DH 2018 keynote address: Digital experimentation, courageous citizenship, and Caribbean futurism

The violence and trauma of climate change have arrived. The Caribbean region is the unfortunate recipient of the impacts of climate change and, much like its inheritance of plantation slavery and colonialism, it is left with the infrastructural, social, and cultural pillage of imperial and neocolonial imposition. This article considers whether and how the humanities and digital humanities, in particular, can produce the ideal intersection between planetary responsibility, community accountability, and sustainable living. In this article, I discuss Create Caribbean Research Institute’s digital humanities praxis through the example of the environmental sustainability project, Carisealand. Through the exploration and discussion of theories, tools, methodologies, and praxis of digital humanities applied to the project, I position Caribbean Afrofuturism in the context of contemporary Caribbean digital environments and the lived experience of Caribbean people in the aftermath of climate change. I apply discourses of Afrofuturism to imagine an alternate Caribbean future represented in the redesign, digital imagination, and representation of selected Caribbean communities. By offering models for rethinking, visualizing, and rebuilding physical spaces, I hope to raise questions and offer insights about the power of digital humanities for social and environmental justice in the contemporary and future Caribbean. The goal is to also offer the model as a template for developing other mapping projects that can propose an alternate future for the Global South.