Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 

About: Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism is an academic journal published by Duke University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Diaspora. It has an ISSN identifier of 0799-0537. Over the lifetime, 721 publications have been published receiving 5881 citations.

Venus in Two Acts

Abstract: This essay examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery and wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn’t already been stated. As an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world, Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, the essay mimes the violence of the archive and attempts to redress it by describing as fully as possible the conditions that determine the appearance of Venus and that dictate her silence.

Bodies in the System

Abstract: 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 urgent project. In Peasants and Capital (1988) he examines three units—the village, the world, and the nation—that offer us one way to connect these people and places to global concerns. This essay suggests that Trouillot’s intervention might be productively extended if we take seriously the body and its constituent parts as a fourth unit of analysis. Drawing from recent work in feminist science studies and from her own fieldwork on sexual politics in Martinique, the author asks how the body might function as an important scalar intertext in our ongoing efforts to demonstrate the centrality of the Caribbean to contemporary debates about power, politics, and the postcolonial.

Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery

Abstract: From the moment of its introduction into the Atlantic world, hereditary racial slavery depended on an understanding that enslaved women's reproductive lives would be tethered to the institution of slavery. At the same time, few colonial slave codes explicitly defined the status of these children. This essay explores English slave codes regarding reproduction under slavery alongside the experience of reproduction to suggest that legislative silences are not the final word on race and reproduction. The presumption that their children would also be enslaved produced a visceral understanding of early modern racial formations for enslaved women. Using a seventeenth-century Virginia slave code as its anchor, this essay explores the explicit and implicit consequences of slaveowners' efforts to control enslaved women's reproductive lives.

Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib

Abstract: The question is still open: what is the purpose of Guantanamo Bay? Why torture people whom the government and the interrogators know are innocent? What kind of U.S. empire now extends its filaments throughout the global gulag of interrogation prisons, torture-ships and internment camps? The U.S. state, I argue, has entered the domain of paranoia, for it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously both deliriums of omnipotence and forebodings of perpetual threat. I trace the flashpoints of paranoid violence into the labyrinths of torture to explore three crises: the crisis of violence and the visible; the crisis of imperial legitimacy; and what I call ‘the enemy deficit. What is the relation between photography and forgetting? What accounts for the persistent presence of photography in the scene of torture? I critique the ‘pornography-made-them do-it” narrative and explore the torture photographs not for what they reveal, but for what they conceal and what they allow us to forget about the now established but concealed circuits of global imperial violence.

On the Question of Caribbean Studies

Abstract: This essay urges that in considering the question of Caribbean studies we think not only about the substantive content of our work but also about the senses in which this work makes assumptions about the idea and project of Caribbean studies as a conceptual-ideological field. The essay briefly refers to two generative moments in the history of Caribbean studies: one in the 1950s framed around M. G. Smith's A Framework for Caribbean Studies and another in the 1970s framed around Kamau Brathwaite's "Caribbean Man in Space and Time." The point in considering these moments in the figuring and refiguring of Caribbean studies is to encourage a certain kind of history of ideas, namely, one that thinks through the kinds of ideological-conceptual problem-spaces that shape and orient their respective formulations.