Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) brings together a wide range of digitized texts, manuscripts, and images from the pre-20th century Caribbean and provides an interactive digital scholarly lab for the collaborative study of these materials. Fractured and dispersed by a history of imperialism, the archives of the early Caribbean are re-collected in the ECDA and re-networked in relation to Caribbean-centered rather than European imperial geopolitics and culture. By reaching into the colonial archive and retrieving interpolated and embedded voices of enslaved diasporic Africans, and by visualizing the relations among Caribbean peoples, texts, and commodities, the ECDA aims to use the recombinatory power of the digital archive to produce new knowledge of the past.