Discipline Criticism Edited by David Scott Publication history 1997–present | Language English Publisher Duke University Press Frequency Triannually | |
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism is a triannual literary magazine that was established in Jamaica in 1997 as a forum for critical writing. Its founding editor-in-chief is David Scott (Columbia University).
Contents
The journal publishes scholarly articles, opinion essays, and interviews, as well as literary works of fiction and poetry, visual arts, and reviews, the content focusing on "critical work that examines the ideas that guided the formation of Caribbean modernities". 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."
History
Writer and critic Annie Paul has described her early collaboration with David Scott that led to their establishment of the journal, saying: "Small Axe was and is an ambitious attempt to produce a Southern forum that challenges 'received paradigms and assumptions about the Caribbean.' The journal was the first leg of this larger project." The journal's name and mission are explained thus:
"'If you are a big tree, we are a small axe.' As this Jamaican proverb (popularized by Bob Marley) suggests, a small axe is an instrument of criticism. This is what our journal aims to be: a small axe.' The journal was in search of a new vocabulary of criticism that would illuminate the twilight zone that scholarship in the South faced: a moment 'when older paradigms are no longer plausible and new ones have not yet asserted themselves.' It also wanted quite simply to intervene — in such critical debates and rethinkings as might be taking place in or around the region."
Initially launched in Jamaica, Small Axe later relocated to the United States, where it was formerly published by Indiana University Press before moving to Duke University Press.
In an interview in November 2008, editor Scott said: "The broad ambition of the journal, I think, has not changed. The idea of a journal that would be concerned with intervening in debates about the Caribbean in such a way as to be critical of the conventional paradigms in relation to which, or through which, the Caribbean was conceived, argued about, engaged — to try to open up conceptual intellectual space for revisioning the Caribbean — that broad preoccupation has not changed. What has changed, I suppose, are the tactical details, the distinctive dimensions along which that project has been pursued. I think that Small Axe has always been a work in progress."
Having been published bi-annually, in 2008 Small Axe began producing three issues a year, with the intention of devoting one of these to the Francophone Caribbean.
Small Axe Project
Associated with the print journal, the Small Axe Project provides a digital platform principally through Small Axe and sx salon.
The project also administers a literary competition for poetry and short stories from emerging writers whose work centres on regional and diasporic Caribbean themes and concerns.
Abstracting and indexing
The journal is abstracted and indexed in InfoTrac databases, Emerging Sources Citation Index, MLA International Bibliography, and ProQuest databases.