...” obscure continuities and elide the crucial impact of US imperialism. The practice of the US military occupation (1916–24) in clothing itself in a discourse of democratization and modernization was perpetuated by the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship (1930–61) to long-lasting effect. Through close readings...

... they participate in a construction of Caribbeanness that tacks between intimacy and estrangement, the national and the international, the past and the future, tradition and modernity. This interplay finds its highest expression in turbulent politics: on the one hand, the judicial systems of the global North...

...Deborah A. Thomas Small Axe Incorporated 2002 Modern Blackness: “What We Are and What We Hope to Be” Deborah A. Thomas his is a progressive tale, or rather a tale of progress redefi ned in Jamaica. Like most tales, it has its various twists and turns, but I am going to focus...

...David Scott Small Axe Incorporated 2003 Political Rationalities of the Jamaican Modern David Scott Clientelism in the Th ird World is more than a device to win votes for competing parties. It is a mechanism by which to institutionalize a power structure. —Carl...

... practitioners. 2 And yet it would be a mistake to imagine this situation as an aberration, an anomaly in an otherwise highly structured and stratified health-care market. True, most clients of black ritual practitioners in Atlantic locales such as Cartagena de Indias (modern-day Colombia) were of African...

... of the making of a “modern” Jamaica has been crucial to a nationalist historiography—a paradigm that might be less cogent in the contemporary period. © Small Axe, Inc. 2017 1960s identity race independence These notes sketch, in a preliminary way, a gradually evolving project that literary...

...Ángel A. Rivera This essay explores Eugenio María de Hostos’s and Ramón E. Betances’s notions of modern subjectivities, in the context of Romantic narratives, to index the fractures of collective and communal nationalist imaginaries within the Caribbean Confederation. Hostos and Betances were...

... narratives of exile and return, the article argues that authors such as Dany Laferrière and Edwidge Danticat offer post-territorial understandings of culture and nation. ©2008 Small Axe Incorporated. All rights reserved. 2008 Fictions of Displacement: Locating Modern Haitian Narratives J. Michael...

... as articulated in José Estebán Muñoz’s work in order to detect an analogous breakdown in Bolívar Echevarría’s influential work on racial modernity. In conclusion, the essay poses a question about the emancipatory potential of abjection by putting Ellis Neyra’s compelling reading of Pedro Pietri’s The Masses...

... a continuum. [email protected] © 2023 by Small Axe, Inc. 2023 Africa and the Caribbean tradition modernity Trinidad Maureen Warner-Lewis is a name that I have had in my head and on my tongue for more years than I have been without it. Before I fully knew and understood...

... questions what it means to have a productive form of defiance and protest. Overall, the author uses the story of her aunt eating the telegram to demonstrate how Ellis Neyra’s multipoetic sensorial listening could excavate alternative archives and ways of knowing left out of Western modernity. priverar...

... politics—even in their more radical versions—tend, in this reading, to reproduce modern narratives about the meaning and substance of emancipation, the role of the nation-state, the political implications of visibility traditionally understood, and, more broadly, the proper ends of black politics...

... offers a liminal, fleeting opportunity for Black digital agency between these two states. [email protected] © Small Axe, Inc. 2024 modernity Black Twitter Black digital libidinal economy Black respectability Black optimism I am often online; it’s where my people stay...

...Barnor Hesse Nahum Chandler, in his remarkably evocative book X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought , works with the Derridean idea of the exorbitant to argue that W. E. B. Du Bois's thinking exceeds and transforms the terms of Western critical thought on modernity. Du Bois...

...Edward J. Sullivan This essay revisits the arguments in Continental Shifts: The Art of Edouard Duval Carrié . The book's editor looks at how the volume (a mid-career survey of the Haitian artist) was conceived and at its contributions to the study of modern Haitian art and visuality. The author...

... recognition of the region as an inaugural space in the invention of a modern consciousness—not as a problematic tertiary portion of the globe where modernity is a belated burden. In advancing this case for a hemispheric recasting of the Caribbeanist field, it helps to reread a little-known essay that took...

... feast of scraps, not only productively reframe histories of modernism in light of structuralist, postcolonial, and cultural studies, but also point toward a new agenda for the description of African diasporic art and, more broadly, for art history's approaches to questions of racial and sexual...

.... It addresses Carnegie’s prescient interventions in relation to three canards of political philosophy—race-based notions of belonging, the centrality of secularism to modern notions of political community, and particular discourses of autonomy and self-determination. The author argues that what Carnegie shows...

... the lens of Puerto Rico’s colonial crisis as symptomatic of a global crisis of neoliberal capitalism, by means of an analytics of debt as a central feature of capitalist modernity. Rather than simply presenting the book, the essay critically addresses several interwoven questions that are key to its...