Sarah R. Cohen, University at Albany, SUNY

"Performing Enslavement on the Dessert Table: Sculptural Sugar Casters"

Wednesday, March 12, 2025, 6:00 p.m., FAH 101, University of South Florida



Eighteenth-century colonial sugar production fostered new European table implements: ornamental yet useful sugar casters. Three exceptional pairs of casters feature laboring figures hauling bundles of 

cane. The silver originals present male and female workers with African features, directly referencing coerced Caribbean labor. Two variant pairs in faux lacquer show boys in Asian attire, feeding the 

fashion for chinoiserie while upending the realistic cohesion of race and enslavement. This lecture will apply concurrent practices of theatrical construction, especially its play with enslavement as 

transient, adaptable characterizations and themes, to assess the casters  provocative transition from gendered "Africans" to "Asian" boys. 



Sarah Cohen, professor of art history, specializes in 17th - and 18th-Century art, architecture, gender, 

and material culture. She is the author of three books: Art, Dance and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (2000), Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-century Art: Sensation, Matter and 

Knowledge (2021), and Picturing Animals in Early Modern Art: Art and Soul (2022). Her recent work on sugar and the representation of slavery investigates the life cycle of eighteenth-century material 

culture, as entangled with colonialist ambition.