Infrastructure of Lack: Defining Caribbean Vernacular Networks

Luis Rivera Jiménez

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Résumé (en traduction)

Cet article propose une réflexion théorique sur les formes et les significations des réseaux dans la Caraïbe, en dépassant les définitions traditionnelles ancrées dans l’informatique et les infrastructures formelles. En se tournant vers des modes d’échange vernaculaires, improvisés et culturellement ancrés – comme la culture de « Club Nintendo » et BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) en République dominicaine, les pratiques DIY d’Internet chez les utilisateurs cubains, ainsi que l’omniprésence des mèmes et des fils de conversation WhatsApp au sein des communautés diasporiques – cet article repense le concept de « réseau » à partir d’une perspective caribéenne. Plutôt que de considérer la Caraïbe comme déconnectée ou technologiquement émergente, cette approche conçoit la région comme un espace de création de réseaux créative, stratégique et souvent transgressive.

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Introduction

To begin defining the form and structure of Caribbean vernacular networks, we can pull from two sources of definitions that illustrate the larger structures presented in this essay as two “appropriations” of definition to present a model defined “between ideas.” This use of definition echoes the way that same model exists and operates. We can start our defining from Information Societies and Computer Networks.

Information societies refer broadly to high-tech, economically prosperous service societies, where information technology, as opposed to conventional resources or energy, is the dominant technology. A society is considered an information society if the production, transmission, and manipulation of information have gained substantial economic, cultural, and social importance.^[1] This definition in some ways already situates us outside the Caribbean region, where most states, nations, islands, and colonies are imagined as underdeveloped and economically precarious service or extractive economies.

The word network in English first began to refer to complex interconnected systems of information and resource sharing with direct reference to merchant waterways—an etymology significant for Caribbean poetics, since the first “networks” depended on water—and later to rail systems in the nineteenth century.^[2] Only later does the concept evolve into the computer network, defined as a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smartphones.^[3] To finish this initial braided definition, we must also focus on the physicality behind the network and the information society. Computer networks depend on a now-hidden set of physical topologies—links, nodes, relays—that enable communication between devices. The Wi-Fi in an apartment might appear as an ephemeral wave but depends on a telecommunication cable connected to a modem whose traffic is routed through servers thousands of miles away, with all this information traveling at nearly the speed of light through undersea fiber-optic cables. Information societies are, in some sense, those that have mastered the commercialization, establishment, and management of these infrastructures.^[4] As James Carey reminds us, what we call “technology” very often means technologies that instrumentalize information—apparatuses that gather, sort, manage, and process information so that it can then be used to control other things in the world.^[5]

What I propose as Caribbean Vernacular Networks reframes the global web of Caribbean displacement, diaspora, and migration as a system of communicating nodes: a human network of communication across digital and physical mediums that re-tools existing frameworks and infrastructures of information to center on dialogue, identification, spirituality, and communion. This stands opposed to First World hoarding of personal data and digital information to create matrices of control, algorithmic compliance, and predictive power. The appropriations of the definitions of information societies and computer networks here serve to reconfigure basic political, economic, and cultural binaries of Developed and Underdeveloped, Client vs. Server, First vs. Third World. While the Caribbean is often defined as technologically incipient, such framings ignore the region’s important technological developments, undermine the affective and communicative networks of belonging and identity maintained globally, and center technology only as capital production and labor exploitation, rather than its possibility to serve human needs.^[6]

The Caribbean, through its history and present conditions of displacement, its territoriality as an archipelagic region, and its multilingual, cross-cultural productions, presents itself as a site where “networks” emerge as poetic encounters between the human and the hardware. The will behind development is redirected toward cultural, communicative, and human needs; these create novel and transgressive forms of technological practice that emphasize circulation, exchange, and dialogue rather than the extractive reaping of user data to fuel algorithmic control by the world’s largest companies. Caribbean Vernacular Networks allow us to situate ourselves outside the binary of developed and underdeveloped, exploring what is novel, innovative, and strategic about the ways that information and technology circulate and transform within human networks across the global Caribbean diaspora.

These vernacular networks describe the physical, affective, social, and cultural topologies that sustain a global web of dialogue and exchange among Caribbean people, despite infrastructural scarcity, state surveillance, limited bandwidth, and colonial logics of exclusion and extraction. The lesson is not that these practices survive “in spite of” poverty or lack, but that scarcity itself generates a constitutive force for new forms of relation and innovation. These are not merely “the products of poverty.” Rather, they embody solutions directly tied to the Caribbean reality. Such networks resist and reconfigure colonial narratives and extractive structures, countering the image of the Caribbean as a meteorized, underconnected region divided by language, diaspora, and distance. What this conception fails to see is that the so-called “loose connections” of the Caribbean have in fact evolved for centuries and remain central sources of identification for millions of people across the globe. The systems of communication, exchange, and communal identification developed under colonial domination, infrastructural lack, and global displacement must be understood as important and resilient tools—tools from which we must continue to learn in order to resist ongoing and emerging crises across our peoples.^[7]

Dominican Vernacular Networks

The Dominican Vernacular Networks are some of the least discussed or published, a particularity that deserves its own conversation later on. These are networks I can speak about because I have actively participated in them with my own family, and they have shaped my personal notions of Dominican identity. The ones I will discuss are Club Nintendos, informal businesses that emerged in the 1980s onwards, and the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) craze of the late 2000s and 2010s. Starting with Club Nintendos, we can consider an important aspect of Caribbean networks: asymmetry of access. Instead of assuming the hierarchical reading of access across mobility—the image of success and privilege being shaped by proximity to colonial powers and First Worlds (the visiting cousin bringing back brand-name clothes and toys from his trip to the United States, for example)—we can re-tool this relation to produce something other than envy and inferiority.^[8] Club Nintendos were small, informal businesses usually run by tech-savvy teenagers in converted living rooms or garages, equipped with video game consoles, televisions, and accessories, where playtime could be rented by the hour. The vector of access here was quite clear between infrastructure and mobility.

The closest Club Nintendo to my grandmother's house was a five-minute walk along unpaved roads in Bonao, the largest town in a rural province in the south of the Dominican Republic. My cousin and I would go to play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for a few pesos an hour alongside other children renting their own consoles. Infrastructurally, there were serious limitations around technological access in this and other towns on the island. Some children lived in homes without consistent electrical service, a limitation that reduced the possibility of owning or operating digital and electric appliances; video games and consoles were not readily available in rural communities. For many Dominican children before the 2010s, access to video games happened primarily through Club Nintendos. Mobility here functioned across two registers: mobility “inside and outside,” and technological mobility. The first was tied to family members who could travel between rural and urban centers, or to and from cities in the United States, where appliances and video games were more accessible. The teenager whose relative worked in the United States could acquire a PlayStation 2, which he “owned” and then rented out to others who could not afford one. But what interests me more is technological mobility—the ability to re-think the inside/outside dynamic by navigating existing infrastructures in new ways.^[9]

The Club Nintendo I frequented was not run by someone with mere access to “the outside” but to “the online.” Its teenage owner depended on a family member connected to the internet to support his collection of hacked video game consoles. With some knowledge of English and access to online communities dedicated to “breaking” consoles to play unlicensed games, he and others could provide lateral access to the latest releases. This also enabled access to Latin American versions of games with Spanish-language text and audio that were not region-locked to U.S. consoles. Mobility here was less about possessing infrastructure and more about navigating it. All the Club Nintendos I visited operated with hacked consoles and pirated discs. Piracy opened new relational dynamics: if there was a game you wanted, you could bring or request a cheap copy from the owner. What began as top-down ownership transformed into a relation of information and proficiency. Indeed, my cousin and his brothers now all work in IT and computer systems on the island, shaped by a lifelong engagement with video games and their piracy.^[10]

This mobility to navigate the web intersects with piracy’s communal structure of peer-to-peer sharing and file hosting; to this day, digital communities are devoted to translating video games into languages never planned for by the original companies. In this way, Club Nintendos expanded access through expertise, as those who understood infrastructural conditions exploited their gaps to generate what was missing. The end of expertise here is translation and exchange. As more consoles were hacked, as the communal pool of pirated games expanded, and as more of us learned the hardware we loved, our access grew collectively. These small communities of play presented a radically different version than the technological narrative of the isolated individual before a screen. Expertise and play became collective practices to expand a limited possibility. Limitations of mobility and infrastructure eliminated the possibility of individual ownership but opened avenues of communal building and information sharing to generate another infrastructure and another kind of access.^[11]

The next important node of Dominican vernacular networks emerged alongside the first smartphones and a heated national debate about citizenship and the political role of the diaspora. In 2010, President Leonel Fernández ratified a constitutional change allowing non-resident Dominicans to vote in general elections by mail and allocating seven seats in the Chamber of Deputies to votes cast from abroad.^[12] By 2015, nearly 1.9 million Dominicans were residing in the United States—close to one-fifth of the island’s total population—so this legal shift concretely linked the political fate of the island to communities dispersed across the globe.^[13] Citizenship and belonging were reframed not primarily as territorial categories but as social, human, and circulatory conditions in which displacement and transnational life became central to political life.^[14]

That political reconfiguration coincided with a distinct technological moment. Before WhatsApp’s global ubiquity, cross-border communication remained expensive and awkward: international calls were billed by the minute and SMS packages were limited. Into this landscape arrived the BlackBerry Pearl (2006) and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), the first widely adopted “mobile-first” messaging app designed for device-to-device communication. Marketed as a corporate tool—an executive’s digital calling card, complete with a unique pin—BBM assumed an imagined cosmopolitan, business-class user. What unfolded in the Dominican Republic, however, was the opposite: BBM became a mass vernacular tool for everyday diasporic connection. Mobile carriers sold BBM-only packages that limited other services but provided data for messaging; BlackBerrys proliferated even in rural areas because they solved a pressing need—cheap, real-time contact with relatives and friends abroad.^[15]

This inversion—where a technology designed for corporate mobility was repurposed by non-elite, displaced users—reveals a central feature of Caribbean vernacular networks: they exploit what is already at hand, redirecting tools toward social problems the original designers did not anticipate. The significance of BBM was not merely technological economy (reducing the cost of communication) but political and affective: it created durable channels for intimacy, information exchange, mobilization, and political engagement across distance. Where institutional enfranchisement extended the vote to non-residents, BBM extended civic life into the pockets of diasporic communities; one enabled formal political agency, the other the everyday infrastructures of participation.^[16]

Seen this way, BBM prefigures later network forms—WhatsApp groups, meme threads, audio notes—that mediate diasporic publics across immigrant groups. These vernacular practices are messy, rhythmic, and ephemeral, but they construct infrastructural sovereignty: ad hoc, low-cost, culturally legible systems sustaining political life and cultural circulation under scarcity and displacement. Rather than treating the Caribbean as disconnected, we should read these practices as inventive responses to structural constraints—techniques of repair and relationality that show how networks take shape outside formal infrastructures, reshaping political subjectivities and belonging. Identification and belonging in the Caribbean today cannot be understood outside these expansive networks of meaning and affect across communication lines. This sustains a mode of identity akin to computational networks: dialogue is central. Identity is not a fixed territorial category but a mutable global participation inside a conversation. This conversation happens parallel to official structures of citizenship and to the social, climatic, and political crises that intensify displacement across the Caribbean. This ephemeral network of digital messages and software thus becomes a crucial lens for understanding the conditions that create webs that withstand distance, language, and displacement.^[17]

El Paquete Semanal

The next node worthy of attention on the map of Caribbean vernacular networks is the Cuban offline circulation practice known as El Paquete Semanal (and its equivalents in other constrained contexts). Where BBM addressed the problem of transnational telecommunication between dispersed Dominican families, El Paquete responds to another form of scarcity: restricted access to the open web, limited bandwidth, and state or market barriers that make global internet access partial or expensive for much of the population.^[18] El Paquete is not a web platform; it is a human-powered, physical distribution system: weekly collections of films, series, music, apps, magazines, and local content that circulate on external hard drives, USB sticks, and door-to-door exchange networks. Its logic is both archival and performative: it is composed, commented on, and repaired at the intersection of the technical (copying, compression, packaging) and the social (local vendors, informal curators, consumers who recommend and re-distribute).^[19]

This material arrangement—packages traveling by hand, bus, and shop counter—forces us to rethink “infrastructure” as something more than cabling or institutions. The technologies that sustain El Paquete are hybrid: a blend of cheap hardware, compression skills, and popular curation. Circulation involves practices of selection, translation, and adaptation: informal curators edit, organize, and contextualize material for local audiences, adding subtitles, trimming items, or assembling thematic collections that respond to cultural preferences and needs.^[20] In terms of Caribbean vernacular networks, El Paquete is exemplary because it shows how a community reconfigures available technical vectors to produce an informational infrastructure that carries social, affective, and political meaning.

Politically, the existence and expansion of El Paquete operates in a grey zone: it is not merely mass piracy or a purely mercantile phenomenon; it is also a technology of cultural survival. Where formal access to information, educational tools, and cultural resources is mediated by state restrictions or the global market, these systems create alternative channels for teaching, aesthetic experience, and collective self-representation.^[21] For example, educational and documentary materials circulating in the packages constitute a popular archive that—although informal—has real pedagogical value; likewise, the diffusion of local music and audiovisual productions reinforces cultural circuits that would otherwise be marginalized by industry barriers.^[22] From a decolonial and technology studies perspective, El Paquete demonstrates that communities do more than “use” technology: they remake it. They translate models, rewrite functions, and sustain economies based on the communal exchange of data. It is an instance of what might be called a “hardware of care”: a technical practice not oriented toward data extraction or algorithmic monetization, but toward maintaining networks of affection, memory, and learning.^[23] Thus, the logics organizing El Paquete explicitly contradict the paradigm of extractive platforms; rather than harvesting data to predict and monetize, these systems prioritize availability, resilience, and the rapid circulation of cultural and utilitarian resources.

The affective dimension is central: El Paquete does more than meet instrumental needs; it reproduces rhythms of sociability and anticipation (the weekly arrival of the package resembles the arrival of a monthly magazine or new episode) and establishes communal temporalities of cultural consumption. The popular curation that sustains the package acts as a living record of tastes, censorships, and local resistances: what is included and excluded, how foreign material is “edited,” reveals the cultural vectors that matter to audiences.^[24] In this way, El Paquete is simultaneously repository and cultural laboratory: a site where content is tested, adapted, and reimagined before circulating beyond its immediate circuit. Connecting El Paquete to the nodes already discussed (Club Nintendos, BBM) reveals a broader pattern: across these practices there is a shared logic of inversion and appropriation. Tools designed for other uses—game consoles, corporate software, commercial global content—are transformed by users to meet local priorities: access, pedagogy, affective ties, political participation. That transformation is not merely a technical “hack”; it is an ontological reworking: it redefines what counts as infrastructure, who operates it, and for what ends. In this sense, El Paquete teaches us that the Caribbean’s informational infrastructure is not an absolute absence but an aggregation of creative socio-technical arrangements that embody forms of informational and collective sovereignty.^[25]

Finally, attending to El Paquete and analogous practices across the region compels us to expand our analytic toolkit: we must combine ethnographic methods (interviews with vendors and consumers), technical analysis (how content is packaged and distributed), and political reading (what these circuits mean for citizenship and cultural practice). Only then can we grasp how, from the material to the imaginaries, Caribbean vernacular networks sustain forms of knowledge and solidarity that carry both empirical and theoretical value for thinking about information, memory, and resistance under conditions of precarity.^[26]

Conclusion

This essay has argued that the Caribbean’s information ecologies cannot be rendered intelligible through a narrow vocabulary of cables, servers, and market-driven platforms. Instead, the region’s “networks” must be read as vernacular, improvised, and deeply political assemblages: practices that translate scarcity into sociality, that convert absence into methods of care and circulation. From BlackBerry Messenger thread’s that knitted diasporic political constituencies to El Paquete Semanal’s human-powered distribution of cultural knowledge,to the informal Club Nintendo cultures that rework gaming media, these nodes make visible a different topology of connectivity—one organized by repair, and relationality rather than by throughput and monetization.^[27]

Across the case studies, a set of common dynamics emerges. Technologies conceived for other ends are routinely retooled: corporate software becomes a vernacular messaging commons; packaged commercial content becomes a locally curated archive; the digital becomes a site of translocal solidarity. These inversions are not mere hacks; they are collective acts of infrastructural authorship. They instantiate what I have called a “hardware of care”: socio-technical practices whose telos is sustaining memory, pedagogy, and social bonds rather than extracting value.^[28] Crucially, these practices operate in tandem with formal political shifts—such as the enfranchisement of non-resident citizens in the Dominican Republic—so that everyday communicative routines and formal institutions co-produce new forms of political belonging and agency.^[29]

Theoretically, situating these vernacular networks within Caribbean and Black radical thought reframes infrastructure as both material and symbolic. Drawing on archipelagic relationality and anti-colonial critiques, we can see that “lack” is not only a condition to be remedied but a conceptual lens that reveals alternative logics of knowledge production.^[30] This intervention pushes against platform- and data-centered accounts of connectivity (and their attendant notions of progress) and toward a framework that recognizes the political intelligibility and epistemic value of improvisation, ephemerality, and community stewardship.^[31]

Ivan Illich's concept of convivial tools offers a final theoretical frame for what these vernacular networks accomplish. For Illich, a convivial tool is one that can be used by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for a purpose chosen by the user — a tool whose use by one person does not restrain another from using it equally, and that requires no previous certification:

Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. … The telephone is an example. … The telephone lets anybody say what he wants to the person of his choice; he can conduct business, express love, or pick a quarrel. It is impossible for bureaucrats to define what people say to each other on the phone, even though they can interfere with — or protect — the privacy of their exchange. (Illich 34–35)^[32]

The Club Nintendo, BBM, and El Paquete are convivial tools in precisely this sense: each was taken up by users who redesigned its purpose, expanded its reach collectively, and refused the determinations of the original designers. A hacked console rented by the hour to children in Bonao, a corporate messaging app repurposed for diasporic kinship, a human-powered archive distributed door to door — these are not failures of proper technological use but demonstrations of what Illich calls conviviality in practice. Designating the network structurally as a convivial tool opens up a possibility that the penetration-rate paradigm forecloses: the network is not a suprastructural fixed structure imposed from above, but a tool that can be used, manipulated, and redirected toward community connection, the circumvention of embargo and exclusion, and the sustenance of a displaced population through shared language, image, and media. A network could be obscured behind the mythical intangibility of Wi-Fi or the exo-capitalism of colonial infrastructure — industries and bureaucratic tendrils extending power deep inside the material world — but these interpretations must live parallel to the evidence of what Caribbean communities have already done with the tools at hand. As technological capital and digital infrastructure grow ever more ubiquitous, the Caribbean confirms that we are not simply prey to an infrastructural imposition from above. These conditions can always be put in critique, adapted, and changed.

There are practical and political implications. Curators, educators, and policy-makers should recognize, support, and protect informal circuits rather than criminalize or erase them. Programs that fund only high-tech solutions miss the generative capacities of low-bandwidth, low-cost, community-managed infrastructures. In contexts of climate instability and continued economic precarity, the resilience embedded in vernacular networks—local archives, peer-to-peer distribution, oral pedagogies—should inform disaster preparedness, cultural preservation, and participatory pedagogies.^[33] At the same time, scholars must resist romanticizing these practices: they emerge from structural violence and should be documented and supported in ways that respect communal agency and avoid extractive research practices.^[34] Methodologically, studying Caribbean vernacular networks requires hybrid tools: ethnography that listens to vendors, elders, and group-chat participants; technical analysis of packaging and compression practices; sonic and visual analysis of cultural flows; and historical work that traces legal and demographic shifts.^[35] Researchers must practice ethical reciprocity, co-creating outputs with the communities whose practices are being studied, and prioritizing accessible, multilingual dissemination. Limitations of this study—uneven archival records, the ephemeral character of much digital vernacularity, and uneven access to sources—point to the necessity of long-term, collaborative research infrastructures rather than episodic fieldwork.^[36]

Looking forward, there is fertile ground for applied projects: community-centered digital repositories that respect local control; workshops to transfer low-tech preservation skills; cross-island exchanges documenting vernacular network practices; and curatorial experiments that foreground process over polished object.^[37] Such initiatives can translate analytic insights into infrastructures that materially enhance cultural life and civic participation. If we accept that networks are made as much by repair, repetition, and rumor as by routers and platforms, then the Caribbean teaches us a vital lesson: connectivity is not a single metric but a practice. Reading the region’s vernacular networks on their own terms not only recovers hidden ecologies of knowledge and care, it reframes how we imagine technological futures—less as inevitable upgrades toward a Silicon Valley model, and more as plural experiments in living together under conditions that demand creativity, solidarity, and sustained improvisation.^[38]

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1. C. N. Madu, Chu-Hua Kuei, and Chijioke U. Madu, Handbook of Information Management (Springer, 2019). ↩︎

2. James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Unwin Hyman, 1989). ↩︎

3. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Wiley-Blackwell, 1996). ↩︎

4. C. N. Madu et al., Handbook of Information Management. ↩︎

5. Carey, Communication as Culture, 12–15. ↩︎

6. Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018). ↩︎

7. Jorge Duany, Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). ↩︎

8. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press, 2006). ↩︎

9. Rita Raley, Tactical Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). ↩︎

10. Lawrence Liang, “Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure: Rethinking Access to Culture,” International Journal of Communication 2 (2008): 1169–1185. ↩︎

11. Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (University of Minnesota Press, 2001). ↩︎

12. Julissa Reynoso, “The Dominican Diaspora: From Migration to Transnational Citizenship,” Journal of International Affairs 66, no. 1 (2012): 199–212. ↩︎

13. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey: Dominican Population in the United States, 2015. ↩︎

14. Duany, Blurred Borders. ↩︎

15. Sheller, Mobility Justice. ↩︎

16. Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (2015): 4–17. ↩︎

17. Sujatha Fernandes, “Fear of a Black Nation: Local Media, Global Politics, and Cuban Popular Culture,” Transforming Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2012): 22–33. ↩︎

18. Eliézer Pujol and Ted Henken, “Cuba’s Digital Revolution: Citizen Innovation and State Control,” Latin American Research Review 54, no. 3 (2019): 668–681. ↩︎

19. Abigail De Kosnik, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (MIT Press, 2016). ↩︎

20. Cristina Venegas, Digital Dilemmas: The State, the Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba (Rutgers University Press, 2010). ↩︎

21. Sujatha Fernandes, Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press, 2006). ↩︎

22. Ted Henken and Sara Garcia Santamaria, eds., Cuba’s Digital Revolution (University Press of Florida, 2021). ↩︎

23. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, eds., Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (University of Illinois Press, 2015). ↩︎

24. Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, and danah boyd, Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (Polity, 2016). ↩︎

25. Nick Couldry, and Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2019). ↩︎

26. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). ↩︎

27. Kevin Yelvington, ed., Caribbean Cultural Identities (University Press of Florida, 2001). ↩︎

28. Parks and Starosielski, Signal Traffic. ↩︎

29. Duany, Blurred Borders. ↩︎

30. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (University of Michigan Press, 1997). ↩︎

31. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. ↩︎

32. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Equinox Publishing 1973). ↩︎

33. Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (Duke University Press, 2012). ↩︎

34. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). ↩︎

35. Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity, 2017). ↩︎

36. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2008). ↩︎

37. Néstor García Canclini, Imagined Globalization (Duke University Press, 2014). ↩︎

38. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993). ↩︎