Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9384314
Aisha Z. Cort
Abstract:In the context of revolutionary Cuba, discourses of identity are veiled behind discussions and performances of nation and nationality. Consideration of the paradoxical relation of blackness and the Cuban Revolution must consider the historical relation of blackness to the Cuban nation, from its inception, to independence, through the Republic and immediately prior to the Revolution. In addition, a discussion of this relation must consider the discreet comments on race made via official policies, speeches, and discourses on the subject. Using Nancy Morejón's critical analysis in her seminal 1982 work Nación y mestizaje en Nicolas Guillén as a springboard, the objective of this work is two-fold—to explore how the Cuban nation is reimagined in the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and to dissect the use of metaphors such as mestizaje as performances of nation that in turn highlight racial discourse.
[摘要]在革命的古巴语境中,身份话语被隐藏在民族与民族性的讨论与表演背后。在考虑黑人与古巴革命的矛盾关系时,必须考虑到黑人与古巴民族的历史关系,从古巴民族成立到独立,通过共和国并在革命之前。此外,对这种关系的讨论必须考虑到官方政策、演讲和关于种族问题的论述中对种族问题的谨慎评论。以Nancy Morejón在其1982年的开创性作品Nación y mestizaje en Nicolas guillacimen中的批判性分析为跳板,本作品的目标是双重的:探索古巴民族如何在Nicolás guillacimen的诗歌中被重新想象,并分析使用隐喻,如mestizaje作为国家的表演,进而突出种族话语。
{"title":"Nation, Race, and Performance in the Poetics of Nicolás Guillén and Nancy Morejón","authors":"Aisha Z. Cort","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9384314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9384314","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the context of revolutionary Cuba, discourses of identity are veiled behind discussions and performances of nation and nationality. Consideration of the paradoxical relation of blackness and the Cuban Revolution must consider the historical relation of blackness to the Cuban nation, from its inception, to independence, through the Republic and immediately prior to the Revolution. In addition, a discussion of this relation must consider the discreet comments on race made via official policies, speeches, and discourses on the subject. Using Nancy Morejón's critical analysis in her seminal 1982 work Nación y mestizaje en Nicolas Guillén as a springboard, the objective of this work is two-fold—to explore how the Cuban nation is reimagined in the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and to dissect the use of metaphors such as mestizaje as performances of nation that in turn highlight racial discourse.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"42 1","pages":"125 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76237468","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 : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-9384170
Nadège Veldwachter
Abstract:Using the field of humanitarianism as the critical locus, this essay reflects on what Haiti, called the "Republic of NGOs," can teach us about unsettling the coloniality of being, power, and freedom if we acknowledge in our critical thought system the acts of humanitarianism this nation has performed. By pursuing the issue of agency otherwise denied to any organism—be it political or intellectual—that departs from Western paradigms, the author aims to contribute to the call on critics and historians to rethink the ideologies that have informed and continue to inform the patterns of research methodologies entrenched in various disciplines to address the vexed question of epistemic dependency. In response, the essay focuses on the episode of inter-minority solidarity between blacks and Jews when, following the 1938 Evian conference, the Haitian government offered asylum to the undesirables of Europe based on the principles of the 1804 Haitian Revolution.
{"title":"Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and \"Failed\" Nations: Haiti and Jewish Refugees in the 1930s","authors":"Nadège Veldwachter","doi":"10.1215/07990537-9384170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9384170","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Using the field of humanitarianism as the critical locus, this essay reflects on what Haiti, called the \"Republic of NGOs,\" can teach us about unsettling the coloniality of being, power, and freedom if we acknowledge in our critical thought system the acts of humanitarianism this nation has performed. By pursuing the issue of agency otherwise denied to any organism—be it political or intellectual—that departs from Western paradigms, the author aims to contribute to the call on critics and historians to rethink the ideologies that have informed and continue to inform the patterns of research methodologies entrenched in various disciplines to address the vexed question of epistemic dependency. In response, the essay focuses on the episode of inter-minority solidarity between blacks and Jews when, following the 1938 Evian conference, the Haitian government offered asylum to the undesirables of Europe based on the principles of the 1804 Haitian Revolution.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"77 1","pages":"1 - 15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85732044","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8912816
Monique A. Bedasse
Abstract:This essay argues for an approach to postcolonial Caribbean intellectual history that moves beyond the national archive to rely on a globally dispersed archive. It uses Rastafari repatriation to Tanzania to highlight the intellectual history of the movement and to demonstrate the extent to which the repatriation created a transnational documentary trail with a set of archival imperatives that renders the national archive insufficient for the reconstruction of postcolonial Caribbean intellectual history.
{"title":"Rastafari, the Transnational Archive, and Postcolonial Caribbean Intellectual History","authors":"Monique A. Bedasse","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8912816","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8912816","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues for an approach to postcolonial Caribbean intellectual history that moves beyond the national archive to rely on a globally dispersed archive. It uses Rastafari repatriation to Tanzania to highlight the intellectual history of the movement and to demonstrate the extent to which the repatriation created a transnational documentary trail with a set of archival imperatives that renders the national archive insufficient for the reconstruction of postcolonial Caribbean intellectual history.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"20 1","pages":"116 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90261234","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8912859
Hazel V. Carby
Reflecting on arguments and insights in the discussion essays by Eddie Chambers, Marisa Fuentes, and Marc Matera on the author’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, this response essay focuses on the dilemma of black feminist critique, practice, methodology, and pedagogy in a constant struggle with and against the colonial archive. It poses questions about the possibilities and limits of developing alternative ways for narrating racialized lives into being.
{"title":"Imperial Intimacies—Further Thoughts","authors":"Hazel V. Carby","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8912859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8912859","url":null,"abstract":"Reflecting on arguments and insights in the discussion essays by Eddie Chambers, Marisa Fuentes, and Marc Matera on the author’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, this response essay focuses on the dilemma of black feminist critique, practice, methodology, and pedagogy in a constant struggle with and against the colonial archive. It poses questions about the possibilities and limits of developing alternative ways for narrating racialized lives into being.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"9 1","pages":"198 - 203"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87436044","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8912789
Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi
Abstract:When South African–born Peter Abrahams moved to Jamaica in 1956, he thought he had found a racial paradise. Over the next six decades as a Jamaican, his understanding of race in Jamaica was complicated after independence. His last two novels—This Island Now (1966) and The View from Coyaba (1985)—fictionalize the transition to independence in the anglophone Caribbean and how that transition related to the set of concerns unfolding across the rest of the black world. This essay traces Abrahams's thought on questions of race and decolonization through a close reading of his Caribbean fiction and how he came to theorize the literal and conceptual space of the Caribbean—the island—as a strategy for freedom. In so doing, the author asks, What are the limits of the Caribbean novel of the era of decolonization (1960s–80s) in the anglophone Caribbean? What constitutes it? And how does it articulate liberation?
{"title":"Peter Abrahams's Island Fictions for Freedom","authors":"Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8912789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8912789","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:When South African–born Peter Abrahams moved to Jamaica in 1956, he thought he had found a racial paradise. Over the next six decades as a Jamaican, his understanding of race in Jamaica was complicated after independence. His last two novels—This Island Now (1966) and The View from Coyaba (1985)—fictionalize the transition to independence in the anglophone Caribbean and how that transition related to the set of concerns unfolding across the rest of the black world. This essay traces Abrahams's thought on questions of race and decolonization through a close reading of his Caribbean fiction and how he came to theorize the literal and conceptual space of the Caribbean—the island—as a strategy for freedom. In so doing, the author asks, What are the limits of the Caribbean novel of the era of decolonization (1960s–80s) in the anglophone Caribbean? What constitutes it? And how does it articulate liberation?","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"62 1","pages":"101 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78100538","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8912830
Marisa J. Fuentes
Abstract:This book discussion essay addresses critical questions concerning historical methodologies when working with the archives of Atlantic-world slavery. Thinking with Hazel V. Carby's Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, the essay considers the power of historical memoir to narrate the violence of the British empire through family stories. The long-intertwined histories of England and the Caribbean inevitably lead to slavery's archives, and in the final section of the book, Carby describes the lives of her earliest ancestors on a Jamaican coffee plantation. In response, the essay author revisits her hesitations regarding slavery's archive and the stakes of approaching the silences of enslaved people in the records. Drawing on pivotal work in black feminist studies, this essay rearticulates the nuances of Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation" to bring attention back to archival boundaries and the limits of historical methodologies that make certain imaginings most difficult.
摘要:这本书的讨论文章解决了在处理大西洋世界奴隶制档案时有关历史方法的关键问题。与黑兹尔·v·卡比(Hazel V. Carby)的《帝国亲密关系:两个岛屿的故事》(Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands)一样,这篇文章考虑了历史回忆录通过家庭故事讲述大英帝国暴力的力量。英国和加勒比地区长期交织在一起的历史不可避免地导致了奴隶制的档案,在书的最后一部分,卡比描述了她最早的祖先在牙买加咖啡种植园的生活。作为回应,文章作者重新审视了她对奴隶制档案的犹豫,以及接近记录中被奴役者沉默的利害关系。借鉴黑人女权主义研究的关键工作,本文重新阐述了赛迪亚·哈特曼(Saidiya Hartman)的“批判性虚构”的细微差别,将注意力带回档案边界和历史方法的限制,这些限制使某些想象变得最困难。
{"title":"Genres of History and the Practice of Loss: Attending to Silence in Hazel Carby's Imperial Intimacies","authors":"Marisa J. Fuentes","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8912830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8912830","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This book discussion essay addresses critical questions concerning historical methodologies when working with the archives of Atlantic-world slavery. Thinking with Hazel V. Carby's Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, the essay considers the power of historical memoir to narrate the violence of the British empire through family stories. The long-intertwined histories of England and the Caribbean inevitably lead to slavery's archives, and in the final section of the book, Carby describes the lives of her earliest ancestors on a Jamaican coffee plantation. In response, the essay author revisits her hesitations regarding slavery's archive and the stakes of approaching the silences of enslaved people in the records. Drawing on pivotal work in black feminist studies, this essay rearticulates the nuances of Saidiya Hartman's \"critical fabulation\" to bring attention back to archival boundaries and the limits of historical methodologies that make certain imaginings most difficult.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"15 1","pages":"167 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85426752","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8913610
Deborah A. Jack
{"title":"What is the value of water if it doesn't quench our thirst for…","authors":"Deborah A. Jack","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8913610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8913610","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"35 1","pages":"155 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85002284","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8912844
E. Chambers
Abstract:This discussion essay on Hazel V. Carby's Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands considers the contrasting ways the dominant society and the people of the African diaspora approach and regard research into family histories. Beginning with reflections on the somewhat dreaded though seemingly benign question, "Where are you from?," the essay explores the shortcomings and racial biases of popular genealogical websites, contrasting these with the deeply and profoundly nuanced ways Carby's book tackles fundamental questions, shortcomings, and difficulties in endeavors to trace ancestry. Along the way, the essay references Alex Haley's Roots and then takes up the Moynihan Report and Maury Povich's daytime TV show, Maury, both of which, the author asserts, reflect the pathology of depicting the black father as absent and deviant. The essay concludes with considerations of an inevitably settled yet nevertheless creatively fertile "mixed upness" of the creation of African diaspora family histories.
{"title":"Zippin' Up My Boots, Going Back to My Routes","authors":"E. Chambers","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8912844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8912844","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This discussion essay on Hazel V. Carby's Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands considers the contrasting ways the dominant society and the people of the African diaspora approach and regard research into family histories. Beginning with reflections on the somewhat dreaded though seemingly benign question, \"Where are you from?,\" the essay explores the shortcomings and racial biases of popular genealogical websites, contrasting these with the deeply and profoundly nuanced ways Carby's book tackles fundamental questions, shortcomings, and difficulties in endeavors to trace ancestry. Along the way, the essay references Alex Haley's Roots and then takes up the Moynihan Report and Maury Povich's daytime TV show, Maury, both of which, the author asserts, reflect the pathology of depicting the black father as absent and deviant. The essay concludes with considerations of an inevitably settled yet nevertheless creatively fertile \"mixed upness\" of the creation of African diaspora family histories.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"177 1","pages":"186 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72753386","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/07990537-8912837
M. Matera
Abstract:Through a combination of critical memoir and family history, Hazel V. Carby's Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands offers an intimate history of empire—an excavation of close connections across space and time, of empire's presence in the most intimate spaces and relationships, and of the sedimented yet contingent racial logics underlying constructions of Englishness and Britishness. This brief discussion essay considers the book's eccentric form and method as a challenge to imperial history, its methodological commitments, and its archival moorings. Carby offers a powerful critique of narratives of the black presence and racism in postwar Britain that center on the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948. By way of conclusion, the essay follows Carby in revisiting the so-called Brown Baby debate at the end of World War II, an episode in the reracialization of Britain that offers glimpses of the diversity of perspectives and political imaginaries among people of African descent and their extensive ties to a wider black Atlantic.
{"title":"An Intimate History of Empire","authors":"M. Matera","doi":"10.1215/07990537-8912837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-8912837","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Through a combination of critical memoir and family history, Hazel V. Carby's Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands offers an intimate history of empire—an excavation of close connections across space and time, of empire's presence in the most intimate spaces and relationships, and of the sedimented yet contingent racial logics underlying constructions of Englishness and Britishness. This brief discussion essay considers the book's eccentric form and method as a challenge to imperial history, its methodological commitments, and its archival moorings. Carby offers a powerful critique of narratives of the black presence and racism in postwar Britain that center on the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948. By way of conclusion, the essay follows Carby in revisiting the so-called Brown Baby debate at the end of World War II, an episode in the reracialization of Britain that offers glimpses of the diversity of perspectives and political imaginaries among people of African descent and their extensive ties to a wider black Atlantic.","PeriodicalId":46163,"journal":{"name":"Small Axe","volume":"4 1","pages":"175 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91048832","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}