Sugar: the iconic staple of plantation-based agricultural production throughout the Caribbean, the foundation of the systems of dispossession launched by colonialism and slavery, the site of efforts to make objects out of humans, of intergenerational racialized and gendered trauma. How can sugar be “home,” sweet or not?

James M. Philippo’s lithograph “Heathen practices at funerals,” published in his book Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843), is not the typical imperial representations of neat rows of cane as far as the eye can see, nor the lines of machete-bearing laborers under the surveillant eye of the overseer, nor the mills or aqueducts that, on each plantation, were the material manifestations of a global system that made Jamaica the jewel in the British imperial crown in the late eighteenth century.

On the contrary: the presence of huts across the background of the scene—in a horizontal parallel with the caricatured figures who carry the funerary coffin—suggests the presence of “home” as a potential site of refuge both for the living and the dead. However precariously and staged this may be, and against the sarcastic perspective of the composition, “home” is made present in the image. Although Philippo’s goal with this engraving was to illustrate funeral practices of enslaved peoples on the island, the book was published a few years after the abolition of slavery (1838).

The domestic space of the plantation as a potential site of refuge, however precarious, appears again shortly after in an image of C. H. Graves: the stereoscopic photograph Home Sweet Home, Jamaica of 1899. In its visual omission, sugar here also generates the appearance of shacks where intimacy and quiet, in all their complexities, may be guarded, and where family might be reconstituted. These are sites that emerged alongside ongoing techniques of surveillance, policing, gender-based violence, injury, and dehumanization during a period in which sugar production was on the decline yet plantations still structured the parameters of social, political, and economic organization.

The spaces of maintenance of Afro-descendant-based community suggested in Philippo’s and Graves’s works is aesthetically elaborated in the work of Jamaican artist Michaella Garrick. In “Aye, Black Girl,” shown here, sugarcane bark collected from several parishes across Jamaica are woven together with repeated photographs of the artist herself, as a young girl (on the left) and as an adult (on the right), in a floor-to-ceiling mounted structure.

The woven pattern of the sugarcane bark evokes that of the dwellings in Graves’s Home Sweet Home, Jamaica. While sugar is no longer the driver of economic development in Jamaica—it contributes only 1% of Jamaica’s GDP, and 80% of sugar production is consumed locally—sugar plantations are still central to the visual landscape of every parish. By embedding the photograph of the artist’s younger self behind the woven bark, Garrick is referencing her memories of the persistence of the plantation’s social order, one in which hierarchies of color and class overdetermine social value and potential. Her adult self, on the other hand, refuses the dispossession of the plantation, creating a counterpoint to the very element that represents interpersonal, social, and political violence.

Garrick again attributes new meaning to sugarcane bark in an installation at the Edna Manley College in Kingston. This time, however, the weaved sugarcane bark creates a standing structure and a semi-enclosed space that the artist herself and others used to find retreat in ways that refuse the discipline of the plantation.

By inviting visitors to rest on the bed, Garrick’s installation created fleeting and foreboding moments of rest and intimacy in a site where sugarcane represents transgenerational trauma, thus allowing us to imagine a different set of relations than those defined by the plantation. ■

Sugar: the iconic staple of plantation-based agricultural production throughout the Caribbean, the foundation of the systems of dispossession launched by colonialism and slavery, the site of efforts to make objects out of humans, of intergenerational racialized and gendered trauma. How can sugar be “home,” sweet or not?

James M. Philippo’s lithograph “Heathen practices at funerals,” published in his book Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843), is not the typical imperial representations of neat rows of cane as far as the eye can see, nor the lines of machete-bearing laborers under the surveillant eye of the overseer, nor the mills or aqueducts that, on each plantation, were the material manifestations of a global system that made Jamaica the jewel in the British imperial crown in the late eighteenth century.

On the contrary: the presence of huts across the background of the scene—in a horizontal parallel with the caricatured figures who carry the funerary coffin—suggests the presence of “home” as a potential site of refuge both for the living and the dead. However precariously and staged this may be, and against the sarcastic perspective of the composition, “home” is made present in the image. Although Philippo’s goal with this engraving was to illustrate funeral practices of enslaved peoples on the island, the book was published a few years after the abolition of slavery (1838).

The domestic space of the plantation as a potential site of refuge, however precarious, appears again shortly after in an image of C. H. Graves: the stereoscopic photograph Home Sweet Home, Jamaica of 1899. In its visual omission, sugar here also generates the appearance of shacks where intimacy and quiet, in all their complexities, may be guarded, and where family might be reconstituted. These are sites that emerged alongside ongoing techniques of surveillance, policing, gender-based violence, injury, and dehumanization during a period in which sugar production was on the decline yet plantations still structured the parameters of social, political, and economic organization.

The spaces of maintenance of Afro-descendant-based community suggested in Philippo’s and Graves’s works is aesthetically elaborated in the work of Jamaican artist Michaella Garrick. In “Aye, Black Girl,” shown here, sugarcane bark collected from several parishes across Jamaica are woven together with repeated photographs of the artist herself, as a young girl (on the left) and as an adult (on the right), in a floor-to-ceiling mounted structure.

The woven pattern of the sugarcane bark evokes that of the dwellings in Graves’s Home Sweet Home, Jamaica. While sugar is no longer the driver of economic development in Jamaica—it contributes only 1% of Jamaica’s GDP, and 80% of sugar production is consumed locally—sugar plantations are still central to the visual landscape of every parish. By embedding the photograph of the artist’s younger self behind the woven bark, Garrick is referencing her memories of the persistence of the plantation’s social order, one in which hierarchies of color and class overdetermine social value and potential. Her adult self, on the other hand, refuses the dispossession of the plantation, creating a counterpoint to the very element that represents interpersonal, social, and political violence.

Garrick again attributes new meaning to sugarcane bark in an installation at the Edna Manley College in Kingston. This time, however, the weaved sugarcane bark creates a standing structure and a semi-enclosed space that the artist herself and others used to find retreat in ways that refuse the discipline of the plantation.

By inviting visitors to rest on the bed, Garrick’s installation created fleeting and foreboding moments of rest and intimacy in a site where sugarcane represents transgenerational trauma, thus allowing us to imagine a different set of relations than those defined by the plantation. ■