The Horrible Gift of Freedom
Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation

Marcus Wood

Meditations on the paradoxes generated around the ending of Western slavery

Reviews

"Marcus Wood is the most distinctive voice talking about slavery in English. In The Horrible Gift of Freedom, he combines intellectual mastery of diverse (and interdisciplinary) works with a remarkable assertiveness of style. The result is a book you won't be able to ignore."
—James Walvin, author of The Trader, The Owner, The Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery

"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


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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,…

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Series/imprint:
Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900

A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication

Page count: 516 pp.
Illustrated
Trim size: 6.125 x 9.25

Cloth
List price: $74.95
Your price: 978-0-8203-3426-4
2/15/2010
  

Paper
List price: $29.95
Your price: 978-0-8203-3427-1
2/15/2010

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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.