“I know the world by how I speak the world”: TikTok ABCs, Disaster Language and Andre Salkey’s Hurricane

This paper considers how Caribbean ways of speaking map onto social media by analyzing two popular TikTok series as well as the testimony of a survivor of the 2021 eruption of La Soufrière that was widely circulated on Facebook. Understanding what Caribbean cultural production on social media entails means appreciating social media platforms like TikTok as commercial entities. As such, they define what can be produced and influence what audiences are likely to register as funny. Though Caribbean people's representations of themselves may seem more accessible than ever, the ways in which we hear each other on social media remains unevenly defined. Juxtaposing this consideration of the Caribbean digital landscape with Andrew Salkey's Hurricane, I argue that the connotations that social media usages of vernacular have accumulated risk compromising the opportunities for ideological inspection that fictional and non-fictional representations of disaster make possible.