Recasting Scotland’s Legacies of Slavery through Performance

Recent historical research has demonstrated the importance of slavery-derived wealth for the industrial development of Scotland. Yet the contemporary relevance of this history is rarely addressed by academic historians. Rather than historians, it is Caribbean and British Caribbean artists who are increasing public awareness of the legacies of slavery in Scotland. In this paper, we build on this work to show how archive-based theatre can be used to increase understandings of slavery and its ‘afterlives’ in Scotland as well as the Caribbean. The paper examines the ethics of representing the lived experiences of enslaved, dispossessed, and oppressed people on stage by reflecting on our own experiences as academics and artists collaborating in the Living Histories of Sugar project. Living Histories of Sugar used the immersive, affective, and personalizing qualities of theatre, and its ability to create connections with artists’ and audience members’ own memories of sugar, to reveal the interconnected histories and contemporary legacies of people in the Caribbean and Scotland. The resulting performance sought to recast the ways artists and audiences from across the Atlantic think about, understand, and live with the transnational and unfinished nature of the sugar industry. By reflecting on the co-creative and thematic development of the Living Histories of Sugar performance, we demonstrate how we came to grips with the ethics of dramatizing the violent events, as well as the silences, of recorded history.