Cuban New Media Literature, Database Aesthetics, and the Novela-Paquete in Jorge E. Lage’s Archivo

Abstract:This article focuses on how Jorge E. Lage represents the tension between Cuban national archives and everyday memory as it relates to digital practices in his novel Archivo (2015). I analyze how digital practices mediate several forms of citizenship and unveil Cuban subjectivities that remain at the margins of the nation. I also use Lage’s work to theorize key concepts of contemporary Caribbean literary and new media studies such as the novela-paquete and new media literature. In this way, I propose new vocabulary for both disciplines applicable to contexts outside of the US digital hegemony. I see the intersection of the two disciplines as a site for generating anti-colonial knowledge in Caribbean cultural studies. I conclude that, by dialoguing with online and offline Cuban alternative archives, Lage suggests that national archives can be scrutinized and altered via fiction that engages with new media as an experimental literary form in the twenty-first century.