The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (review)

The two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007 received little attention in the United States. Marcus Wood's angry and insightful examination excoriates the British bicentennial as a mere continuation of two centuries of memorializing a "horrible gift of freedom"—a vision of emancipation that suppressed the experience of enslavement, layered dependency on the enslaved as it enhanced the moral prestige of the purported givers, and wrapped the former slave power in the sanctified garment of abolition.

Provoked by the official anniversary and aware of gaps in his own previous research, Wood set out to uncover the graphic tradition of myths chronicling the benevolent and disempowering "emancipation moment," epitomized by the 1787 image of the beseeching slave on the seal of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The result benefits from the wide-ranging talents of the author (a painter, performance artist, filmmaker, and professor of English at the University of Sussex): a mash-up of methods and disciplines, including art history, literature, and theology; extensive knowledge about the visual archive of slavery and the African diaspora; and immersion in public history practice. Delivered throughout in high dudgeon, Wood's polemical outrage is relieved by an admirable capacity to illuminate relationships, linkages, and influences.

After a tendentious introduction, The Horrible Gift of Freedom examines the "abolition myth" in the evolution of the triumphant white female figure of Liberty; in depictions of the "emancipation moment" in the United States and Caribbean; and in pictorial and literary works depicting slave resistance and autonomy (a departure for Wood). The last two chapters directly address the bicentennial, chronicling how the iconic, diagrammatic Description of the Slave Ship "Brookes" (1789) was reified and reinterpreted; how a veritable "Wilberfest" of official ceremonies, cultural products, and commentaries deified William Wilberforce while cleansing the politics of abolition and muffling the nature of the slave trade; and how these proceedings were occasionally counterbalanced by protests and by museum professionals who challenged the orthodoxy encrusted in their institutions.

Wood's signal contribution is the eighty-page chapter surveying anniversary stamps, first day covers, and postmarks on communications from Africa to the Caribbean and the United States. Exhaustive semiotic readings assess the "extent to which philatelic design is locked into the imaginary of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century graphic archive of the emancipation moment" (224). Wood reveals with convincing breadth and detail that stamps are a unique, mass-produced, globally peripatetic visual form that bespeaks official national memories about slavery and abolition. The fiction of the "emancipation moment" predominates in these fascinating minipictorial narratives, but Wood's subtle formal readings, supplemented by broad knowledge of the African diaspora, locate significant differences in visual commemorative practices.

Similarly, Wood's lengthy, closely observed consideration of William Still's Underground Railroad (1872) investigates narrative, rhetorical, and pictorial strategies that "foregrounded freedom as something the slave actively seized rather than passively received" (134). The systematic study of one visual form in the philately chapter and of Still's compendious book shows Wood at his best.

More typical of the book is a rambling thematic approach spot-mining the visual archive of slavery. Dipping in and out of the visual record, Wood is unrivaled in uncovering evidence of critical patterns, continuities, and conflicts. But that method also yields some arbitrary examples and subjective readings.

These flaws are most apparent when he discusses U.S. slavery and abolition. Wood views the myth of emancipation as hegemonic, blossoming in 1807 and spreading in obscuring tendrils across the Atlantic. A large 1863 engraving by Thomas Nast (misidentified as "Robert Nast") celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation is the most prominent of three images Wood marshals to illustrate America's semiotic absorption. Interrogating the print composed of vignettes contrasting the cruelties of slavery versus the benefits of emancipation, circling a roundel featuring a free black family enjoying...