Book Review

Marcus Wood, a British art historian and artist, has produced a prodigious study of the visual images that profoundly influenced the political and cultural discourse regarding slavery and abolition in the antebellum years. He has compiled a stunning, and sometimes overwhelming, archive of the prints, drawings, and paintings that underscored Western assumptions about blackness and slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In so doing, Wood meticulously traces the cultural, aesthetic, and political connections between classic works such as J. M. W. Turner's Slaver Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying and commercial schematic designs of slave ships, or between Giotto's Flagellation of Christ and abolitionist depictions of slave punishment and torture. This book is part art history and part cultural studies, and the author employs an impressive range of tools for his analysis, including archival exploration, semiotics, African American and British history, and the study of print and visual culture. He is also concerned with their intertextual nature—how artists reference each other and how history, memory, religion, and culture are essential to these creations.

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