Folsom reminds us of the inherent excess haunting both database and narrative: each requires a perpetual eclipsing of an out-thereness; a map of infinite possibilities that can only be illuminated one at a time, emerging from thresholds like phantoms. If databases provide bits and pieces rendered visible by a series of choices; narratives are the aggregate giving those choices fleeting, imperfect form—an illusory whole whose authority depends upon consensus. This lends force to Browne’s “douen epistemology,” an “illegitimate” way of (un)seeing anchored in Caribbean rhetorics, that crafts, in digital environments, a banished “ethos that can flourish outside of and beyond the perimeter of a province that is either surveilled or vacated by a master of some kind” (47-8)—which I take to mean categories of recognition, in their myriad, (im)material forms.
Browne ultimately calls for narratives that find sanctuary in “symbolic wilderness,” where they might dwell with “that which haunts” (46). I feel that such wilderness grows thick at the interface between database and narrative, where the singularity of colonized visions explode/implode into endless constellations of relational and referential possibilities. (183) [JZ-05]
[Folsom, 2007; Browne, 2021; Stabile and Linderman, 2012]
Finding Form in Digital Wilderness: A Decolonial, Douen’s Pursuit?

One thought on “Finding Form in Digital Wilderness: A Decolonial, Douen’s Pursuit?”
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I’m so glad you brought this work into the blog, Jenna, not only because the douen is such a fascinating figure, and Douen epistemology such an interesting way to extend the figure into related cultural rhetorics and worldviews, but also because the mixed-directional features of the Douen (i.e., backwards feet) have pushed me to think in new ways about the combined concepts of thresholds, or cross-over points (sort of like doorways, but not always so neatly rectangular or open/closeable) and this linking “and” between narrative and database. At the end of Hyperculture (which, unfortunately, we didn’t read to p. 82 in this iteration of ENGL6344) draws on Handke and Heidegger, and ends with a note about how, when you can feel the sorrow of thresholds, you are no longer a tourist. Something in this hints at feeling the sorrow of between-ness offers possibilities for not sporting a Hawaiian shirt (or not with indifference, anyway).