traveled to the Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and for each this history is a reference point in her practice. Gosine proposes a consideration of the Americas as a consequence of three wreckages: the ship landings of European colonizers and the arriving ships of enslaved and, later, indentured peoples.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"18 1","pages":"119 - 143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80696772","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}