Thank you for being in the room — or for finding your way here afterward.
This page is a starting point, not a finished archive. The bibliography below is a working reading list that traces the lineage behind the Data Diasporas project: the Caribbean theorists, the critical data scholars, the practitioners building sovereignty infrastructure right now, and the films and conversations that shaped how I see this work. Some of these sources I have lived inside for years. Others I am newer to. I have tried to be honest about which is which, so this page can serve as both a citation list and a genuine invitation to read further.
If you have additions, corrections, or questions about anything cited here, I want to hear from you. The conversation Data Diasporas is trying to build does not happen in one room or one talk. It happens across many of them. Reach out at datadiasporas@gmail.com — or come on the podcast.
— Melissa
Caribbean Theory and the Afterlife Tradition
Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Originally published in French as Poétique de la Relation (1990).
The source of "the right to opacity." The foundational Caribbean theoretical anchor for the argument Data Diasporas is making about data sovereignty.
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Sharpe's concept of "the wake" — the ongoing aftermath of slavery — gives the talk its framing of "the afterlife of data." Sharpe extends Saidiya Hartman's earlier work, and the move from "afterlife of slavery" to "afterlife of data" is the conceptual hinge of the talk's central argument.
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Origin of "the afterlife of slavery" as a named concept. Required reading alongside Sharpe.
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
The roots/routes distinction underwrites the "Data Routes" framework that organizes Data Diasporas. Data, like diaspora, gains and loses power in transit.
"Cultural Identity and Diaspora." In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.
The standard reference for theorizing diasporic identity. Foundational to the framework even where not directly cited.
Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2013.
Beckles is the chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission and Vice-Chancellor of UWI. His scholarship on Drax Hall as a "killing field" is the historical foundation of the Drax-Hall-to-data-center argument.
Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice. caricomreparations.org.
The regional institutional framework for reparations work. Cited as the institutional context for any Caribbean conversation about data sovereignty.
"Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument." CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
The deepest Caribbean theoretical grounding on what counts as "the human" inside Western data systems. Listed here as essential further reading; the talk's argument is in conversation with Wynter even where she is not directly cited.
Critical Data and Algorithmic Studies
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press, 2018.
Noble's analysis of search algorithms shows how technical systems inherit and amplify classification logics. Part of the intellectual context for the talk's argument about geographic bias and algorithmic inheritance.
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
"The New Jim Code" — the way technological systems reproduce and intensify inequality even when designed with neutral or beneficial intent. The framework underpins the talk's discussion of parametric insurance and AI bias.
The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.
The named concept of "data colonialism" — the framework for thinking about data extraction as a contemporary extension of colonial logics.
Data Nullius and related work on Caribbean intellectual property and data sovereignty.
Dr. Inniss is a Guyana-based scholar whose concept of "data nullius" parallels "terra nullius" to describe the way Caribbean data is treated as ownerless and freely available for extraction. The concept has been generative for Data Diasporas and is one I am actively engaging more deeply.
"Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification." Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81 (2018): 1–15.
The foundational study documenting that commercial facial recognition systems fail dramatically on darker-skinned and female faces. The technical literature on "geographic bias" begins here.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House, 2020.
Wilkerson's tracing of how Jim Crow law became the template for the Nuremberg Laws — architectures of racial codification that travel across geographies and centuries — gives the Drax-Hall-to-data-center argument its theoretical scaffold.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010.
Background reading on diasporic movement, displacement, and the human cost of systems built without consent.
Practitioners Building Data Sovereignty
Founder and CEO, Amini. Nairobi, Kenya.
Kallot's work building modular, sovereign AI infrastructure for the Global South — including the partnership with the Government of Barbados — is cited in the talk as a contemporary counter-architecture to extractive data center buildouts. Key public sources: TIME 100 Impact Awards profile (March 2026); "The AI revolution is being written in Africa, not Silicon Valley" (Geneva Solutions, July 2025).
Founder, Heirloom. Previously founder, Streamlytics.
Streamlytics (now no longer active in its original form) processed over ten billion data points from consumers in 125 countries on an ethical, opt-in, paid model — the data subject was the owner and was compensated. Benton's current venture, Heirloom, is a sovereign memory layer designed for the age of AI: a blockchain-enabled platform where individuals verify their identity, certify the provenance of their data, and license their data on terms they control. Heirloom positions itself as the trusted memory layer for human-AI interaction, building infrastructure for the data sovereignty argument that Data Diasporas makes conceptually. Disclosure: I have been an investor in Streamlytics and am a founding member of Heirloom. See: The Heirloom Protocol: A Human-Centered Memory Layer for AI (white paper, 2025).
Sovereign AI Infrastructure for Africa and the Global South. amini.ai.
The Amini-Barbados partnership runs through the Ministry of Industry, Innovation, Science and Technology and includes a twelve-week fellowship training local technologists. As of late May 2026, Amini reports a pilot pod operational and scaling to over five megawatts within six months.
A blockchain-enabled data management, verification, and storage platform that empowers individuals to verify their identity, validate and license their data, and interact with AI agents and systems across platforms — interoperably and on their own terms.
A CARICOM-owned regional parametric insurance facility, established 2007, that paid Jamaica $91.9M after Hurricane Melissa. Cited as both a Caribbean institutional accomplishment and an illustration of partial sovereignty — Caribbean ownership wrapped around non-Caribbean catastrophe models.
Background and Reference Sources
SPHERA Catastrophe Model. Pavia, Italy.
The catastrophe model that determined Jamaica's CCRIF payout. Documentation available through RED publications and CCRIF technical reports.
$6.7 Billion Recovery Package for Jamaica, Post-Hurricane Melissa, 2025–2028.
The multilateral recovery package architecture. Three percent of the package sits inside a Caribbean institution (the CDB); the remaining ninety-seven percent is structured across institutions based outside the region.
Monthly Remittance Reports, October 2025.
Source of the 8.3 percent remittance decline figure.
Direct cash transfer organization that delivered $650 transfers to households in St. Elizabeth communities by December 2025.
and community relief networks operating in St. Elizabeth Parish and other hurricane-affected areas.
Green Industrial Gateway Advantage (GIGA) Strategy.
The Greenland data center build in St. Andrew parish is led by BIDC under CEO Mark Hill. The site is described in public communications as having a 15MW planned capacity, with the first 5MW government-owned and the remaining 10MW opened to private investors. As of May 2026, compute partners for the Greenland build had not yet been publicly named.
Senator Jonathan Reid, Minister responsible.
The ministry leading Barbados's digital sovereignty roadmap and the Amini partnership.
Note on research gaps
The talk acknowledges several active research questions for which I do not yet have answers: (1) whether the Greenland data center build and the Amini pods will operationally converge; (2) the compute partners for the Greenland build; (3) the local skills pipeline being developed to staff and operate sovereign Caribbean data infrastructure; (4) Caribbean scholarship specifically addressing the colonial environmental history of the Greenland site and the Scotland District more broadly. These are open threads that I am actively pursuing and would welcome guidance on.
Media, Films, and Conversations That Shaped the Thinking
Hosted by Steven Bartlett.
Long-form conversational podcast format that informs the Data Diasporas approach to dialogue as method.
13th (2016) and Origin (2023, adapted from Wilkerson's Caste).
Visual and narrative grammar for thinking about how historical architectures of racial classification persist in contemporary institutions.
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. London: Bodley Head, 2023.
Varoufakis's argument that platform capitalism has shifted to a feudal mode of extraction is a generative framework for thinking about data center infrastructure and the political economy of compute. Cited as ongoing reading.