Out Of The Caribbean: Small Axe Issue 79: Caribbean Intellectual Life Refuses to Stand Still
On April 8, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism released Issue 79, and as with every issue since its founding in Jamaica in 1997, it arrived as an academic journal and a statement of intent. Originally established as a forum for critical writing and published by Ian Randle Publishers, Small Axe has since moved […]
Black News 
On April 8, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism released Issue 79, and as with every issue since its founding in Jamaica in 1997, it arrived as an academic journal and a statement of intent.
Originally established as a forum for critical writing and published by Ian Randle Publishers, Small Axe has since moved through the University of the West Indies Press and Indiana University Press before settling with Duke University Press in 2009, where it now appears three times a year.
According to The Caribbean Review of Books, it has become “the leading intellectual journal published in the Anglophone Caribbean,” known for its decidedly critical stance towards the region’s political and cultural establishment. Under the long editorship of Columbia University anthropologist David Scott, who was awarded the Council of Editors of Learned Journals Distinguished Editor Prize in 2017, the journal has built a reputation for asking uncomfortable questions about what Caribbean modernity actually means and who gets to define it.
Issue 79 is no exception. The issue opens with a preface from Scott titled The Inheritance of the Subversive 1970s, a framing that signals what runs through much of the content: a reckoning with radical histories and what remains of them. Among the standout pieces is Anasa Hicks’s investigation into race in the Cuban Ochoa affair, and Raúl Fernández’s essay mapping a Greater Caribbean musical web through the language of sound, water, and time. Max Gruber turns to Gordon Parks and Puerto Rican modernity, while Elizabeth Jackson examines the fault lines between “popular” and “literary” Caribbean historical fiction through the work of Valerie Belgrave and David Dabydeen.
A substantial section of the issue is dedicated to scholar and activist Rhoda Reddock. Contributors Kamala Kempadoo, Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, Jocelyne Guilbault, and Carole Boyce Davies collectively examine Reddock’s decades of feminist scholarship and activism across the Caribbean, a tribute that doubles as an argument for why that tradition of feminist intellectual labour deserves its own lineage and record.
The issue’s visual centrepiece is the “Visualities” section, featuring Shoshanna Weinberger’s cover art, Some Fruit Have Legs, alongside her essay, Invisible Visibility: Passing Between the Lines. This section reflects the Small Axe Project’s broader commitment to Caribbean visual practice as a form of criticism in its own right.
The issue closes with a book discussion of Ryan Jobson’s The Petro-State Masquerade, examining oil, sovereignty, and power in Trinidad and Tobago.
The Small Axe Project now spans multiple platforms: the print journal, sx salon (a digital literary forum), and sx art (devoted to Caribbean visual practice), a constellation that has made it the closest thing the Anglophone Caribbean has to a permanent intellectual infrastructure. Issue 79 reminds you why that matters.
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