| This dissertation is a study of the borderlines, points of contact, and clashes between First World technoculture and Third and Fourth World ways of life; I call this space of oscillation, articulation and disarticulation the Fifth World. With the Second World's alternatives all but vanished and the First World in the process of inventing the upcoming Virtual Age, my study concentrates on, although is not limited to, Caribbean and Latin American responses to technology, beginning with technologies and artifacts of text in the works of early twentieth-century Caribbean poets and the postmodern Latin American novel. Finally, my work examines current and future Third World strategies for engaging the digital papyrus of the Internet.;Marshall McLuhan, Homi Bhabha, and Donna Haraway all recognized that hybrid space is capable of releasing tremendous new cultural energy. As McLuhan pointed out, this energy is particularly evident in the intersections between oral and literate cultures. The Fifth World takes place in an intersection of pre-literate, literate and growing post-literate societies which is producing new, highly charged, cultural-political spaces. These hybrid spaces provide new avenues for social communication and growth, but they also create unpredictable combinations like the emerging high-tech tribalism. Postmodern and post-colonial scholars, such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, have called for the invention of "radically new forms" to map the growing complexities of the "global system" and for "a different ethic of intellectual study" based, not in separatism, but in the connectivity of diverse cultural elements that address "the problem of the new." Similarly, human rights activists like Rigoberta Menchu manifest the need for a "new type of education" that can increase the participation of indigenous people in the global dialog. It is from this growing space of "the new" cultural codes of global discourse and the emerging need for alternatives that this study of the Fifth World originates. |
