• “‘Jane Irie’ Is Her Avatar”: Uploading Brontë and Rhys in the Digital Age of Jamaica.
    Isis Semaj-Hall (University of the West Indies, Mona)
  • Engaging the Digital in the Classroom: Beta Tests, Trial Runs and Guinea Pigs.
    Robin Brooks (University of Pittsburgh)
  • Caribbean Poverty/Education.
    Benjamin Branch (University of West Indies, Mona), Ms. Jamillah Scott-Branch (North Carolina Central University)
  • Moderator: Tzarina T. Prater (Bentley University)


“‘Jane Irie’ Is Her Avatar”: Uploading Brontë and Rhys in the Digital Age of Jamaica
Isis Semaj-Hall (University of the West Indies, Mona)

Uploading a file to the internet means creating and sharing a part of the self with the world. And in the Caribbean, access to the internet functions as a passport to places beyond the borders of a small island. Yet there is little scholarship on Caribbean digital media use. In this digital age, the frequency with which we construct and upload avatars of ourselves for online use makes us poised to relate to and analyze identity complexities. Thinking specifically about Charlotte Brontë’s and Jean Rhys’s literary works, respectively, gender and race complexities rise to the surface. Having recently taught Brontë and Rhys’s literature to university students in Jamaica, I created a unique platform for non-white students to boldly ‘upload’ themselves into white women’s constructed understandings of the 19th century Caribbean. Framed by Bahktin (1981), Hargreaves, Miell, and McDonald (2002), Nakamura (2008), and Morrison (2016), this paper presents a pedagogical recommendation for the use of digital media in Caribbean humanities programs. By examining how students used digital-thinking to create their own contemporary access to what would otherwise have been for them sterile 19th century historical fiction, I consider the influence of Bajan icon Rihanna, Afrofuturist African American singer Solange, English balladeer Adele, as well as social media apps like Instagram and Tinder on Jamaican students’ critical approach to the characters Bertha and Antoinette. This paper, therefore, argues that 19th century white women’s fiction becomes uniquely accessible to Caribbean literary scholars through the reflective digital borderlessness of social media and music media.

Engaging the Digital in the Classroom: Beta Tests, Trial Runs and Guinea Pigs
Robin Brooks (University of Pittsburgh)

The growing field of digital humanities has opened a multitude of possibilities to help us shape our students into culturally competent global citizens by diversifying our pedagogical practices. Despite lacking sophisticated tech-savvy skills, I am learning, through trial and error, how to incorporate media technologies into my courses. This presentation highlights my experience with using digital technologies in traditional undergraduate literature courses in order to address different learning styles, build critical thinking skills, facilitate “broad engagement, communication, and accessibility” to the Caribbean, and underscore connections between literary analyses of fiction and poetry and the real world. In particular, I will focus on ways I illuminate Tanya Shirley’s poetry in The Merchant of Feathers and Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey. Teaching guides within the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), YouTube, specific videos and music allow me to invoke discussions such as language, crime, police, death, poverty, family relationships, youth and educational inequalities in these texts. Discouraging students from seeing Caribbean nations as distant places, these tools assist students with placing “others and elsewhere in relentless relation,” emphasizing commonalities with their personal experiences. Continued discussions of everyday, hands-on experiences with digital technologies inside the classroom is a necessity if we are committed to increasing the knowledge of instructors and students concerning DH methods and practices. Being cognizant of the practicality or practical use of digital technology for teaching literature courses can enhance students’ overall learning, ultimately.

Caribbean Poverty/Education
Benjamin Branch (University of West Indies, Mona), Ms. Jamillah Scott-Branch (North Carolina Central University)

This effort addresses Caribbean poverty and education using a digital humanity and interdisciplinary framework based from crowdsourced resources. Partners, UWI, Mona Campus, North Carolina Central University; Shepard Library, and Aalto University; Library and Learning Centre are engaged in formulating digital humanity workflow that can be best coupled with open educational resources and open access journal efforts. Such design may offer universities a cost effective method of sustainable digital humanities and interdisciplinary learning that intentionally interacts with social issues. We intended to diagram an international data workflow and local Caribbean workflow that may lead social impact and related policy considerations in the Caribbean. The heart of this effort involves public, outreach and special projects synergy directed towards poverty and education issues with Caribbean youth to promote a healthy global viewpoint of lifelong possibilities. Our goal is create a digital impact of youth participants who brainstorm and collectively attempt to remedy effects of poverty and education with collaboration resources.