Time and the otherwise: Plantations, garrisons and being human in the Caribbean
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoretico-ethnographic space of the Caribbean has to do with what its foundational histories can tell us about the relationships between time, temporality and sovereignty. Drawing from an ethnographically derived creative project I am currently developing in collaboration with musician Junior ‘Gabu’ Wedderburn and psychologist Deanne Bell, I will show that recurring moments of exceptional violence, themselves emerging from ongoing, everyday patterns of structural and symbolic violence, lead to an experience of time neither as linear nor cyclical, but as simultaneous, where the future, past, and present are mutually constitutive and have the potential to be coincidentally influential. This ontological alterity does not rely on a condition of being prior, outside or marginal, but instead is fully embedded within the violences of modernity. As a result, exploring the relationships among labor, race, politics and what it means to be human from the space of the Afro-Caribbean allows a critical reorientation of modern ideologies of temporality that are inexorably linked to linear teleologies of progress, development, and improvement, and which therefore require the erasure of the forms of racial prior-ness that have been central to the making of the Caribbean as a material and ideological space.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".