Notes on Kevin, Adonis Browne, "A Douen Epistemology"

Browne, Kevin Adonis. “A Douen Epistemology: Caribbean Memory and the Digital Archive.” College English, vol. 84, no. 1, 2021, pp. 33–57. 

This was a challenging read, and I'm not sure I can do justice to it. Browne is reflecting, at one level, on the Caribbean Memory Project, a digital archive of cultural history that he developed. But he is also reflecting on the role of memory in the making of pasts and futures for Caribbeanness. These two points intertwine when he speaks of the digital archive's "'projection of Caribbean memory'" as "a statement of rhetorical intentionality that takes as its major premise an idea of Caribbeanness that seeks to transcend temporal, spatial, situational, and technical boundaries" (38). He admits that the outcome of this project is "indeterminate," but at the same time, he sees the "indeterminacy" as "hold[ing] the greatest possibility for Caribbean activity projected from memory into the future" (39). 

Toward the end, he argues that "practitioners" of decolonization drop the language of "de-colonization" because, he says, 

[a]ny discourse that shares its etymological or epistemological roots with the discourse it means to undo is destined to reify the original and undermine itself--its legitimacy will always be circumscribed by the logics of the definitive context, rather than emerge out of the struggle to craft new (or revive old) language for what is currently being done, observed, shared, consumed, and studied, as the case may be. (55-6)

He goes on to say that we need to try to find language that fits "our unique purpose" (56), rather than simply react/respond to previous ideological discourses.  

There's a lot more going on in this article than I'm able to write about in a "summary." I realize, for example, that I haven't discussed Browne's use of the Douen, which he describes as a character from Caribbean folklore that is "the restless spirit of an unbaptized child" (40). I actually tried to write something about it, but I found myself getting more confused. I'll come back to this post after we've discussed the article in our group. My apologies for not doing it justice at this point.