Archival geometries: virtual pasts and subaltern futures in Caribbean digital art

This essay examines how M. NourbeSe Philip's 2008 poetry collection, Zong!, and Roshini Kempadoo's 2004 multimedia installation, Ghosting, draw on the poetic affordances of digital media to undermine the coloniality of official archives. Philip and Kempadoo, I demonstrate, read colonial and national archives as notational diagrams, following patterns of marks rather than of semantic meaning. They progressively distort these diagrams through the geometric operations of transposition and projection, until the fragmented speech of black women inhabiting the archives is made visible. They do not make this speech visible in the present as much as they produce an opening to a future in which it can manifest itself. I draw on Philip and Kempadoo's digital experiments to theorise the notion of a subaltern archive - an archive of the virtual, of the not yet archivable. These artists, I argue, add medium specificity to Gayatri Spivak's original thesis on the subaltern: the subaltern woman in post/colonial archives cannot be read as text. Her agency can still be figured through the geometric, visual transformation of archival fragments.