Caribbean Memory Project

The Caribbean Memory Project (CMP) is the Caribbean’s first crowd-sourced cultural heritage research platform. It is designed to activate and engage the memory of cultural heritage among a mixed audience and to aid in counteracting the effects of erasure and forgetting occurring in a growing number of contemporary Caribbean communities. The CMP is motivated by enduring questions of citizenship and its related responsibilities—to a family, a community, a country—which are central to the conceptualization and sustainable enactment of Caribbean identity.  The CMP’s foundational questions include: 

• What can Caribbean people can do with their heritage, and the knowledge, texts, locations, and other tangible objects they produce as a consequence of belonging?
• How does technology—digitization, in particular—enable a more robust interpretation, understanding, and articulation of Caribbean identity for communities that have not traditionally used technology for the purpose of self-definition?
• How do these communities integrate digital technology with other forms in their day to day lives?
• How does technology facilitate outreach in local, national, regional, and international contexts?
• How does mobile technology provide access and materials to communities that lack the resources for digitization and distribution?
• What are the greatest impediments to the exploration of heritage and other modes in digital contexts, particularly with regard to the intersections of rhetoric with related arts (aesthetics, poetics, philosophy, and politics), as well as their differences?

Since launching The CMP in 2014, we have identified, acquired, processed, and interacted with various archives via our Mobile Archiving Service. We have also devised a comprehensive, long-term strategy in education, entrepreneurship, and social engagement (described in our Phase II and III objectives) for addressing the possibilities, implications, and material effects of heritage and citizenship.

The CMP functions as a public repository for texts—family archives, collections, found/discarded materials, and public databases—that begins to illustrate the range of documentary activity produced by (and about) Caribbean people and their descendants. Participants and the general public have direct and open access to this heritage database that may  be used for reflection, education, and research into the social histories of indigenous, native, and naturalized communities by local, regional, and transnational parties.