Project MUSE®: Small Axe - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Small Axe.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 5 (2001) through current issueLatest Articles: Small AxeTWOProject MUSE®Small Axe1534-67140799-0537Latest articles in Small Axe. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Preface: Antinomies of Self-Criticism in the Jamaican Marxist Left
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975451
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The 1970s communist Left in Jamaica formally came to an end with the folding up of the activities of the Workers’ Party of Jamaica (WPJ) in 1992, the year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The party had been launched in 1978 out of the Workers’ Liberation League, which itself had been founded in 1974 in the wake of the breakup of the Abeng project and the dispersal of its participants in divergent Left directions. Its former leadership, largely professionals, many of whom were academics at the University of the West Indies, Mona, were reabsorbed into middle-class respectability and conformity, under whose complacent security they tried as best as they could to put their wayward past behind them. All well
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallPreface: Antinomies of Self-Criticism in the Jamaican Marxist Left2025-11-21text/htmlen-USPreface: Antinomies of Self-Criticism in the Jamaican Marxist Left2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®175742026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Claude McKay’s Historical Imagination
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975452
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In the century since Claude McKay first published Harlem Shadows in 1922, little attention has been paid to the complex vision of history articulated in its pages. Yet that vision is crucial because it complicates the book’s political and aesthetic dimensions. This essay considers McKay’s historical imagination as it manifests in his views on the trajectory of world history, particularly for imperial powers; the economic forces shaping the experience of time in the West and the Caribbean; and the relationship between art, history, and time, including the artist’s role in engaging with the past.Much of the scholarly conversation surrounding the book has focused on issues of politics and style. Specifically, critics
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallClaude McKay’s Historical Imagination2025-11-21text/htmlen-USClaude McKay’s Historical Imagination2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®667752026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Dream and Dread: Haitian Exceptionalism in Pre–Civil War African American Propaganda
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975453
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In the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake, Colin Dayan noted the myriad ways the media represented Haiti “as a passive, neutered object of disaster, with no history, no culture, nothing except images of rubble, pain, dirt, and misery.”1 In her short piece, Dayan raises the question about the role and function of metaphor in representations of Haiti. Dayan concludes that metaphor “exists in the service of our cherished ideals of ‘civilization’—which are, of course, notions of self. Our selfhood is reflected, as in a distorting mirror, in our notions of Haiti.” In other words, Westerners need Haiti to be “a metaphor for all kinds of bad things” to recognize themselves as civilized selves. Sensitive to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallDream and Dread: Haitian Exceptionalism in Pre–Civil War African American Propaganda2025-11-21text/htmlen-USDream and Dread: Haitian Exceptionalism in Pre–Civil War African American Propaganda2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®731452026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21“Pass Them On”: Preserving Afro-Latina Epistemologies Through Spiritual Narratives
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975454
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The quote, “Pass them on,” is taken from the postscript of Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s 2009 novel Daughters of the Stone, in which the narrator Carisa Ortiz introduces herself as “a teller of stories.”1 I selected this quote from Llanos-Figueroa’s text for its simple but resonant request: to share the stories of previous generations of Afro-Latinas to give them permanence. Llanos-Figueroa’s novel speaks to the often-neglected history of Afro-Latinas, whose voices are overshadowed by Anglocentric and male perspectives. By sharing the previous generations’ stories, whether apocryphal or real, the storyteller and the reader collaborate to link the past and the present, thereby elevating the act of storytelling to a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmall“Pass Them On”: Preserving Afro-Latina Epistemologies Through Spiritual Narratives2025-11-21text/htmlen-US“Pass Them On”: Preserving Afro-Latina Epistemologies Through Spiritual Narratives2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®603402026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Radiation and the Question of Power: C. L. R. James and the Struggle for Chaguaramas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975455
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In 1958, the nuclear age arrived in Trinidad with the clandestine construction of a Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radar station at the US Navy base in Chaguaramas. Located at a far corner of Trinidad’s Northwest Peninsula, the tracking station began operations in February 1959 as one node in a transatlantic network that included installations in Greenland, Yorkshire, Alaska, and New Jersey. For US military officials, Trinidad appeared well suited for an operation whose secrecy was paramount. In the Caribbean, they believed efforts to track and intercept Soviet ballistic missiles would remain hidden from view.After World War II, the unspeakable images of fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki generated
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallRadiation and the Question of Power: C. L. R. James and the Struggle for Chaguaramas2025-11-21text/htmlen-USRadiation and the Question of Power: C. L. R. James and the Struggle for Chaguaramas2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®1014242026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Introducing the Forum on Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975456
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At the January 2025 meeting of the American Historical Association, we convened a panel to discuss Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism. We gathered as scholars of slavery, of empire, and of race—all of us having encountered Long’s three-volume History of Jamaica in our own work, and all of us expressing gratitude to Catherine Hall for offering us such a definitive and generative study of Long, his life, his work, and the impact of his efforts to situate Jamaica as a major engine in England’s slave-owning empire. In their presentations on Lucky Valley, Vincent Brown, Robin D. G. Kelley, Walter Johnson, Sasha Turner, and Kathleen Wilson offered their engagements with and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallIntroducing the Forum on Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley2025-11-21text/htmlen-USIntroducing the Forum on Catherine Hall’s Lucky Valley2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®172892026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Denial, Disavowal, and the Deferral of Black History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975457
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Catherine Hall is one of the great heroes of the historical profession. As I write in a dustjacket blurb for Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism, “Once in a while a big book comes along that compels you to drop everything, clear your schedule and focus intently.”1 Its publication is an important event, a timely call to understand and redress the racial capitalism that the planter-historian Edward Long worked to create and sustain.Edward Long occupies a place at the center of the historiography of eighteenth-century slavery. A well-cultivated and erudite Englishman with deep connections to the British colony of Jamaica, Long went to the island in 1757 while in his early twenties, spending
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallDenial, Disavowal, and the Deferral of Black History2025-11-21text/htmlen-USDenial, Disavowal, and the Deferral of Black History2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®216902026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21History from the Ground Up
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975458
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Catherine Hall has written a brilliant history of Edward Long and his “possessions”—by that I mean his property in land and people, investments, family, books, beliefs, secrets, and active imagination. And she wrote it from the standpoint of his victims. Vincent Brown is absolutely right to call Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism a “counterhistory of racial capitalism,” mainly because the world Edward Long made, and that made him, lays bare the precise operations of the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy—the production and circulation of sugar, the functions of merchant houses, the real costs of turning the labor of captive Africans into surplus value, and their determination to resist
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallHistory from the Ground Up2025-11-21text/htmlen-USHistory from the Ground Up2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®246542026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21The Soul of Racial Capitalism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975459
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“Of them I am singularly clairvoyant,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of White people in his 1920 essay “The Souls of White Folk.” “I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. . . . I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails.” Du Bois termed what he saw when he looked “personal whiteness.” A sense of entitlement so profound that it seemed innate to those whom it clothed, an understanding that “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”1“The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing,” Du Bois continued. “The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction. The Middle Ages regarded
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallThe Soul of Racial Capitalism2025-11-21text/htmlen-USThe Soul of Racial Capitalism2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®203512026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21A Psychoanalytic Approach to the History of Racial Capitalism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975460
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In an echo of the honorific Queen Mother bestowed upon women leaders and healers in some West African cultures, an enslaved woman living in eighteenth-century Jamaica called Cubah was coronated Queen of Kingston. Adorned in a crown and robe, Queen Cubah assembled an army and declared war against her people’s oppressors. They were determined to seize power from Whites and claim the island for themselves. The rebellion failed and Cubah was exiled from Jamaica. Having persuaded a ship captain to repatriate her, she eventually returned to the island, where she was executed. Queen Cubah’s leadership and militancy made her an important figure in the imagination of the Caribbean, a symbol of the potent possibility of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallA Psychoanalytic Approach to the History of Racial Capitalism2025-11-21text/htmlen-USA Psychoanalytic Approach to the History of Racial Capitalism2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®216282026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Lucky Valley in the World: Racial Capitalism and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975461
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Empire is still with us. It shapes our conscious and even unconscious choices about what is possible and desirable in everyday lives, newly acknowledged to be lived under the shadow of ongoing settler colonialisms, genocide, and recurrent climate catastrophes.But the historical study of empire has been transformed in my lifetime, and probably yours. The histories of empire are no longer solely the stories of policies and intentions, whether administered locally or centrally; neither are the settler and extractive sites of empire isolated into separate regional area studies. Rather, eighteenth-century empires are now more often apprehended as a series of connected, transoceanic communities that crisscrossed the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallLucky Valley in the World: Racial Capitalism and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire2025-11-21text/htmlen-USLucky Valley in the World: Racial Capitalism and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®460432026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21History as Redress and Repair
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975462
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I am most grateful to the five historians who have taken the time to read Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism, no small task, and to share their thoughts about it. Their scholarship helped me write my book. Special thanks to Jennifer Morgan, both for her work and for her introduction to these contributions. They have all reflected on Lucky Valley from their distinctive perspectives, and their insightful essays encourage new thoughts.1My hope was that the book would be understood as a call for repair: repair for the damage that New World slavery has inflicted, in its different ways, on both the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. Vincent Brown takes this up. Lucky Valley, he writes, is a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallHistory as Redress and Repair2025-11-21text/htmlen-USHistory as Redress and Repair2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®485962026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21On the Other Side of the Shore
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975463
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Île de la Désirade, no. 1, 2022Port-Louis, Guadeloupe, 2022Île de la Désirade, no. 2, 2022Le Moule, Guadeloupe, 2024Hotel Callinago, Le Gosier, 2022Baie-Mahault, Guadeloupe, 2021This series of images comes from a photographic study titled Dlo Doubout (Sugar Cane), created by a collective of photographers. It explores the foundations and evolution of contemporary Guadeloupean society through the lens of sugarcane.For the first Indigenous and nomadic peoples from northern Venezuela, the Kalinagos, the sea represented, among other things, a source of nourishment, a means of movement, and ultimately a path to explore new spaces favorable to their development. In fact, they migrated to the Caribbean islands at the end
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallOn the Other Side of the Shore2025-11-21text/htmlen-USOn the Other Side of the Shore2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®122412026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Translating for Future Readers: Glossing Haitian Literature in English Translation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975464
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A critical geographer, a novelist/philosopher/poet, and a translator sit down at their desks and begin composing lists. The geographer was asked to write an entry on the concept of “diaspora” for an encyclopedia of human geography. As she enters her list, she “revise[s], amend[s], and modifie[s].” She introduces “many ellipses, pauses indicating breaks, breaths, erasures,” which make her entry something that a list, a glossary, was never meant to be. She hopes that “the list, with any luck, will hint at how cataloguing a material, conceptual, and imaginative site—diaspora—does little to undo, and indeed reconstitutes, our present geographic order,” demonstrating how listing limits the radical potential of the very
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallTranslating for Future Readers: Glossing Haitian Literature in English Translation2025-11-21text/htmlen-USTranslating for Future Readers: Glossing Haitian Literature in English Translation2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®962382026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Beyond the Anthropocene Ark Ecology of Climate Havens and Spaceships
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975465
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On 2 October 2024, the Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) Geoff Bennett and William Brangham discussed the idea of climate havens. Bennett recounted how Hurricane Helene “made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Florida, but it’s towns across Western North Carolina hundreds of miles from the coast and thousands of feet above sea level that have seen some of the worst destruction.” He opined: “Communities once considered climate havens are now facing a harsh reality. There may be no such thing.” Brangham joins in, featuring a conversation with Alex Steffen of The Snap Forward. Brangham initiates the conversation with Steffen with this observation:Asheville, [North Carolina,] which is temperate, inland, nestled up in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallBeyond the Anthropocene Ark Ecology of Climate Havens and Spaceships2025-11-21text/htmlen-USBeyond the Anthropocene Ark Ecology of Climate Havens and Spaceships2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®552822026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Une écologie décoloniale de Malcom Ferdinand : décentrements épistémiques et esthétiques
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975466
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Je propose dans ce texte de discuter certains points de l’essai fondateur de Malcom Ferdinand, Une écologie décoloniale : penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen, paru aux Éditions du Seuil en 2019, depuis mon point de vue de chercheuse française, spécialiste des littératures de la Caraïbe hispanophone et attentive aux théories féministes et décoloniales latino- américaines. À partir de cette position que j’assume comme étant en partie illégitime—car n’étant pas moi-même caribéenne, et travaillant dans une tout autre discipline que celle dans laquelle se déploie l’ouvrage de Malcom Ferdinand, qui a pourtant nourri mon propre travail—, j’insisterai sur trois éléments en particulier qui me semblent essentiels dans
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallUne écologie décoloniale de Malcom Ferdinand : décentrements épistémiques et esthétiques2025-11-21text/htmlen-USUne écologie décoloniale de Malcom Ferdinand : décentrements épistémiques et esthétiques2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®540672026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21Small Trees Take Down Big Axes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975467
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It is an honor to have a part of this Small Axe discussion dedicated to my book Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World.1 My gratitude goes to David Scott, who suggested the idea, the editorial team, and, of course, Alex Moulton and Sophie Large, who have written two brilliant essays critically engaging with this book. It is a welcomed and humbling experience to have your work discussed, criticized, and at times to used to shed light on different situations. However, this is a particular task because this book was first published in 2019 in France, and the research made in this process goes back more than ten years. While my thinking and experiences on this subject have continued to expand, I have
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/185/image/coversmallSmall Trees Take Down Big Axes2025-11-21text/htmlen-USSmall Trees Take Down Big Axes2025-11-212025TWOProject MUSE®369212026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-11-21