...Michael Niblett Arguing for an understanding of the capitalist world-system as the interpretative horizon of world-literature, this essay considers how the formal and stylistic mannerisms of Edgar Mittelholzer's My Bones and My Flute (1955) register the contradictory inflection of capitalist...

... Africa as a conceptual frame in Caribbean theory and literature. This essay pushes for a New World African diasporic rethinking of Cape Town as an alternative city-space within such imaginaries—alternative to that for which Harlem has become metonymic: the New Negro and the Renaissance in black literary...

...Aaron Kamugisha This essay introduces Sylvia Wynter's “Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World,” an unpublished 900-plus-page manuscript written by Wynter in the 1970s. “Black Metamorphosis” is a remarkable manuscript, and it deserves close study for a number of reasons. It is arguably the...

...Aaron Kamugisha “Black Metamorphosis,” Sylvia Wynter's unpublished manuscript of the 1970s, is premised on the idea that the black experience of coloniality is crucial to comprehending the history of the New World. This essay traces the idea of black experience in “Black Metamorphosis” through the...

...Harvey Neptune Caribbean studies, institutionalized from inception as part of the “third world,” might be beneficially reconceptualized minus the postwar geopolitical presumptions of three worlds and, remapped, instead, within the two-world schema. To resituate the Caribbean this way enables...

... paintings, jewelry, silver, and hundreds upon hundreds of photos that my father took of her in every pose all over the world. She is here where she wants to be, going through her things and laughing at me while she pleads with me to be close, to get down with her on the bed and talk about Haiti all through...

...Keithley Woolward Directly engaging the recent manifesto and essay collection calling for a world literature in French, this article considers the creolized, hybrid forms of geopolitical and discursive belonging of the Francophone Caribbean participants as a useful starting point for such a project...

..., and linguistic borders of postcolonial literature. Small Axe, Inc. 2010 The Ambivalent Transnationalism of a Literature-World—in French Kaiama L. Glover Like the diagnosis of an illness with regard to the doctor, the analysis of the manifesto is empowering for the critic. The...

...: History, “World Literature,” and the Persistence of the Political Charles Forsdick Postcolonial critics customarily present Edward Said as a foundational figure in their field, yet repeated claims to “ownership” along these lines contradict Said’s protestations, often expressed in...

...Nalini Persram Small Axe Incorporated 2004 The Importance of Being Cultural: Nationalist Thought and Jagan’s Colonial World Nalini Persram [O]nly a vulgar reductionist can insist that [nationalism’s] new political possibilities simply “emerge” out of a social structure...

...Robert A. Hill This essay examines the role played by George Beckford in grappling critically with the complicated legacy of the plantation system. It focuses on the transition from his role in the New World group to his participation in the Abeng newspaper group in Jamaica, in 1969. The essay...

... of the world are in constant connectedness to each other, capitalism being only the crudest example of this reality. Finally Chamoiseau queries the extent to which the term `postcolonial' can be a useful one for formerly colonised peoples, given the risk that it might sanctify or give undue...

...Bonnie Thomas Rodney Saint-Éloi is one of the most exciting contemporary writers of Haitian origin, and yet his work is little studied in the academic world. Saint-Éloi, who was born in Haiti in 1963 and migrated to Montreal, Canada, in 2001, has maintained a long and distinguished career as an...

...David Scott Copyright © 2019 Small Axe, Inc. 2019 In memory of Teshome Gabriel I had imagined arriving in Addis Ababa to the thumping soundtrack of Dennis Brown’s “The Promised Land” or Third World’s “Journey to Addis,” full, in other words, of the rhythms of an enchanted...

...Natalie L. Belisle This essay mines the concept of untranslatability in two texts by Eduardo Lalo: Los países invisibles and La inutilidad. The analysis interrogates the juridical implications of translation within the “world republic of letters,” which ostensibly accrues literary capital to texts...

...Michael Eldridge Just after World War II, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation hired the Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Caresser to host a weekly program airing on its nationwide network and its fledgling International Service. His engagement, this essay argues, had less to do with “carry[ing...

...Vanessa Agard-Jones As we consider the points of articulation between and among scales of analysis, Michel-Rolph Trouillot's theorization of how small places matter in the world, and further, of how seemingly marginal people might be central to our understanding of systems of power, remains an...

...Pablo F. Gómez This essay offers the Spanish Caribbean as a showcase for the central role black Atlantic healers and their culture played in shaping the Atlantic world of knowledge production about the body and the natural world during the seventeenth century. The author examines how...

... refer to as “an organic relationship to the emergence of new world order.” In this case, the new world order is institutional structures that determine where, when, and in what context certain conversations about power, access, and social change can and should occur. What is most striking, however, is...

... to the world and the mode it instills. Still, “letting oneself be spoken” does not go without a “letting go,” without rupture or distancing, the whole body seized and worn down, for most of us, by a shrinking world, by a threadbare language. What we need is to turn around, go the other way. There is...