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  • Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade by Maurie D. McInnis
  • Alexis L. Boylan (bio)
Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade. Maurie D. McInnis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 280 pages. $45.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.

If one considers recent popular films, an argument could be made that in this particular moment, between the sesquicentennial of the start of the Civil War and the beginnings of Reconstruction, audiences in the United States cannot get enough of seeing slavery. Films such as Lincoln (2012), Django Unchained (2012), Twelve Years a Slave (2013), and even Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), with varying degrees of success and desire to speak to historical veracity, push contemporary audiences to see the plantations, the shackles, the beatings, the subjugations, the labor, and the bodies of slavery. This focus and the variety of ways in which slavery is visually constructed could be seen as standing in opposition to the visual paucity that forms the central historical tension of Maurie D. McInnis’s Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade. McInnis argues that artists in the years surrounding the Civil War were not overwhelmed with options for visually constructing the experience and horrors of slavery but instead were confined, inhibited, and incapable of painting, drawing, or sculpting what they saw or knew of slavery. Artists and audiences failed politically and socially to push beyond narrow constructs of racial, gendered, and artistic propriety. Yet around the edges, McInnis makes another suggestion: that these images represent a wider creative lack, a failure of the visual on an epic level. Ultimately, this claim is perhaps the most radical aspect of McInnis’s book, pushing readers to reconsider the value of traditional art history and the possibilities in thinking about the lives and limitations of objects, artists, and audiences in new ways. [End Page 235]

McInnis’s book rests upon her analysis of the images produced by English artist Eyre Crowe after his 1852 visit to the United States with his friend and mentor, author William Makepeace Thackeray, on the occasion of Thackeray’s lecture tour through several American cities. On visiting Richmond, Virginia, Crowe, who was already captivated by the subject of American slavery from his reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s recently published Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), went to a slave auction and made sketches that he would return to and expand on in paintings and prints many times over the rest of his career. This trip and the images produced during and after Crowe’s travels might appear to be the focal point of the book, but as McInnis warns us in her introduction, this “is not a traditional art history book” and, in fact, these images only serve as “the hub of a wheel” with “radiating spokes spread outward to discuss the evolution of slave trade imagery” (9). This conceit is masterful, for it allows McInnis the opportunity to navigate detailed studies of various interrelated topics: the art market in the US and England, literary tours, the history of representing slavery, the geography of the slave trade, the mechanics of the slave auction, and the interconnections between slavery and architecture. This form might suggest chaos, tossing the reader adrift, but McInnis uses Crowe’s images strategically, repeatedly pulling the reader back to the center or “hub.” This structure also suggests a resistance to recent modes of academic publishing that encourage discrete chapters on particular bounded points. McInnis’s book refuses that kind of narrow fragmentation; to get the full impact, one must read the entire book, a diligence well rewarded.

Another benefit of this model is the contrast it provides with other recent publications about the imagery of slavery. Many of these publications emerged from exhibitions or museum collections, thereby wedding the analysis to specific objects and collections. McInnis, however, is liberated by her approach to come at culture, bodies, slavery, and capitalism through and around objects, using images both to clarify and confound, allowing readers to see this historical moment anew. For example, she dwells on the very different responses Thackeray and Crowe had to witnessing American slavery. Thackeray...

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