Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism is published in March, July, and November by Duke University Press, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, NC 27701, on behalf of Small Axe, Inc. Number 49 corresponds to vol. 20, no. 1, 2016. Submissions/correspondence Manuscripts of no more than 7,000 words should be submitted electronically as MS Word attachments to [email protected]. For style details, please consult www.smallaxe.net/smallaxe/submission.php. Visual materials should be sent to [email protected] and must be accompanied by clear layout instructions. A synopsis of Small Axe submission guidelines is provided at www.dukeupress.edu/smallaxe. World Wide Web Visit Small Axe at www.smallaxe.net and Duke University Press Journals at www.dukeupress.edu/journals. Subscriptions Direct all orders to Duke University Press, Journals Customer Relations, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, NC 27701. Permissions Photocopies for course or research use that are supplied to the end user at no cost may be made without explicit permission or Annual subscription rates: print-plus-electronic institutions, $175; fee. Photocopies that are provided to the end user for a fee may not print-only institutions, $160; e-only institutions, $136; individuals, $35; be made without payment of permission fees to Duke University Press. students, $25. Address requests for permission to republish copyrighted material to Rights and Permissions Manager, [email protected]. For information on subscriptions to the e-Duke Journals Scholarly Collections, contact [email protected]. Advertising Direct inquiries about advertising to Journals Advertising Coordinator, [email protected]. Print subscriptions: add $11 postage and applicable HST (including 5% GST) for Canada; add $14 postage outside the US and Canada. Distribution Small Axe is distributed by Ubiquity Distributors, 607 DeGraw St., Brooklyn, NY 11217; phone: 718-875-5491; Back volumes: institutions, $160. Single issues: institutions, $53; fax: 718-875-4047. individuals, $14. Indexing Small Axe is indexed in EBSCO Academic Search Premier, For more information, contact Duke University Press Journals at EBSCO Current Abstracts, EBSCO Current Citations Express, EBSCO 888-651-0122 (toll-free in the US and Canada) or 919-688-5134; Humanities International Complete, EBSCO Humanities International [email protected]. Index, Hispanic American Periodical Index, Humanities Abstracts, Humanities Index, MLA Bibliography, ProQuest Discovery, ProQuest International Index to Black Periodicals, ProQuest Literature Online © 2016 by Small Axe, Inc. (LION), ProQuest News and Magazines, ProQuest Periodicals, ProQuest ISSN 0799-0537 Prisma, ProQuest Research Library, and Wilson Omnifile. Cover Art: Angelika Wallace-Whitfield, The Unconscious, Subconscious, and Conscious Self, 2013; enamel and charcoal on canvas, 4 × 6 ft.; photograph by Christine Wallace-Whitfield. Used by permission of the artist. For their support in the production of this issue, Small Axe acknowledges Journal design and layout by Juliet Ali with thanks The Reed Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Typesetting by MacKey Composition Set in Helvetica Neue 9/14 Printed in the United States of America EDITOR MANAGING EDITOR ADVISORY BOARD David Scott Vanessa Pérez‑Rosario Edward Baugh Kamau Brathwaite EDITORIAL COMMITTee EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Erna Brodber Yarimar Bonilla Tiana Reid Edouard Duval Carrié Charles Carnegie Rhonda Cobham Kaiama L. Glover PRODUCTION Edwidge Danticat Maja Horn MANAGER/COPYEDITOR J. Michael Dash Erica James Kelly S. Martin Locksley Edmondson Aaron Kamugisha Robert Hill Roshini Kempadoo TRANSLATOR, FRENCH George Lamming Martin Munro Nadève Ménard Kari Levitt Melanie Newton Rupert Lewis Matthew Smith COPYEDITOR, FRENCH Earl Lovelace Alex Martin Sandra Pouchet Paquet Caryl Phillips GRAPHIC DESIGNER Gordon Rohlehr Juliet Ali Verene Shepherd Maureen Warner‑Lewis Sylvia Wynter The Small Axe Project consists of this: to participate both in the renewal of practices of intellectual criticism in the Caribbean and in the expansion/revision of the horizons of such criticism. We acknowledge of course a tradition of social, political, and cultural criticism in and about the regional/diasporic Caribbean. We want to honor that tradition but also to argue with it, because in our view it is in and through such argument that a tradition renews itself, that it carries on its quarrel with the generations of itself: retaining/revising the boundaries of its identity, sustaining/ altering the shape of its self‑image, defending/resisting its conceptions of history and community. It seems to us that many of the conceptions that guided the formation of our Caribbean modernities—conceptions of class, gender, nation, culture, race, for example, as well as conceptions of sovereignty, development, democracy, and so on—are in need of substantial rethinking. What we aim to do in our journal is to provide a forum for such rethinking. We aim to enable an informed and sustained debate about the present we inhabit, its political and cultural contours, its historical conditions and global context, and the critical languages in which change can be thought and alternatives reimagined. Such a debate we would insist is not the prerogative of any single genre, and therefore we invite fiction as well as nonfiction, poetry, interviews, visual art, and book discussions. This issue of Small Axe is dedicated to the memory of Sidney Mintz (16 November 1922– 26 December 2015), anthropologist of the Caribbean. Over the course of a long and remarkable scholarly career, and in relation to what he felicitously called three “ancient colonies,” Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Jamaica, he enabled us to see the place of the Caribbean in the formation of the modern world and of the place of the modern world in the formation of the Caribbean. vii Preface: Sylvia Wynter’s Agonistic Intimations 49 David Scott March 2016 1 T’rough Accident: Utterance and Evolution in Songs of Jamaica Alex Benson contents 18 Pays-là chaviré: Revolutionary Politics in Nineteenth‑Century Haitian Creole Popular Music Kate Hodgson Sylvia Wynter’s “Black Metamorphosis”: A Discussion Guest editor, Aaron Kamugisha 37 “That Area of Experience That We Term the New World”: Introducing Sylvia Wynter’s “Black Metamorphosis” Aaron Kamugisha 47 From Mode of Production to Mode of Auto‑Institution: Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis of the Labor Question Demetrius L. Eudell 62 Marronnons / Let’s Maroon: Sylvia Wynter’s “Black Metamorphosis” as a Species of Maroonage Greg Thomas 79 Rebellion/Invention/Groove Katherine McKittrick 92 Sylvia Wynter’s Theory of the Human and the Crisis School of Caribbean Heteromasculinity Studies Tonya Haynes 113 The Resistance of the Lost Body Nijah Cunningham 129 The Black Experience of New World Coloniality Aaron Kamugisha Visualities 147 Eyedealism Matthew McCarthy Book Discussion: Alexandra T. Vazquez, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music 155 Fugitive Sounds Alejandra Bronfman 164 Broken Melodies and Deep Grooves: Listening at the Limits of Cuban Music in Miami Celeste Fraser Delgado 175 Una escuela rara: Feminist Methodologies, Innovation, and the Sound of What Is to Come in Diaspora Studies Samantha Pinto 185 You Can Bring All Your Friends Alexandra T. Vazquez 194 Contributors Preface: Sylvia Wynter’s Agonistic Intimations David Scott I vividly remember arriving at Sylvia Wynter’s (then) home in Palo Alto, California, on the morn‑ ing of 19 November 1999 (almost exactly sixteen years ago to the day I write this) to conduct my planned interview with her.1 She greeted me at the door with an embracing smile of incal‑ culable width and warmth and ushered me in to the living room where we would speak over the course of the next two days. It seemed to me such a familiar space, this living room—familiar in the elegant statement of its decor and furnishing, in its formal and subdued gaiety. There was a just-so character to it, as though everything had been carefully, deliberately chosen and arranged and now resided exactly where it had always belonged. And though we had never met before, Sylvia, too, was immediately recognizable to me, in her mannered sense of poise and propriety and solidity and decorum, mixed with an undercurrent of mischief and irrever‑ ence and an altogether wicked sense of humor. She projected a no‑nonsense personality and a formidable intellectual presence that gave you to understand that the time you were now spending with her was of no trifling significance and should not be wasted. It is an experi‑ ence of sheer intellectual adventure I will not soon forget. In every way, I have always thought, Sylvia Wynter is entirely—and precisely—what Rex Nettleford would have called (with all its Jamaican resonances and inflections) a “lady of quality.” 1 See David Scott, “The Re‑enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,” Small Axe, no. 8 (September 2000): 119–207. small axe 49 • March 2016 • DOI 10.1215/07990537‑3481390 © Small Axe, Inc. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/20/1 (49)/vii/472857/SMX49_00viiPreface.pdf by guest on 28 February 2021 viii | Preface: Sylvia Wynter’s Agonistic Intimations At the time I set about making the systematic preparations for the interview some months before I arrived at her doorstep that November morning, I could scarcely have imagined that in the space of little more than a decade Wynter would become something of an iconic figure for a revisionist black intellectual orientation thematized around the trope or the poetics of the “human” (notably rendered in ontological tones as a substantive: the human).2 Certainly she was already iconic to me—but perhaps in a less abstract or, in any case, a more circumscribed way. To me, at the time, Wynter was one of the predominant figures in a Jamaican (and, more broadly, Anglo‑creole Caribbean) intellectual generation, whose work had been formative for my evolving sense of the theoretical languages of postcolonial criticism. This is how I’d come to her—feeling my way through the debates about Jamaica’s cultural‑political sovereignty.