This work examines Salt & Aloes, a digital humanities project created in 2020 and dedicated to the study and circulation of Caribbean material culture. At its core, the project was developed to address the silences and distortions embedded within colonial archives by experimenting with digital platforms as alternative spaces for knowledge production. Through Salt & Aloes, I argue that digital humanities tools hold extraordinary potential for Caribbean scholarship, but that the development of these platforms is often limited by systemic challenges of cost, colonial infrastructure, and institutional gatekeeping. In this sense, projects like Salt & Aloes embody a form of fugitivity, created outside academic institutions, improvised with limited resources, and sustained through networks of creativity and community engagement. Fugitivity here does not signify escape alone but rather a tactical engagement with restrictive structures; finding ways to thrive at the margins of formal scholarly practice while disrupting the logics that limit a plural and emergent telling of Caribbean histories.

Salt & Aloes began with an experimental impulse, through an initial investigation of a single object: the planter’s chair. During a 2011 performance at the Whim Plantation and Museum in St. Croix staged by the artist La Vaughn Belle, participants were invited to pose with a chair from the collection, an artifact whose design was historically bound to the authority of European planters and the imperial projects of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The resulting series of polaroids revealed varying tensions that this act of sitting elicited. Some poses demonstrated a comfort or willingness to take control of the object, while others revealed what read as more of a hesitation to do so. Together, the images documented each sitter’s struggle or surrender to the power embedded in the chair’s history. This performance articulated the ways in which material culture has mediated power and memory and ultimately became a catalyst for the creation of Salt & Aloes.

The study of objects and material culture in, of and from the Caribbean has historically been compromised by the fragmentary legacies of colonization. Propagandistic Eurocentric documentation and archival practices systematically perpetuated racist ideologies, and flattened the complex, layered meanings of material objects, erasing the lived experiences that surrounded them. These practices have included the use of cataloguing systems and descriptions that reinforce epistemological violence, privileging the histories of European colonizers, and marginalizing or erasing the voices and experiences of colonized or racialized peoples. Such gaps are not merely absences but deliberate forms of suppression: a refusal to record indigenous knowledge systems, a distortion of African contributions, and an imposition of European interpretive frameworks.

Faced with the uneven terrain of an incomplete and unreliable archive, artists, activists, and cultural practitioners have employed alternative tools, design radical systems, or themselves created speculative renderings of life (past, present, or future) to imagine and reclaim what had been lost or erased. In these efforts, digital platforms have emerged as sites of decentralized, accessible, user-centric engagement, enabling greater experimentation in meaning-making and narrative recovery. Artist Rodell Warner’s use of AI exemplifies the turn toward alternative archival engagement with his series Artificial Archive, which employs text-to-image AI generators to critically intervene in the Caribbean photographic archive. Warner digitally colorizes and animates nineteenth-century photographs of Black and Brown Caribbean subjects, blending archival images with digital animation to challenge and subvert the colonial and anthropological narratives that have historically shaped these representations. His ongoing work raises important questions about the reliability of visual archives and invites viewers to reconsider what Caribbean history and identity might look like when reimagined through modern tools.

Despite the possibilities of existing technology, the original iteration of Salt & Aloes was strikingly modest: a stream of Instagram posts featuring archival images, some descriptive text and minimal context or metadata. Though these early posts lacked extensive historical background or thoroughly rigorous research, they were fundamentally driven by critical questions around the trustworthiness of Caribbean’s visual identity. What did the Caribbean truly look like? How have colonial histories shaped the recognition and representation of the region? And how do the images and objects from the past — products of colonial encounter, economic exploitation, and racialized power — filter into contemporary Caribbean visual culture and identity?

In addition to modern images of traditional design, such as the planter’s chair, some of the earliest entries for the project included photographs by American travel writer Harry A. Franck. These posed studio portraits of indentured laborers, and candid snapshots of what was purported to be everyday Caribbean life were among the digital collection held by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. These posts were far from a traditional archive but represented the project’s fugitive beginnings; a curiosity, experimentation, and a purposeful refusal to presuppose an object’s inherited story. In so doing, this experimentation opened a space of exploratory representation, inviting viewers to ask how Caribbean visual identities are shaped by the legacies embedded in such images. From the sixteenth century onward, Caribbean visual culture was deeply shaped by European colonial agendas. Maps, paintings, botanical illustrations, and early photographs served imperial interests by portraying tropical landscapes, enslaved and indentured laborers, and Indigenous peoples through Eurocentric and often racialized perspectives; a visual language in which Franck represented a newer generation of Western imagination. These images reinforced the structures of plantation economy, racial hierarchy, and colonial domination, functioning as ideological tools in the construction of empire.

Yet, both within and in opposition to these dominant visual regimes, Caribbean peoples and artists have continually contested, adapted, and reimagined inherited representations. Edna Manley of Jamaica (1897–1987), Hector Hyppolite of Haiti (1894–1948), and Althea McNish of Trinidad and Tobago (1924–2020) are among the visual artists who actively challenged colonial legacies by reclaiming African diasporic heritage, integrating local cultural symbols, and redefining Caribbean identity. Beyond individual practices, artist collectives like the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), founded in London in 1966 and active through the early 1970s, created an inclusive forum for Caribbean writers, visual artists, and intellectuals to collectively redefine Caribbean identity and culture. CAM’s efforts expanded cultural production beyond colonial narratives and forged connections between West Indian migrants and Black British communities, significantly shaping Caribbean arts and cultural discourse during a period of political and social change. More recently, digital humanists have revived the practice of crafting maps with extensive historical data beyond mere geography. This resurgence of “thick-mapping” integrates additional layers of information into contemporary network constructions, thereby enhancing and challenging traditional spatial and cultural representations. By embedding these interactive layers, researchers explore the nuanced conveyance of meaning through maps, highlighting how both detailed and conventional symbols can influence and reflect perceptions of the world. This methodology enables spatial historians to reexamine fundamental analytical categories such as race, gender, class, and state power, using them as lenses to study the physical and dynamic aspects of historical environments. A notable example of this approach is Vincent Brown's work on visualizing and analyzing slave revolts in Jamaica during the early modern Atlantic period (134–141).

The early Salt & Aloes posts, though admittedly clumsy and undefined, offered a provisional gesture within a modern decolonial project. What would emerge over time, and through much trial and error, was a reorientation toward the multiple, evolving visualities through which Caribbean identity is produced and experienced. Eventually, the language included with the images began to invite reflection on the colonial ways of seeing that remain codified in contemporary culture and challenged viewers to imagine the Caribbean as a site of ongoing cultural production rather than fixed stereotype or object of colonial display. This approach is aligned with important and emerging efforts both practical and theoretical that seek to decolonize Caribbean archives by embracing multi-vocal, situated histories marked by complexity, fragmentation, and emergent narratives.In advocating for archival justice scholars Hazel V. Carby calls for archives themselves to acknowledge alternative modes of knowledge production and representation that go beyond written documents to include embodied memory, ritual, and vernacular histories, essential for communities historically excluded from official narratives. Tina Campt’s work on refusal and visual captivity further adds to these challenges to traditional archival practices by arguing for affective and embodied engagements with materials, urging that archives be sites of contested engagement and ethical negotiation. This emphasis on the “messiness” of this work, the transparency, vulnerability, and openness to correction, became an essential point of growth for Salt & Aloes as the project embarked on the experimental work of remixing and reassembling archival materials through digital methodologies. Aljoe and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) exists as an example of an open-access resource for early Caribbean materials which, importantly, “engages specific modes of remixing that characterize contemporary Caribbean art and music to present the material anew” (Sinanan, 153–156). Rather than resisting this messiness, this work centers on iterative, non-linear modes of knowledge production that embrace fragmentation and multiplicity, promoting participatory and equitable archival practices.

Building on this experimental and iterative approach, initiatives such as the Caribbean Memory Project similarly work to empower diasporic communities in documenting and preserving their own histories through oral storytelling, family archives, and public dialogue. These efforts reposition archival authority away from colonial state and institutional control toward community-rooted custodianship. In parallel, the Jamaica Memory Bank has expanded archival practices by incorporating audiovisual collections and community-curated exhibitions, further emphasizing participatory and decentralized models of cultural preservation. Together, these theoretical frameworks and practical projects compel archival practice in the Caribbean to move beyond static repositories and toward dynamic, participatory, and decolonial spaces, offering useful models for projects like Salt & Aloes that foreground plurality, situatedness, and continuous re-imagination within Caribbean histories.

Still, throughout the life of this project, Salt & Aloes has been shaped by significant structural barriers that limit Caribbean scholars' use of digital humanities tools and training. Grassroots digital projects like this frequently embody "people-first" approaches valuing relationality, human-centered production, and iterative collaboration rather than polished products or institutional metrics, yet these models struggle for recognition and financial sustainability (Meneses and Furuta, 5). As described by Marisa Parham in her discussion of digital humanities discovery, the challenges inhibiting visibility, sustained funding, and institutional support for digital scholarship are compounded in and for marginalized regions and where social infrastructure for DH remains emergent (333).

Within this, alternative projects like Salt & Aloes exist as acts of digital marronage; employing a kind of creative survival and insurgency amid precarity. Emerging entities such as the Digital Caribbean Research Institute seek to build regional capacity despite persistent funding instability and tensions between global platform standards and local epistemologies. Similarly, the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute (CDSsi) represents a partial but important intervention in centering Caribbean contexts within digital training and scholarship. For participants of this program, myself included, the institute underscored how pedagogical practices in digital humanities must thoughtfully reckon with the constraints and possibilities intrinsic to postcolonial realities. Unlike many traditional digital humanities programs that often presume uninterrupted access to infrastructure and standardized norms, the CDSsi recognized the complex landscape where Caribbean scholars navigate funding precarity, technological scarcity, linguistic diversity, and diasporic dispersal. Fugitivity as an analytic and praxis may be expressed as independent, community-driven projects precisely because they strategically slip through institutional cracks, leveraging provisional digital platforms and collaborative networks to imagine and enact more liberatory modalities of archiving, mapping, and storytelling.