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  • The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation
  • Kirk Savage
The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation. By Marcus Wood (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2010) 442 pp. $74.95 cloth $29.95 paper

The Horrible Gift of Freedom “was a depressing book to write,” concludes Wood (354). The book is an extended indictment of Anglo-American culture, brimming with irritation, if not outrage, at New Labour, the Royal Mail, past scholars, and, especially, white abolitionists and the many groups then and now who have trumpeted their achievements.

The book was inspired by, and culminates in, the frenzy of media output, art events, and museum exhibitions surrounding the 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of the British slave trade. The first five chapters of the book provide a theoretical frame for understanding the 1807/2007 phenomenon and excavate the visual traditions underlying it. These chapters focus on British prints—on which Wood is an authority— though they also make substantial forays into visual production in the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. The final two chapters concentrate on the 2007 bicentennial performances and exhibitions in Britain, from the notorious Westminster Abbey service and “So Sorry” march to the more thoughtful interventions done at Wilberforce House Museum and other institutions.

Wood ultimately argues that, despite some creative attempts to break the pattern, “nothing has changed much in two hundred years” (317). The dominant representation of emancipation in the Euro- American world has always been about moral self-congratulation. Britannia and America and the other slave states celebrate themselves for ending a criminal system that they organized and brutally implemented for their own enormous profit. In the process, the standard representation at once dodges the white majority’s complicity with slavery and perpetuates the psychology of slavery, by rendering the black slave a passive recipient of the newly benevolent state’s “gift” of freedom. Using the anthropology of gift exchange and Fanon’s critique of colonialism, Wood argues that white society’s gift of emancipation is really a gift to itself, inflating its own moral superiority—hence the title of this book.1 The gift trapped and infantilized its supposed recipients even as it legally released them from bondage.

Wood has considerable talents of acute observation and vivid description, but the framework of his argument is so overwhelming that it tends to force his analyses into predictable results. Hence, for example, he decries a 1980 unesco stamp showing victims of the slave trade for its “melodrama” and “white sentimental fantasy” (235), whereas he praises a 2007 Barbados stamp using the same source image (an eighteenth-century French print, rendered schematically in the unesco version and more elegantly in the Barbados stamp) for inviting viewers to participate imaginatively in the scene (259). In Wood’s defense, the framing devices [End Page 640] and context of each image in the Barbados stamp are unique, thus permitting interpretations to multiply, but his own readings largely follow a script laid out early in the book.

Horrible Gift is therefore a more repetitive exercise than Wood’s previous book on the representation of Atlantic slavery, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester, 2000). Horrible Gift has no major counterweights, such as Joseph Mallord William Turner’s masterpiece “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying,” which Wood defended eloquently against recent criticisms that it failed to represent the victims themselves. Yet if he had looked beyond the celebratory prints produced after emancipation, Wood could have found other artists, such as John Quincy Adams Ward in the United States, who were trying to rethink emancipation as an ongoing struggle, much as Wood would like us to do now. Whereas Turner’s painting decorates the cover of Blind Memory, the cover of Horrible Gift shows a black janitor using a push broom to clean Abraham Lincoln’s nose in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.—arguably a great work of art but one that Wood’s text passes over in silence.

Wood’s prescription for moving beyond the sorry tradition of emancipation imagery is to focus more on slave art and resistance...

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