• New World History Now: From a Painful Notion of Time to a Prophetic Vision of the Past
    Gary Wilder (CUNY Graduate Center)
  • Digital Affect and the Remediated Caribbean Literary Aesthetic in Kamau Brathwaite’s Strange Fruit and Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys
    Jarrel De Matas (University of the West Indies, St Augustine)
  • Digital Double: Alternative Media and Counter-Narratives in the work of Warren Le Platte
    Jonathan Felix (Independent Scholar)
  • Moderator: Bryan Wagner (University of California, Berkeley)


  • New World History Now: From a Painful Notion of Time to a Prophetic Vision of the Past
    Gary Wilder (CUNY Graduate Center)

This paper will take up the organizers’ invitation to think metaphorically about links between the digital and Caribbean history or concepts. In it I will try to think “digitally” about Édouard Glissant’s reflections on how New World history has led to a “painful notion of time” among Caribbean communities. Experiences of disjunctive temporality, broken chronologies, and haunting repetitions, Glissant suggests, created the paradoxical opportunity or imperative to develop a “prophetic vision of the past.” Conversely, I will try to think the digital through the optic of these two conceptual formulations. Glissant concluded, and demonstrated, that Caribbean histories could be better approached or grasped through literary fiction, not conventional historiography (which subscribes, however covertly, to a unitary conception of History). In parallel, I will suggest that a must needed approach to world history that is grounded in both New World history and Caribbean intellectuals’ reflections on (New World) history, based on a painful sense of time and a prophetic view of the past, might be usefully understood and possibly pursued in digital terms – in terms of the kind of temporal simultaneity that digital ways of grasping the world might be able to indicate. Speaking as a scholar who has not (yet) undertaken digital projects, I will a. invite dialogue about the digital and Glissant’s refiguration of past and present in these formulations; b. suggest that the extraordinary work in spatial mapping undertaken by the Caribbean Digital group might also be extended to temporal mapping (or unmapping).

  • Digital Affect and the Remediated Caribbean Literary Aesthetic in Kamau Brathwaite’s Strange Fruit and Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys
    Jarrel De Matas (University of the West Indies, St Augustine)

This study explores the ways in which Strange Fruit and As Flies to Whatless Boys help us to understand uniquely perspectival experiences of Caribbean History through literary digitisation. I use the term remediation, offered by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, to indicate those stylistic choices taken by writers to extend their narratives beyond the book-bound page and towards electronic narratives that intersect, interrogate, and complicate its print counterpart. Examining the literary work of Robert Antoni and Kamau Brathwaite, against theories of digital criticism, this study argues that the creative writings provide narratives of changing technoculture that have as much to do with present day technologies, as they do past socio-cultural histories. By contextualising the contemporary permeation of digital technologies, I emphasize the role of remediated representations in effecting a reconceptualised trajectory of Caribbean postcolonial literary criticism which must necessarily respond to the changing aesthetics signalled by writers such as Brathwaite and Antoni.

  • Digital Double: Alternative Media and Counter-Narratives in the work of Warren Le Platte
    Jonathan Felix (Independent Scholar)

Digital spaces hold potential for creative and participatory practices through expressions of Alternative Media, as any cultural ‘prosumption’ (production + consumption) activity which serves communities of interest affected by unequal relations and articulations of power. By employing a visual discourse analysis, this paper is a case study which explores the work of Caribbean creative, Warren Le Platte and his unusual creation of an Internet meme series in 2016. As both a reflexive practice and socio-cultural critique of his home country of Trinidad, Le Platte’s work raises questions regarding the cultural logic which informs the dysfunctional relationship between local institutions and the public they are expected to serve. Le Platte’s work is an example of Double Alternativity – the practice of Culture Jamming reappropriated into a new disruptive form which functions as a participatory and subversive device. Furthermore, Le Platte serves as an example of how Caribbean peoples might reinscribe their identity through reflexive counter-narratives.