The Sweet Tooth of Slavery

Abstract

This past spring and summer, in an installation by artist Kara Walker, a sugarcoated sphinx gazed upon visitors with a blank and inscrutable stare in the defunct Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. At the entrance to the installation, thirteen statues of brown children, made of resin and coated with molasses, toted the sugar to construct the giant statue. This display drew upon stereotype and caricature—the sphinx sporting a headkerchief and exaggerated lips and butt, the children’s swollen heads copied from racist figurines—but this grotesquerie did not mitigate, but rather heightened, the unease that the installation inspired. Through the contrast between these figures, one monumental and thirteen diminutive, one dusted with refined sugar and the baker’s dozen oozing molasses, Walker suggested that the empire that erected and displayed the sphinx also excreted wounded black bodies. Late nineteenth-century Northerners attempted to overlook the origins of their refined sugar by eschewing molasses (and, implicitly, the brown bodies that both produced and consumed it). Walker’s installation reminds us that it is still easy in hipster Williamsburg, for example, to ignore the global labor exploitation and racism that facilitates the circulation of sugar. On the website for the exhibition, Edwidge Danticat writes about the terrible conditions and child labor in contemporary sugar cane harvesting. This misery provides a stark counterpoint to the triumphalism of the sphinx. This figure, which Walker called the Marvelous Sugar Baby, crystallized the power of whiteness, much like the elaborate sugar sculptures in medieval banquets from which Walker drew the first part of the exhibition’s title, A Subtlety. The Sugar Baby’s prominent vulva signaled the sweetness of her sexual availability for white slave-holders, but Walker’s use of caricature undermined the grandiosity of their empire-building project. While both the awe-inducing architectural grandeur of the sphinx and her sugary veneer reflected the illusion of Both works insist upon the centrality of sweetness and sugar to the exploitation of black bodies in the pursuit of white pleasure. The slave body becomes a kind of candy.