By electronic literature we are not referring solely to works of literature distributed via online platforms and social media sites. As these presentations show, the digital environment has provided the necessary contexts and technical capabilities for the development of purely born-digital (Hayles 2002) works of many kinds. From poetry built on the now-obsolete Adobe Flash platform that allowed poets to create interactive and kinetic works where words would move, change color or respond to sound on their screen to the ultra-contemporary form of the image macro meme, electronic literature encompasses a variety of literary genres and forms that could have not existed without digital machines and, for the last couple of decades, without their free distribution on the internet. The multimedia/multilingual composition and global circulation of these works enacts the tensions of contemporary globalization, postcolonialism, and decolonization by focusing on concrete national contexts that are decentered within the non-nationalist and borderless ethos of the global web.

Chad Frisbie in “‘Cunnilingus in North Korea’ and Other Sensations of Non-Nationalism” reads Young-Hae Chang (YHC) Heavy industries well-known Flash poem “Cunnilingus in North Korea” as an example of how the multimedia composition of this digital work dismantles Cold War Korean binaries, e.g: North/South, poor/rich, communist/capitalist, etc. Moving to the rhythm of Nina Simone’s “See-Line Woman” about African American sex workers, YHC Heavy Industries’ poem juxtaposes the purported liberation of North Korean women’s sexuality to the actual immiserations of the country, while challenging the rationalization of U.S. imperialism as being beneficial to the global economy.

In “Glotopolitics of Latin American Electronic Literature: The Migration from National to Interzonal Languages,” Verónica Gómez analyzes the political power of the Spanish and Quechua languages, as these are influenced by the national and international context in which they are used. In order to do so, she looks at a selection of Latin American digital works focusing on migration from a double perspective: from media migration (from print to digital) and the migration of languages and bodies. With this, she establishes a link between national language and literatures that, by being reformulated and expanded by a digital intermedial language (Kattenbelt 2008), configures a new glotopolitical cartography (Marcellesi & Guespin 1986; Narvaja de Arnoux 2000).

Finally, and with a focus on the circulation of poetry in digital platforms (blogs, websites, and messaging services), Susanna Sacks explores African decolonization tactics of indigenous poetic production in Malawi in her presentation, “Against Algorithmic Aesthetics: Sapitwa Poetry’s Production of a Multilingual Poetic Public." Similar to Gómez’s presentation, Sacks understands that the online environment, while decentralized, is not exempt from power inequalities. In this sense, Sack’s exploration of the Malawian transmedia project, Sapitwa Poetry, “responds to Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999)’s call for indigenous knowledge structures by creating a model of decolonial literary publication and community formation online.”

Covering a wide range of languages, cultures and territories, each presenter will focus on their particular case study in three 20 minute long presentations, still guaranteeing at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion where to explore the connections and tensions of a national, postcolonial and global digital literary scene.