Archipelagos 2.0. – Online-Archive and Cultural Memory in the Caribbean

Prof. Dr. Miriam Lay Brander

 

The question of the impact digital media have on cultural memory is among the most pressing issues in the cultural debate of our time. This contribution to the debate aims to pursue two goals in particular:

1) A theoretical approach to the current shift towards online memory practices in ethnically heterogeneous postcolonial communities, where questions of digital memory have so far received little attention.

2) An investigation into the increasing significance of structured online-databases as well as responses to them in social media regarding enacting and valorising cultural memory. This approach is based on a corpus of online-archives, which will provide information on mechanisms of selection, transcoding, storage and online circulation of material on the respective societies’ past and heritage.

Informed by current approaches from digital memory studies, this project aims to investigate the interplay between the material components of online-archives and their social dimension in processes of memory making. It takes as its focus the exemplary case of the Caribbean, which has been a ‘laboratory of globalization’ for centuries due to the region’s long history of massive (forced) migration and the subsequently high cultural diversity. The analysis of multimodal and hypermodal structures of content on Caribbean history and heritage in the Internet will shed light on the largely underexamined relation between cultural memory and digitisation in the Caribbean and provide a first account of how digital archives shape the relation of multiethnic, postcolonial societies with their fragmented history and heritage.