Small Axe Project

The Small Axe Project is an integrated publication undertaking devoted to Caribbean intellectual and artistic work, exercised over four platforms—Small Axe; sx salon, sx visualities, and sx archipelagos—each with a different structure, medium, and practice.[1] The Project also curates related events, symposia, and exhibitions. The Small Axe Project is administered by Small Axe Incorporated, a not-for-profit [501(c)3] organization established in New York State in 2002, and is funded by The Ford Foundation, The Reed Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. David Scott is Director, and Nijah Cunningham, Coordinator.

The aim of the Small Axe Project is to promote the expansion and revision of the scope of Caribbean criticism across multiple platforms. The Project aims to rethink the conceptions that guided the formation of Caribbean modernities; namely, race, class, sovereignty, democracy, development, gender, nation and culture. At the same time, the project is concerned with re-conceptualizing the Caribbean as an object of knowledge and study, across its three major linguistic regions—anglophone, francophone and hispanophone. The current project statement reads:

The Small Axe Project is a transnational, interdisciplinary, and dialogical space of debate and creative expression from and about the Caribbean region and its diasporas. Such a discursive and aesthetic space, as we imagine it, is necessarily open-ended, propelled by a spirit of adventure and criticism. Our mission is to inspire, build, and sustain such a space of inquiry and articulation.[2]

David Scott

David Scott is the president of Small Axe Inc., the director of the Small Axe Project, and the founding editor of Small Axe journal. He teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (1994), Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (1999), Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004), Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (2014), and Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (2017). He is also co-editor of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (2007), He is currently working on a book project examining the moral imperative of reparations for New World slavery.[3]

David Scott was awarded the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Distinguished Editor prize in 2017 for his work as editor of Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism.[4][5] Gordon Hutner said, at the Book Review Session arranged by CELJ on 5 January 2017:[6]

With Small Axe, Scott has moved to generate (and increasingly widen) a collective conversation about modernity and the Caribbean's central place in shaping (and being shaped by) it...Scott describes editing as "the cultivation of a capacity for attunement to the work of others, and a responsive ability to shelter and enable perspectives on common and uncommon themes that do not necessarily align with, and indeed, that sometimes wilfully diverge from, one’s own." He is also loyal not only to his contributors but to his journal's audiences—who rely on him to sift and assess and encourage excellence. Overall, this journal brings to life an active intellectual and artistic community. Scott’s vision for that community is clear and alive and open-ended: to be aware of the history of what it has meant to think and study the Caribbean and to keep asking, as he says in another excellent introduction to an issue, "What today is Caribbean studies? What can it be?"[7]

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
Small Axe
DisciplineCriticism
LanguageEnglish, Spanish, French
Edited byDavid Scott
Publication details
History1997–present
Publisher
Duke University Press for Small Axe Incorporated
FrequencyTriannually
Standard abbreviations
ISO 4Small Axe
Indexing
ISSN0799-0537 (print)
1534-6714 (web)
LCCN99100400
OCLC no.46614817
Links

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism is a peer-reviewed triannual print journal that was established in Jamaica in March 1997 as a forum for critical writing. It was originally published by Ian Randle Publishers biannually for the Small Axe Collective. In 1998, the journal moved to University of the West Indies Press. The journal moved again in 2000 to Indiana University Press, and began triannual publication in 2006. Small Axe has been published by Duke University Press in March, July and November, since 2009.[8] David Scott is Editor and Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is Managing Editor.[9]

The journal publishes scholarly articles, essays, book discussions, and interviews, as well as literary works of fiction and poetry, visual arts, and reviews. The mission of the journal consists in the renewal of practices of intellectual criticism in the Caribbean, as well as an interrogation and expansion of the idea of "criticism". Furthermore, Small Axe aims to rethink extant conceptualizations of the regional and diasporic Caribbean, and to provide a platform for critical dialogues emerging from and pertaining to the Caribbean.

According to The Caribbean Review of Books, Small Axe has become "the leading intellectual journal published in the anglophone Caribbean, while maintaining a decidedly critical stance towards the region's political and cultural establishment."[10]

Small Axe celebrated its 50th anniversary issue in 2016.

Covers

Small Axe covers have been designed by graphic artist Juliet Ali since 2006.[11] The covers have been noted for their striking aesthetic. Some covers have aroused controversy. Small Axe 6 (1999) was considered controversial for its parodying of Edna Manley’s sculpture “Negro Aroused” (1937). In March 2000, Small Axe 7, guest-edited by Faith Smith, was rejected by the press for being pornographic. This controversy eventually led to the journal's departure from University of the West Indies Press.

Each cover figures original work from a Caribbean artist.[12] Notable artists featured on the cover of Small Axe include: Ras Daniel Heartman (Small Axe 5, 1999), Wendy Nanan (Small Axe 11, 2002), Lubaina Himid (Small Axe 23, 2007), Edouard Duval Carrie (Small Axe 27, 2008), Ingrid Pollard (Small Axe 28, 2009), Sandra Brewster (Small Axe 29, 2009), Hew Locke (Small Axe 34, 2011), Ebony Patterson (Small Axe 35, 2011), Arthur Simms (Small Axe 40, 2013), Marlon Griffith (Small Axe 41, 2013), Lavar Munroe (Small Axe 44, 2014), Nari Ward (Small Axe 50, 2016), and Firelei Báez (Small Axe 51, 2016).

Interviews

Notable interviewees featured in the journal include:[12] Stuart Hall (Small Axe 1, 1997), Richard Hart (Small Axe 3, 1998), Ken Post (Small Axe 4, 1998), Robert A. Hill (Small Axe 5, 1999), Sylvia Wynter (Small Axe 8, 2000), George Lamming (Small Axe 9, 2002), Sidney Mintz (Small Axe 19, 2006), Rex Nettleford (Small Axe 20, 2006), Patrick Chamoiseau (Small Axe 30, 2009), Merle Collins (Small Axe 31, 2010), and Orlando Patterson (Small Axe 40, 2013).

Notable special sections

Small Axe frequently features special sections often published in relation to conferences and symposia in which urgent issues pertaining to Caribbean scholarship are discussed.[12] Notable sections include:

  • "On the Archeologies of Black Memory" (Small Axe 26, 2008)
  • "Reconstructing Womanhood: A Future Beyond Empire—A Symposium Honoring" Hazel Carby (Guest editors, Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt) (Small Axe 28, 2009)
  • "Blackness Unbound" (Guest editor, Glynne A. Griffith) (Small Axe 29, 2009)
  • "Relating the Francophone Caribbean" (Guest Editors, Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw) (Small Axe 30, 2009)
  • "What is Caribbean Studies?" (Small Axe 41, 2013)
  • "The Idea of a Black Radical Tradition" (Small Axe 40, 2013)
  • "The Visual Life of Catastrophic History" (Small Axe 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42)
  • "What is Journal Work?" (Small Axe 50, 2016)
  • "The Idea of Hispanophone Caribbean Studies" (Guest editor, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Small Axe 51, 2016)
  • "The Jamaican 1960s" (Guest editor, Donette Francis, Small Axe 54, 2017)

sx salon: a small axe literary platform

sx salon is a tri-annual digital forum for critical and creative explorations of Caribbean literature. Since its initiation in 2010, sx salon has aimed to stimulate and engage aesthetic forms across different literary genres that reflect the changing sensibilities of regional and diasporic realities. sx salon publishes literary discussions, interviews, reviews, poetry and prose. Issues appear in February, June and October. Kelly Baker Josephs, Editor; Vanessa K. Valdés, Book Review Editor; Rosamond S. King, Creative Editor.[13]

sx visualities

Launched in 2016, sx visualities is a digital platform showcasing and debating Caribbean visual practice. Individual and collaborative projects are published annually. Roshini Kempadoo and Daniela Fifi, Managing Editors.

The project statement reads:

sx visualities is a venue for visual practice. It aims to host educational and curatorial projects annually, presenting visual culture across a range of genres and forms: from photography to the moving image, from performance to architecture, from soundscapes to painting and sculpture. Encapsulating this living terrain of creativity, we consider the visual language as part of a wider practice of world-making.[14]

Caribbean Queer Visualities

Curated by David Scott, Erica Moiah James, and Nijah Cunningham, in 2015, Caribbean Queer Visualities (CQV) explores the role of "queerness" in Caribbean visual art. CQV has hosted symposia as well as curated exhibitions.

A 2016 press release for the symposium reads:

One of the most remarkable developments in the Caribbean and its diaspora over the past two decades or so is the emergence of a generation of young visual artists working in various media (paint, film, performance) who have been transforming Caribbean visual practice, perhaps even Caribbean visual culture. Importantly these younger artists did not grow up in the “aftermaths of sovereignty” so much as in the aftermaths of sovereignty’s aftermaths. They grow up in a context in which the great narratives of sovereignty, once oppositional, once open to the adventure of a future-to-come, have congealed and ossified, and in doing so disclose more and more their own modes of exclusion, marginalization, repression, and intolerance. And as the old anti-systemic movements for social and political change became installed in power in the new states of the region they stultified into new modes of orthodoxy, into their own terrified normativities, anxiously policing the boundaries of identity and community, the expressions of personhood and belonging, of sex and pleasure. These are precisely themes that preoccupy this younger generation, and that provoke and illuminate the do main we call Caribbean queer visuality.[15]

In partnership with the British Council, the CQV has been exhibited at The Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and the Transmission Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland, featuring the works of Ewan Atkinson (Barbados), Jean-Ulrick Désert (Haiti/Germany), Richard Fung (Trinidad/Canada), Andil Gosine (Trinidad/Canada), Nadia Huggins (St. Vincent & the Grenadines), Leasho Johnson (Jamaica), Charl Landvreugd (Suriname/Netherlands), Kareem Mortimer (Bahamas), Ebony G. Patterson (Jamaica), Jorge Pineda (Dominican Republic).[16]

sx archipelagos: a small axe platform for digital practice

A digital platform launched in 2016 that focuses on the digital humanities and its implications for Caribbean scholarship. In the wake of the "digital turn" in the humanities, sx archipelagos seeks to promote creative exploration, debate, and critical thinking about and through digital practices in contemporary scholarly and artistic work in and on the Caribbean. Sx archipelagos engages with scholarly essays; digital scholarship projects; and digital project reviews. Alex Gil (scholar) and Kaiama L. Glover, Editors.[17]

Recent and ongoing projects

Literary competition

The literary competition, launched in 2009, serves as a venue for hearing the voices of emerging Caribbean writers of short fiction and poetry, writing in English, Spanish and French. The competition offers prizes for first and second places in each category. Competition winners are published in Small Axe the following year. Martin Munro and Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Coordinators.[18]

In 2017, the Small Axe Literary Competition entered a new phase, accepting entries in Spanish, English, and French, on a three-year rotation for submissions in these language. The schedule for entries is as follows:

  • (2017) Spanish
  • (2018) English
  • (2019) French

sx live

sx live is a blog that features notable and upcoming events in the field of Caribbean studies, as well as brief interviews and reviews by or concerning people associated with the Small Axe Project.[19]

The Caribbean Digital

Since 2014, the Caribbean Digital has hosted conferences and symposia related to the practice and history of the digital in relation to changing social and geo-political contours in the Caribbean and its diasporas. The conference is convened and organized by Kaiama Glover, Alex Gil (scholar), and Kelly Baker Josephs.[20]

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in EBSCO Academic Search Premier, EBSCO Current Abstracts, EBSCO Current Citations Express, EBSCO Humanities International Complete, EBSCO Humanities International Index, Hispanic American Periodical Index, Humanities Abstracts, Humanities Index, MLA Bibliography, ProQuest Discovery, ProQuest International Index to Black Periodicals, ProQuest Literature Online (LION), ProQuest News and Magazines, ProQuest Periodicals, ProQuest Prisma, ProQuest Research Library and Wilson Omnifile.[21]

References
  1. Small Axe Project official website. Retrieved 21 July 2017.
  2. "Small Axe Project". Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  3. "David Scott", Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  4. "David Scott Awarded Distinguished Editor Prize for Small Axe", Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University. Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  5. "David Scott receives Distinguished Editor prize", sx live, 5 January 2017.
  6. "Session Details | 104. Book Reviews", MLA.
  7. Hutner, Gordon. Book Review Session arranged by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, 5 January 2017. Speech.
  8. "Project Timeline". Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  9. Small Ave.
  10. Laughlin, Nicholas, "Criticism as a Question", The Caribbean Review of Books, November 2008.
  11. DaCosta, Gabrielle, "A Caribbean Gallery of Art: An Interview with Juliet Ali", sx Live, 4 April 2017.
  12. "Issues", Small Axe website. Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  13. "SX Salon". Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  14. "sx visualities", Small Axe website. Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  15. Scott, David. "small axe: Caribbean Queer Visualities", Outburst Queer Arts Festival, 2016.
  16. "small axe: Caribbean Queer Visualities", British Council Northern Ireland. Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  17. "sx archipelagos", Small Axe website. Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  18. "submissions + eligibility", Literary Competition, Small Axe. Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  19. "sx archipelagos", Small Axe website. Retrieved 8 August 2017.
  20. "Thinking in and through the digital turn in Caribbean studies: The Caribbean Digital III", sx live, 21 December 2016.
  21. "Small Axe 52 Cover", Duke Journals. Retrieved 8 August 2017. PDF.
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