The Global African/Caribbean Literary Landscape
Carole Boyce Davies (Cornell University), V. Emma Kioko (Cornell University)

To date, no comprehensive and open digital resource has attempted to map the genealogic topographies of the Caribbean literary tradition. The Global African/Caribbean Literary Landscape project provides the means to accomplish this. Originally rooted in a longstanding project to track the global African literary tradition, the project utilizes an open digital platform in order to facilitate broad scholarly and pedagogical engagement with African and Caribbean literary histories relationally. The most recent version of the project identifies and tracks pivotal African, Caribbean, and African-American works of literature (with plans to add Afro-Brazilian literature in the near future) starting in the 1700s and ending in the 1990s. The beta site will be up beginning Fall 2018 and will allow visitors to view works by geographic region and in connection with works from across the African diaspora from 1700 to the contemporary with the aim of being consistently updated based on the appearance of new works. We envision the site as a tool for both research and teaching; the platform will be a living document that encourages visitors to suggest and request additions. Most importantly, this multimedia presentation will seek to begin a conversation with fellow Caribbean Digital participants in order to introduce the beta site and discuss how this project might be most effective and useful for scholars and students interested in engaging with Caribbean literary history.

The Library of Glissant Studies
Jeanne Jégousso (Louisiana State University), Emily O’Dell (Louisiana State University)

Created by Jeanne Jégousso and Raphaël Lauro in 2017, the Library of Glissant Studies (LoGS) is an open access, multilingual database dedicated to making texts by and about the Martinican author Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) accessible and widely available. The objective of the project is to centralize information on Glissant’s work and thought in an open access website, linked to multiple physical and digital archives which contain his manuscripts as well as other printed and multi-media materials. The intention is to make references and resources on and by Édouard Glissant, in any language, available on one digital platform. At the “The Digital Caribbean”, the founder and webmaster, Jeanne Jégousso, and one of the project collaborators, Emily O’Dell, will present the pilot site and explain the history of the project, its aims, and some of the challenges that arose during the first year: how can we create a digital platform that respects the philosophy and aesthetic of the author? How do we unite scholars around a multilingual project that relies first and foremost on collaborative research? Thanks to the inclusion of multimedia formats (texts, audio, and video materials, photography, websites and blogs, etc.) as well as printed material and digitized documents, we believe that the presentation of this project will stimulate further research, interpretation, and collaboration.

A Glimpse of Delis Negrón’s Contributions Through his Digital Archive
Sylvia Fernández (University of Houston), Annette Zapata (University of Houston)

The preservation of the physical archive of Delis Negrón and the creation of its digital archive is a project that captures the life and legacy, personal and professional, of the Puerto Rican Delis Negrón. Born in 1901, Negrón immigrated to New York at age 16 and in 1917 he joined the US Army. During his residence in the southern United States and in Mexico City in the mid-twentieth century, Negrón served as director, editor, poet, writer and activist. The physical archive contains family photographs, poems, newspaper clippings, manuscripts, correspondence and handwritten notes. The transfer to a digital platform allows access to material in English and Spanish, videos, transcriptions, among other interactive features of the material. The goal of the project is to create not only access to a particular history of immigration but also, in a broader context, contribute to the reconstruction of the intellectual history of Puerto Ricans and their contribution to the political, cultural and social contingency of the United States and other Latin American countries. Likewise, with the incorporation of digital technologies, the traditional ways of working with the archive are limited, and alternative spaces are created to facilitate access to material that has been excluded or has been torn apart. This is in order to incorporate new interpretations of (im)migration and expand the understanding of the continuous transnational relations that influence the history and culture of the Caribbean diaspora.