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  • Circling Back and Expanding BeyondTheorizing Excess in Circum-Atlantic Contexts
  • Amy K. King (bio)

I now need to go slow. I cannot rush to the enormous woman sphinx. I have to take my time in fear of what I will find.

—Valérie Loichot, “Kara Walker’s Blood Sugar: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby

In her review of Kara Walker’s installation piece A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), Valérie Loichot admits that she hesitated to approach the mammy-sphinx sculpture made out of eighty tons of refined sugar. Glowing white in the center of the abandoned Domino sugar factory, the mammy-sphinx’s sexuality confronts Loichot as the sculpture’s exaggerated, enormous, and exposed bodily features invite but also challenge Loichot’s uneasy gaze. To reach the mammy-sphinx means passing by life-size molasses statues of children slowly and grotesquely melting in the summer heat and inhaling the cloyingly sweet smell of sugar, new and old, as well as human waste. (This is an abandoned factory, after all.) Loichot’s review considers the intertwined contexts of such imagery in the legacies of slavery and its inexhaustible consumption of bodies, but she wonders about the efficacy of the medium, noting that “while Walker is clearly critical of Domino Foods, and, by extension, of slavery, economic, sexual, and pictorial exploitation of human bodies, mass production and mad consumption, it is not clear as to whether art can satisfactorily fight these forces.” A Subtlety is excessive—in size, smell, [End Page 212] connotation—but Loichot wonders what can be done with the meaning(s) of such excess. This excess of aesthetics does not lead in one direction; it might cause viewers to wonder about the “value” of such excess. Does it ultimately encourage structural criticism? Does meaning itself count as action?

While Valérie Loichot acknowledges Patricia Yaeger’s essay “Circum-Atlantic Superabundance: Milk as World-Making in Alice Randall and Kara Walker” (2006) in a footnote, Yaeger’s essay is much more central to this conversation. Almost eight years before Walker put A Subtlety on display, Yaeger asked in that very essay, “What counts as an aesthetics of excess in a world that thrives on excess?” (769–770). Yaeger’s question lingers as we consider Loichot’s reading of A Subtlety, for what do effective responses to the Atlantic slave trade and all of its grotesque everyday horrors look like?1 How do you successfully counter excess? Can one counter excess? For Yaeger, the aesthetics of excess in circum-Atlantic written and visual texts do work to expose and oppose the everyday extremes and aggressions of racist exploitation.

Approaching discourses of excess in scholarly projects is difficult. As Loichot indicates, it is challenging to respond to—or even look at—texts that so blatantly depict the violence inherent in everyday spaces and objects (sugar, for instance). Yet, this kind of work is necessary, and—to rephrase Loichot—this work requires that we “go slow,” not only because we often fear what we might find in such work but also because we need to approach representations of cultural violence with care. I therefore believe that Patricia Yaeger’s movements in “Circum-Atlantic Superabundance,” read in the context of her earlier monograph Dirt and Desire (2000), help establish and refine a framework for contemporary circum-Atlantic studies, one that can create hemispheric conversations and archives that go beyond the written medium,2 all while remaining carefully attuned to the ways the local and hemispheric contexts come to bear on texts. I would like to turn again to the deceivingly simple question Yaeger asks in the essay: “What counts as an aesthetics of excess in a world that thrives on excess?” (769–770). Yaeger’s questioning of what counts drives my impulse to say “everything counts,” meaning all texts count in this conversation. Her focus on an aesthetics of excess reiterates the spectacular qualities of scenes of violence and intimates that these excessive scenes are everyday normalized occurrences. Also, her framing of the circum-Atlantic as a world that thrives on excess helps us see hemispheric exchange for its local and global resonances. [End Page 213]

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