Refashioning Caribbean Literary Pedagogy in the Digital Age

Abstract

Our critical momentDIGITAL TECHNOLOGY HAS MADE THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY a critical moment of opportunity but also of responsibility for scholars of Caribbean literature. Digital archives and recent reprints have provided access to Caribbean literary texts dating back to the nineteenth century and, thus, have supported a paradigm-shifting expansion of the corpus of Caribbean literature commonly taught and studied. Further, historical newspapers, photographs, memoirs and postcards from the region are being digitised - many are available open-access to the public. These archival materials illuminate the significance this literature held in its original political, social and cultural contexts, and shed light as well on its aesthetics. Further, digital technology is providing new means of analysing literature (such as visualisation and data mining), of presenting literary scholarship (such as curated digital exhibits and websites), and of teaching (online and hybrid courses). Together, these have the promise of bridging institutional and geographic barriers, enabling us to teach and research this expanded body of Caribbean literature in a collaborative interdisciplinary and international digital space.Paradoxically, digital technology is also reproducing colonial hierarchy and marginalising Caribbean literature. Digitising archival materials has the potential both to reproduce and to redress gaps and biases of colonial archives. A similar paradox pertains to digital technology. US government and corporate entities dominate the administration of the internet and an Anglo-American 'technocultural bias' shapes its language, services, and instruments. Anglo-American scholars and institutions dominate digital humanities as well.1 US and British authors, particularly white ones, have a strong web presence and large-scale digital archives and scholarly editions dedicated to them. By contrast, Caribbean authors lack such digital humanities projects, and the resulting marginal position of Caribbean literature on the internet threatens its ability to endure.2 Alex Gil argues compellingly that if Caribbean literature is not made digitally accessible, and if few scholarly editions exist and little digital scholarship, Caribbean authors are at risk of disappearing in the digital age.3Thus, as it opens new horizons, the digital age places significant responsibility on scholars to redress the marginalisation of Caribbean literature and to ensure its future. This article describes how one group of scholars, librarians and students - in the United States and the Caribbean - collaboratively designed a course that began to address this challenge. It is also an invitation to join us in building on that project to create an open-access teaching and research commons to sustain Caribbean literature through and beyond the twenty-first century.Teaching with the archiveWhen a small group of scholars started to plan the course in 2012 we had more modest goals. I taught at the University of the Florida which served as the technological hub for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and since 2007 had helped to build its collection in Anglophone Caribbean literature. Established in 2004, dLOC (www.dloc.com) is an open-access, non-profit, international partnership of over forty libraries, archives, universities and NGOS in the Caribbean, US, and Europe that houses Caribbean library and archival materials with the goals of preservation and access - and the inclusion of Caribbean materials in school and university curricula. As a non-commercial and nonexclusive association, dLOC facilitates collaboration with multiple institutions and works to provide a socio-technical infrastructure for Caribbean studies.In 2012, dLOC had amassed a significant collection of early Anglophone Caribbean literature and cultural journals, including the early poetry of Claude McKay and Una Marson, nearly all of Herbert de Lisser's oeuvre, the Jamaica Journal, Kyk-Over-Al, and Tapia. …