Sugar Time: Reactivating Memories of Scottish Empire through Contemporary Art and Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a circulating commodity, sugar holds heavy histories of violence and exploitation that connect up map points of the former British Empire in ways that place time firmly out of joint. This article suggests how persistent visual traces of these sugar remainders can contribute to contemporary reckonings with the past time of empire. Working in the interval between commemoration and ruination, it shows how Kara Walker's *A Subtlety* (2014) has informed how contemporary artists and performers in Scotland engage with sugar histories in their practice. Alberta Whittle, Kayus Bankole, and Adura Onashile all figure sugar time as both continual and contemporary, linking histories of empire and post-industrial memories with artistic and activist expressions in the present. Their works respond to the violence of history in what Saidiya Hartman has termed "aesthetic mode", leading to the formation of creative and critical practices that people can enact to untangle themselves from the sedimented pain of imperial pasts.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".