The digital Creole

Abstract

This article argues that the Creole is, at once, both a technological construct of the plantation economies of the colonized Atlantic world and a moment of interpretation, constantly negotiating time, place, and interpellations. By placing the Creole identity firmly without the borders of either racial or biological classification, this position works toward an understanding of the new social constructions afforded by the new world of online spaces. Centring the Caribbean as the engine of modernity – the New World – and referencing the role it has played in what we have come to know as cultural studies through the work of Stuart Hall, I argue that the new world of online spaces is analogous to the region in this moment – a thirdspace of limitless possibilities – and offer the logic of the digital Creole as a means of unravelling what it means to exist in a digital world.