A Passion for Errantry: Paths and Diversions of Diasporic Identity in Sukaina Kubba’s Art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article, I consider several possible frames of interpretation, both scholarly and curatorial, for the practice of Iraqi-Canadian contemporary artist Sukaina Kubba. I argue that national, religious, and ethnic associations of the category of diasporic art are loosened by a view of Kubba’s practice which emphasizes instead her aesthetics of wonder, her itinerant biography, and her anti-racist, post-colonial politics. The keys to this interpretation are provided in Kubba’s artistic engagements with the writing of Ibn Battutah and Edouard Glissant. From the former, I derive an account of Kubba’s aesthetics of “wonder” ( aja’ib ) and from the latter an account of her passion for “errantry.” Finally, to account for her reflection on both materials/things and people across her work as in-transit and in dynamic exchange, I conduct a “cultural- biographical” analysis of Kubba’s art and life, modelled on studies of commodities by Arjun Appadurai and others in the field of anthropology.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".