Small Axe

The Small Axe Project stands in support of public serving national cultural institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities which are now under threat of being defunded: nhalliance.org/federal-fundin…

Join u!! 7 March 2025 12pm - 2pm - registration link below 👇🏾

@julian_isenia @SmallAxeProject @CoutiJacqueline Exciting!

Thank you @VanessaYPerez and @RyanCecilJobson for co-editing this project. You can read the article here: read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/arti…

Happy to share my new article in @SmallAxeProject Keywords: Sexualities. I revisit the history of “kambrada” in the Dutch Caribbean, a term for same-sex loving women. Honored to be alongside @larrylafountain, @coutijacqueline, and Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan

Register today for our next iteration of Keywords! 👇🏾👇🏾

Happy publication day to this book! After working on this project for a decade plus, I’m grateful for the opportunity to share this work with the world (and with it the wisdom of working people in Trinidad and Tobago). ⛽️👑🎭🇹🇹 @UChicagoPress press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…

Engaging the discussions from Judy Rodríguez, Ernesto Blanes-Martinez, and Agustín Laó-Montes, this reply essay by Rocío Zambrana recounts and situates the main theses of Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021). #BookDiscussion #SmallAxe74 tinyurl.com/5ebdb4tn

Read this review essay of Rocio Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021) by Agustín Laó-Montes where he argues that it is a book about contemporary Puerto Rico and its world-historical significance. #BookDiscussion #SmallAxe74 tinyurl.com/bdcrrb9s

Ernesto Blanes-Martinez analyzes the problem of subjectivity in Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021) from a phenomenological perspective. #BookDiscussion #SmallAxe74 tinyurl.com/3heemsjh

This Natalie Wood’s visual essay is inspired by the late social justice activist and artist Colin Robinson and his love of carnival. Follow the link: tinyurl.com/bw6s98em

In this keyword essay, @CoutiJacqueline asks, Could theorizing the term "makoumè" as a marker of difference, of lack, of excess, of gender disturbance, expose a very French malaise around questions of genre and issues destabilizing heterosexual norms? tinyurl.com/yvxhc5m3

The terms "friend" and "family" are at the core of this keyword essay by Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan that discusses how those terms are used by same-sex-desiring women in Trinidad to mask and facilitate queer becoming. tinyurl.com/mwzjk74x

Wigbertson Julian Isenia traces in this essay the historical trajectory of the term kambrada, which is akin to mati in Suriname, and represents a spectrum of women’s relationships. The essay concludes with the 2021 Kambrada collective in Curaçao. tinyurl.com/yddnmbjd

In this essay, @larrylafountain engages a SPIT! manifesto, a column by Karla Claudio-Betancourt, and scholarly pieces on queer language around the term patería, a synonym for “queerness” as a sign of gender and sexual transgression. tinyurl.com/yh7a6tst

In this personal homage to Carolyn Cooper, Ananya Jahanara Kabir proposes that we see this convergence in historical continuity with the resistive potential of swag as manifested in Caribbean expressive performative traditions. shorturl.at/xGIqx

This Njelle Hamilton’s essay pays homage to the influential scholarship and activism of Carolyn Cooper; it imitates Cooper’s code-switching newspaper columns and analysis of Sistren Theater Collective’s Lionheart Gal. tinyurl.com/b2nmphb3

A Jacqueline Bishop china plate is featured in the forthcoming memoir of @jallenpaisant, The Possibility of Tenderness. Read about her series "History at the Dinner Table" here: sculpturestudio.blogspot.com/2022/09/jacque… #DialoguesInCarbbeanModernisms @SmallAxeProject

Carolyn Cooper’s research on Afro-Jamaican feminisms via literary history, literary criticism, and cultural studies and her use of that research in various pedagogical spaces is the aim of this essay by Nadia Ellis: shorturl.at/ZwXRj

Read here the essay by Louis Chude-Sokei on Carolyn Cooper’s _Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture_(1993), where the author discusses the book’s impact across and against the “Black Atlantic” paradigm shorturl.at/TzoqJ