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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...