Reviews
"With The Horrible Gift of Freedom, Marcus Wood deploys his characteristic rigor, creativity, and verve in the service of a near complete dismantling of abolitionist self-satisfaction. The cultural artifacts produced to celebrate abolition, both then and now, never have received more searching inquiry."
—Christopher L. Brown, author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism
Description
In his tour de force Blind Memory, Marcus Wood read the visual archive of slavery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Britain with a closeness and rigor that until then had been applied only to the written texts of that epoch. Blind Memory changed the way we look at everything from a Turner seascape to a crude woodcut in a runaway slave advertisement. The Horrible Gift of Freedom brings the same degree of rigor to an analysis of the visual culture of Atlantic emancipation.
Wood takes a troubled and troubling look at the iconography inspired by the abolition of slavery across the Atlantic diaspora. Why, he asks, did imagery showing the very instant of the birth of black slave freedom invariably personify Liberty as a white woman? Where did the image of the enchained kneeling slave, ubiquitous in abolitionist visual culture on both sides of the Atlantic, come from? And, most…
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Paper List price: Your price: 2/15/2010 |
Marcus Wood is professor of English at the University of Sussex and author of several books, including Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, winner of the best book prize given by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He also has a successful career as a painter, performance artist, and filmmaker, producing political work in the visual arts focused on questions of diaspora and racism.