Digital Rifts and lIterary Flotsam

A reflexion focused on three central ideas: a. the digital divide. Astounding disparities in access, material available, and the percentage of literary patrimony preserved and digitized. Overview of existing and valuable 21st century collections, including archives such as those of the DLOC that are pan-Caribbean. Nonetheless, focus primarily on Francophone/Creolophone archive, with special consideration of differences between state and private collections for quality and access; b. post-Atlantic geographies and the west-Atlantic Valley. From Québec to the Guyanas, the west Atlantic corridor (like a Silicon Valley), incorporates the diverse axes of the Caribbean archipel and diaspora, with Miami a symbolic, high-speed center for the geographic, cultural and linguistic diversity of the Caribbean. (Continental Drifts). In this West-Atlantic Valley, cultural, postcolonial, interdisciplinary and gender studies have flourished, often because of weak institutional support in the European academy and because of inadequate infrastructural support in Africa. Issues of Caribbean “dissemination;” c. the flotsam. Anarchical half-truths and distorted documentation, badly written and poorly cut-and-pasted in the post-editorial world of the internet, a buzz of social network flotsam: errors in the ubiquitous Wikipedias, plagiarized sources, biased blogs, unpaid and uncorrected journalists, and especially, the disappearance of traditional publishing structures (and editors) with the conglomeration of small editors and the proliferation of self-publishing. Examples.