This article takes up the trope of “Eating the Other” as it relates specifically to sugar children in the visual arts and offers a glimpse as to how this trope manifests also in literature. Beginning with Brazilian artist, Vik Muniz’s Portraits of the Sugar Children, (1996), I consider his naturalistic portraits of children “drawn” with sugar on black paper. As the offspring of sugarcane laborers on the island of St. Kitts, the children’s sugar portraits encapsulate a more profound significance regarding the conflation of sugar and the black body. Subsequently, this relates to Kara Walker’s sugar installation at the Domino Sugar Factory, A Subtlety or The Marvelous Sugar Baby, (2014), by addressing shared aesthetics, materiality, and the black body as a consumable entity. Walker’s installation featured thirteen sculptures of young black boys made of resin and coated in molasses flanking a 75-foot sugar sphinx. This analysis focuses keenly on the advent of Walker’s sugar children and their relationship to the treachery of sugarcane production and colonial desire. This shared attunement to the materiality and mediality of sugar by Muniz and Walker culminates into a richer tableaux of sugar body politics that addresses the hypersexualization and consumption of black bodies through a deconstruction of colonial appetites. Together these two artists’s work in sugar offers a comparative analysis that goes beyond the material and temporal and ultimately addresses the contentious and violent histories of sugar and the vulnerability of children’s bodies.
Please check out the full article published in American Studies Journal (Jan 2018) Vol. 57, No. 3.
https://journals.ku.edu/amerstud
