Preface: Honor to the Work

This expression, “honor to the work,” is, inimitably and unforgettably, Eusi Kwayana’s. He used it with me once in reference to the work of Small Axe. And for almost two decades now I’ve turned it around and around in my head, gratified not only by its attentiveness and its generosity and the esteem it bestows upon Small Axe but also by the intriguing value it assigns to honor in connection with the intellectual project—the thinking work—we have been engaged in these past twenty-five years within the Small Axe Project. For at first sight, the word honor seems incongruous here, seems to belong to another—perhaps vanished—form of life in which social and personal relations were not so completely instrumentalized, not so reduced to the measure of exchange and the petrified values of the market. Honor seems to call upon a whole other cosmology of virtues. Certainly, Small Axe would not...