“The Sugar Babies’ Call: Climate Changes, or Marooning the Color Wheel”

A Faculty Scholar Resident talk by Sabine Doran, associate professor of German and Jewish studies.

Stagings of “marooners’ calls” in artistic engagements as different as Walker’s A Subtlety, Haile Gerima’s Sankofa, and John Akomfrah’s Tropikos revisit the process of sugar’s crystallization: “Thank you for letting me know that sugar is not white,” reads the first intertitle of the “digital sugar baby’s archive” (Walker). This talk will examine sugar’s crystal image as a reflection of the cooling of heated matter (molasse) on which the process of sugar’s crystallization depends. A process that will allow us to address climate change in terms of what Derrida called (in Cinders) "the holocaust’s holocaust, the blaze reflected and cooled by the glass, the ice, of the mirror.”