Decolonizing cyberspace

Increasingly important information and communication technologies (ICT) play a significant role – sometimes as an image, sometimes as a tool –  for authors like Ellen Ullman, Melissa Scott, Jeanette Winterson and Pat Cadigan. In their novels they explore patterns of power, hierarchy and colonization through the destabilization of space and transgress boundaries in the space they create. By making connections between post-colonial/post-structural/post-modern theory and technology, I explore the authors’ reasons for making these transgressions.

Édouard Glissant explains how computers, and computer-mediated text, can generate a ‘‘space within the indeterminacy of axioms” and how this opens up possibilities to create a space where imaginative and ideological liberation is possible. Glissant’s idea of indeterminacy grows out of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s discussion about space and how it is structured. The virtual, seemingly topographical, space of the Internet has been described, on the one hand, as an information highway (striated space) and, on the other, as a web, where it is possible to surf (smooth space). I connect these concepts to the novels and explore to what extent the authors use these strategies to de-colonize the fictional, digital space their characters inhabit.