Radio Haiti: Constructing a Sonic Archive

In this presentation I will discuss a project being undertaken at Duke University, in close collaboration with Michèle Montas, to digitize the archives of Radio Haiti and make them available to a broad public within Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora. The archives of Radio Haiti comprise around 3000 tapes, recorded from the late 1970s through the early 2000s, which were recently donated by Montas to Duke University Libraries and are in the process of being digitized. This offers us a remarkable opportunity to create a sonic archive, in French and Haitian Creole, which because of its form could potentially be accessible to a very large portion of the Haitian public. My presentation will explore how we are grappling with question of how to categorize, curate, present and share these materials in order to use this archive to contribute to contemporary discussions about the Haitian past and present. I’ll present an early version of a web page we are developing, discuss some of the methodological and theoretical questions we have confronted in doing this work in order raise some broader questions about the politics of knowledge and the interpretive challenges surrounding the emergence space and possibilities of the Caribbean Digital. I will present the platform in a digital “poster board” format.