The Creole Web A Dasein for Digital Culture

Abstract

The creole is at once both a technological construct and a moment of interpretation, constantly negotiating time, place, and interpellations. As a product of the Terra Incognita of the New World, the original space of diaspora, of diversity, and of difference - the importance of Being is paramount in the construct of the creole, as is the locating of self in place. Situated in Trinidad, the larger island of the twin-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, that sits at the very foot of the archipelagic Caribbean; and in which every ethnic group can claim minority status, I demonstrate that its polyculturalism; of which creolization is a manifest example; accounts for the roles of place and space and the negotiations of identity intrinsic in such societies. In Trinidad French Creole there are three verbs to be, which each serve a different function, signifying this complexity. I argue that these forms of capturing the existential nature of life demonstrate the conscious importance of being-in –the – world for the creole. As such this project constructs the creole not as the analogue, progenitor or product of hybridity; but rather as the named, constructed technological product in whose being is indicated the primacy of the present moment, which is neither an effect of the past nor a cause of the future. Leveraging Hall’s observation on the genesis of creole identity as dependent on four metaphorical presences présence Africaine, présence Européene, présence Indienne and présence Americain which in turn combined into the technologies of creation constructed on the tabula rasa of the New World; against Heidegger’s construct of the dasein - the being for whom the question of being is important, the being for whom Being matters; this project uses the construct of the creole as a technological product of place through which the world is both filtered and newly constructed. Structured around three case studies that allow for specific claims to be made about the nature of Being as constructed through digital media practice, and to make broader claims about creole identity and ontology; each of the chapters makes use of varied qualitative methods including ethnographic interviews with media producers and users, critical analyses of society, participant observation, close readings of media texts and the discourses surrounding them, and insights from a range of disciplines including Media and Cultural Studies, African American and Diasporic Studies, Critical Race and Postcolonial Theory, Philosophy, Linguistics, and History. By constructing the creole, rooted in the Latin creare as the primary technological product of the global political economy of the Age of Empire created by language, collective memory and place – the Terra Incognita of the Americas; and offering this identity as both lens and method; this project offers a new understanding of the personal and social constructions afforded by the New World of online spaces as people continue to negotiate the intricacies of time, place, and interpellations in such unmapped or unknown spaces.