Synopsis

A redactive moving image poem created from bubbling sugar, that takes as its starting point Stuart Hall’s analogy of the contested history of the Atlantic Slave trade, its consequences (colonialism), sugar and English identity. Hall writes: “I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth.” Hall speaks not only as a Jamaican descendant of enslaved Africans transported to the British colonies but as all diasporic Africans whose legacy is rooted/routed in the transpontine consequence of sugar manufacture, thereby establishing a position of power and right to be/exist – in defiance of Otherness.

Details

Short (1mins) Art / Experimental | United Kingdom

Language:

English

Production

Directors:

Richard Rawlins

Richard Mark Rawlins (b.1967), Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago. He currently lives and works in Hastings, UK. A graduate of the Royal College of Art’s print programme (2019), Rawlins’ research takes a transnational approach to the "pop-cultural" poetics and politics of life in the Caribbean, the contested and resultant histories/realities of colonialism and it’s transpontine consequence, black identity and diaspora politics.