Kamau Brathwaite

Abstract This chapter discusses Caribbean poet and scholar (Edward) Kamau Brathwaite and his experiments with word processing in the 1980s on a series of personal computers. The chapter notes the challenges of narrating the history of Caribbean computer history, before engaging with theories of the black archive and racialized data to argue that Caribbean computing experienced its own process of creolization. This chapter draws upon archival discoveries and an expanding body of scholarship on the Digital Caribbean to attend to the specifics of the computing culture in which Brathwaite was enmeshed. It argues that Brathwaite conceived of his word processing activities and resulting ‘SycoraX aesthetics’ as a means of decolonizing the modernist literary project.