Tamarind, Metabolism, and Rest: Making Racialized Labor Visible
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Published:January 2024
The chapter examines representations of different regimes of racialized labor through an analytic of metabolism. It presents a reading of Titus Kaphar's A Pillow for Fragile Fictions (2016), a sculpture which deconstructs the myth of George Washington by positioning his bust on its side and filling it with rum, tamarind, molasses, and lime. The chapter argues that the presence of Tom, an enslaved man whom Washington exchanged for the aforementioned West Indian products, can be found in the condensation on the glass—a visibilization of his labor. Looking to tamarind, however, a tree crop unaffiliated with sugar's economy of extraction, enables us to sense a shadow economy of rest, a balm for neoliberalism's own efforts to invisibilize racialized labor with deadly consequences.
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