Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850 by Jenna M. Gibbs (review)

When I was in graduate school, one of my cohort commented during a class that some event or utterance about which we’d read was “multivalent.” As we all nodded approvingly, our professor raised her eyebrows. “Do you mean ‘human’?” she inquired. I was reminded of that sharp little lesson while reading Jenna M. Gibbs’s fascinating and highly readable exploration of slavery, race, and rights in transatlantic theater and popular culture. Gibbs reveals an intricate tangle of meaning and meaning making, in which antislavery and proslavery sentiments and arguments come to life on the same stage and characters and plots cross and recross the Atlantic, shape-shifting as they move. Because Gibbs is so attentive to the complexities of humor, theater as both art and commerce, and audience response, her arguments are difficult to summarize. For the same reason, they should be impossible to ignore.

Performing the Temple of Liberty explores “predominantly white cultural productions of human difference, slavery, and antislavery in print, visuals, and performance” between 1760 and 1850 (5). Gibbs is adamant, and persuasively so, that theater is part of the world, not simply a representation of it. She reminds readers that theaters stood on streets through which shackled Africans, rowdy laborers, and society ladies all passed, and she reveals playwrights and performers drawing on and reshaping ideas first presented in works of philosophy, missionaries’ reports, and scientific treatises. Instruments of imagination as well as instruments of capital helped to create and defend—and sometimes to make vulnerable—racism and enslavement. Focusing on productions in London and Philadelphia while also attending to broader imperial and revolutionary developments, Gibbs poses a series of comparative and causal questions: “How did discourses of slavery and race develop differently in disparate geopolitical sites and constituencies?” “How and why did many Britons’ and Americans’ attitudes toward slavery evolve from … complacency to bloody contestation?” And perhaps most challengingly: “Did the theater between the 1770s and 1850s play a role in transmuting individual antislavery sentiment into mobilized political constituencies?” (5).

Gibbs divides her account into three parts, each organized both chronologically and thematically. Part 1 extends from the 1760s and stirrings of the imperial crisis through the War of 1812. This part combines analysis of the tropes of Columbia and Britannia with discussions of the way English and American theater, like English and American political rhetoric, used a shared language to create worlds simultaneously kindred and alien. Early in the period, Gibbs argues, Philadelphians depicted Columbia, the “Genius of America,” as a guardian of both national independence and individual liberty, thus embedding in their celebration a potentially radical disruption, or at least questioning, of enslavement. By the end of the period, Columbia was reduced to a symbol of nationalism and a protectress of white, male citizenry, her “guarantee of political liberty … divorced from her previously inclusive mandate of personal liberty for all” (17). Across the same period, Gibbs explains, British “cultural producers” used the image of Britannia to celebrate a liberty ostensibly built of law in contrast to colonial chaos, and to contrast “the colonists’ allegations of metaphorical enslavement” with “the reality of Africa slavery in America” (55). In both England and America, cultural producers began to dramatize, even as they poked fun at, claims that Africa should be Christianized and “civilized.”

Not all of this part of the book is revelatory; Gibbs is, as she notes, building on Linda Colley’s argument that antislavery allowed Britons to “‘reaffirm their unique commitment to liberty at a time when war with America had called it into question,’” and other scholars, including Linda Kerber, Caroline Winterer, and Eran Shavetz, have explored the way neoclassical motifs formed part of Americans’ conceptualization of gendered citizenship and the Republic (34). The analysis of images, moreover, is somewhat less fertile ground for Gibbs’s investigation of competing and shifting meaning than...