A Subtlety Or The Corveous Sugar Baby Analysis
Walker created A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. Her work meant to comment on the sugar plantation trade, the workers who were underpaid, degraded and killed. Her work did not only comment on that, it also commented on stereotyping in relation to the representation of the black bodies in imperial discourses – proving that power relationships between the two binary oppositions(Black – White) from times of slavery have not been lost, they are still very much there and haven’t lost their roots and sting. This essay will look at how Walker’s work – the subtlety, challenges and comments on the practices of essentialising, Reductionist, and Naturalising practices of stereotyping in relation to the representation of the black bodies in imperial
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For example, black people were always represented in the media as having a broad face, thick lips, fat nose and big nostrils, fuzzy hair, huge buttocks and breasts(Females), masculine(Males and Females). Walker’s subtlety had enormous features like the nostrils, the buttock, the breast, the lips – this was to show how a black body, more especially, black women – how they were always reduced to a few, simplified and overemphasized physical features in imperial discourses. Due to inequalities in binary oppositions, the black female bodies were reduced to their bodies, and their bodies to their sexual organs or sexuality by whites. Walker gave the subtlety a “pair of labial lips between her coiled haunches-is equally a transfigured power symbol, white as driving force” (Larson, 2014) – which shows that the black is exposed and under attack. The black has always been reduced to dirt, impure, and pollution. It has always been depicted as the carriers of diseases. “Walker set out to honor the workers who chopped the cane, hauled it to port, retched in the slave ships below decks on their way to another port, boiled the molasses in great vats at fiery temperatures, stripped off its blackness— its flavor, its richness, its health-giving nutrients —and turned it into sugar, that is, turned it into nutritional poison, the color of cocaine” (Larson, 2014”. Walker used white sugar to show us how it acts as a whip that causes great suffering amongst the poor – the black community. White sugar is linked to diseases such as diabetes and
For example, black people were always represented in the media as having a broad face, thick lips, fat nose and big nostrils, fuzzy hair, huge buttocks and breasts(Females), masculine(Males and Females). Walker’s subtlety had enormous features like the nostrils, the buttock, the breast, the lips – this was to show how a black body, more especially, black women – how they were always reduced to a few, simplified and overemphasized physical features in imperial discourses. Due to inequalities in binary oppositions, the black female bodies were reduced to their bodies, and their bodies to their sexual organs or sexuality by whites. Walker gave the subtlety a “pair of labial lips between her coiled haunches-is equally a transfigured power symbol, white as driving force” (Larson, 2014) – which shows that the black is exposed and under attack. The black has always been reduced to dirt, impure, and pollution. It has always been depicted as the carriers of diseases. “Walker set out to honor the workers who chopped the cane, hauled it to port, retched in the slave ships below decks on their way to another port, boiled the molasses in great vats at fiery temperatures, stripped off its blackness— its flavor, its richness, its health-giving nutrients —and turned it into sugar, that is, turned it into nutritional poison, the color of cocaine” (Larson, 2014”. Walker used white sugar to show us how it acts as a whip that causes great suffering amongst the poor – the black community. White sugar is linked to diseases such as diabetes and