Photographing A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: Kara Walker's Take on the Neo-Slave Narrative

The photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so.)

—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

That is part of an ongoing debate about black creativity, through the 20th and now the 21st century. It's, "Who is looking?" And it's always been the same answer for the most part. How do people look? How are people supposed to look? Are white audiences looking at it in the right way? And are black audiences looking to see this piece? And, of course, my question is: What is the right way to look at a piece that is full of ambiguities and ego and all the other things that go into making a monumental sculpture?

—Kara Walker

When Kara Walker's installation A Subtlety or The Marvelous Sugar Baby opened in the spring of 2014, it was met with reactions ranging from awe to anger. "Confected" in the old Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York, Walker's four-ton, thirty-five foot sugar sphinx is, as Roberta Smith describes it in her New York Times review, "beautiful, brazen and disturbing, and above all a densely layered statement that both indicts and pays tribute" (Smith, "Sugar? Sure"). The defunct, and now demolished, factory has a sordid history, as during the nineteenth century it was the largest sugar refinery in the world, producing over one thousand tons of sugar daily. One cannot talk about sugar production without addressing the slave labor that facilitated it, thus the site of the installation brings to the fore the vexed relationship between sugar production and slavery. This entanglement is well documented. As Simon Gikandi reminds us, "the institution of slavery was shaped by the production of the commodity, [and] sugar provided the vital and inescapable link between white consumption and black labor . . . Sugar and slavery developed hand in hand" (110). In addition to the connection between sugar production and slavery, the space of the Domino Factory serves as a reminder of the enduring nature of the contentious relationship between the industry and those who labor in it, as many of the workers have not fared well financially since the factory's permanent closure in 2004. In their article "Remembering the Workers of the Domino Sugar Factory" Leigh Raiford and Robin J. Hayes note that Domino provided the "last large-scale factory work in Brooklyn, [which] enabled its unionized workers . . . to raise and educate their children in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill, Williamsburg, and other neighboring communities that since 2004 have increasingly priced out working class families." As Raiford and Hayes make clear, the closure of the factory has not only negatively impacted many of its employees and their families, but has also helped to fuel the rapid gentrification of the surrounding area, thereby compounding the adverse effects of the closure. At the same time that the individuals working in the factory lost their source of income, the cost of living in their community has steadily increased, making it financially impossible for them to remain in their homes.

By drawing our attention to the truly contentious relationships between past and present, individual and community, Walker's installation elucidates an undeniable connection between the process of "refining" sugar, and the process of gentrification, which I would argue can itself be understood as a complicated mode of social "refining." This interrelation between "refinement" and "gentrification" becomes salient, particularly when we consider the multiple valences and uses of the term "refine." For example, in his 1864 Essay on Sugar Refining, Robert Niccol explains:

The term "refining" is usually understood to imply the cleansing or purifying of any substance from the superfluous and other matters with which it may be mixed. Its application, however, in the case of "sugar" denotes that process, or rather combination of processes whereby is effected the...