Internet and the Culture Wars: Caribbean Literary/Cultural Studies in Cyberspace

Abstract

Caribbean cultural studies is a vast area of investigation. Arguably, it is defined by the body of work in a range of disciplines such as history, sociology, literature, linguistics, politics, and economics, but also in law and pure and applied science. Caribbean academics, as well as foreign academics writing about the Caribbean, have for a long time concerned themselves with the role that culture plays in the formation of Caribbean place and space. Cultural studies as an institutional practice was a much later phenomenon. When the Birmingham cultural studies program was being put to rest in the 1990s, the University of the West Indies’ Cultural Studies Initiative was being set up. Of course, Caribbean academics were already participating in the global debates that define cultural studies. Caribbean studies scholars conducted discourses and published texts on a range of subjects, including folklore, customs and traditions, sports, communication and communications, literature and writing, music, leisure, politics, subcultures, deviance, the environment, built environment, religion, and more. Although there might be the temptation to suggest that Caribbean cultural studies developed in the shadow of Anglo-American cultural studies, a more careful examination might suggest that not all Caribbean thinkers were influenced heavily by the formal cultural studies movement in the West.