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Paper short abstract

This paper demonstrates how 'performing the archive' can be used to develop a 'global sense of place' among transnational publics. We do so by reflecting on the co-creation of a performance that invited diverse publics to think about the transnational and unfinished nature of the sugar industry.

Paper long abstract

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of United Kingdom Research and Innovation, the Living Histories of Sugar project (2019-2022) focused on the co-creation of a musical and theatrical performance that invited diverse publics from across the Atlantic to think about the transnational and unfinished nature of the sugar industry. The project involved a series of co-creation workshops with Caribbean and Scottish performance artists, resulting in original songs and biographical stories that worked ‘against the grain’ of written, aural, and visual archives. Our intention was to be open, honest and critical about the selection and use of historical and archival material, while identifying archives that could inspire artists and audiences alike to contest fragmentary and biased representations of the past and their implications for the present. The performance captured a range of people involved the trans-Atlantic sugar industry: from enslaved women in Jamaica, to the wives of Greenock’s sugar refinery workers, to young men working in Jamaica’s Frome sugar refinery run by Tate & Lyle in the 1970s. This paper situates our own reflections as scholars and performance artists in relation to insights from our audience members in Kingston and Greenock, who shared their own understandings, experiences, and feelings about sugar and slavery after the performance. The paper shows how 'performing the archive' can be used to develop what human geographer Doreen Massey calls a 'global sense of place' among diverse, transnational publics who are differentially entangled in the power geometries of colonial capital.