...: Martin Luther King Jr., Peter Tosh, and the Black Radical Imaginary Carter Mathes Peace is the diploma you get in the cemetery. —Peter Tosh I remember that during my childhood in Argentina, in the continuous performance cinemas there was an announcement saying, “The performance begins...

...David Scott This short essay offers one frame in which to think about the idea of a black radical tradition, a term whose elements are all essentially unstable and contested. What is at stake is a historically minded inquiry into “uses” rather than “meanings”—that is, the historical conjunctures in...

...Farah Jasmine Griffin This essay explores the extent to which the concept of “a black radical tradition” illuminates or limits understandings of the art and activism of dancer, choreographer, and activist Pearl Primus. Focusing on Primus's emergence as a public figure and artist during the 1940s...

...Nijah Cunningham Marking the close of the conference “The Idea of a Black Radical Tradition,” this roundtable served as a workshop for participants to explore, extend, and trouble the cultural and political discourse of black radicalism. © 2013 by Small Axe, Inc. 2013 After two days of careful and...

...Carole Boyce Davies The authors response to Kevin Gaines' and Patricia Saunders' discussion of Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Claudia Jones Small Axe Incorporated 2009 Sisters Outside: Tracing the Caribbean/Black Radical Intellectual Tradition...

...Wigmoore Francis Small Axe Incorporated 2003 Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Perspectives on Women in the Discourses of Radical Black Caribbean Men Wigmoore Francis INTRODUCTION t work in the deliberations of black radical thinkers in the nineteenth- and early...

...Elizabeth E. Sine This essay explores the making of a radical cultural politics amid the global crisis of the 1930s and 1940s through a study of the life and work of dancer Si-lan Chen. Born in Trinidad to Afro-Caribbean and Chinese parents, trained as a ballerina in Moscow, and an active supporter...

... organizations, King argues, “In these circumstances the organizations implicitly propose a radically different nation, one that retains its pride and culture—but which no longer demonizes, scapegoats, or disappears indigenous same-sex sexuality or those citizens who engage in it” (117). The notion of freedom...

... representations of pessimisms that embraced life's absurd futility rather than its abject hopelessness. Reading the corpus of this Jamaican literary archive—twelve novels and one memoir—the author examines the heterogeneous nature of the decade's literary pessimisms, best characterized as a sensibility of radical...

... particular style of radical political will. The moment was that of an unprecedented strike meeting in Lionel Town in the sugarcane belt of southern Clarendon in 1959, jointly organized by the two principal and sometimes violently rival trade unions in the Jamaican sugar industry—the National Workers Union...

...Kaiama L. Glover This essay reflects on Haitian radicalism by looking at the life and the works of novelist Marie Vieux Chauvet (1916–73). Though increasingly a subject of interest for scholars of Haitian women's literature and of Haitian feminism, Chauvet's work is only rarely considered alongside...

... Black Internationalisms: West Indian Radicals and The Practice of Diaspora Michelle Stephens ne of Claude McKay’s unique contributions to the fi eld of transnational black studies was his ability to bridge the multiple cultural worlds of the African dias- Opora. As much as...

...Millery Polyné This article examines the benefits and limitations of radicalism in Haiti during the post–US occupation period—1934–57. This critical and underexplored period, which Matthew J. Smith examines in his Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957...

...Faith Smith This essay argues that the death of a fictional photographer in the 1907 novel Rupert Gray: A Tale in Black and White allays anxieties posed by photographic surveillance and “feminization.” Even if the novel's faith in the British Empire disqualifies it from being radical, its portrayal...

... optimism that democracy is the means of producing radical change in the region and given antidemocratic sentiments among the people, expressed most powerfully in low value for the human in the Jamaican context. Using Meeks's premise that ethical questions are at the heart of radical change, the essay...

...Chris Moffat This essay examines the relationship between a radical politics and the institution of the archive through a history of the George Padmore Institute (GPI), a community archive attached to New Beacon Books in London. Focusing on the life and thought of John La Rose (1927–2006...

...Faith Smith This essay uses the discussion of Neville Dawes's The Last Enchantment and Beverley Manley's The Manley Memoirs to interrogate intimate scripts of the independence moment and to suggest that these confound accounts of the era as either radical or conservative. © Small Axe, Inc. 2017...

... 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...

... cyberspace produce sites of ethical discomfort that radically test the celebrations associated with transgression in a postcolonial context. © 2012 by Small Axe, Inc. 2012 The ethic of disobedience encoded in postcolonially popular terms such as trespass and transgression takes on increasingly complex...

...Tracy Robinson This essay explores the expansion of Jacqui Alexander's earlier concept of erotic autonomy through the motif of the Sacred in her new book, and her articulation of what could be described as a Caribbean feminist ethic that demands radical self-determination exercised within self and...