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

Paul Gilroy’s 1993 study The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness has not only influenced our understanding of the culturally hybrid identities of persons of African descent over the past few centuries, but also helped create the concept of an Atlantic culture shaped by the repeated crossings of people, ideas, and creative works between various points in the Atlantic world. Such is the framework of Jenna M. Gibbs’s Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850. Gibbs analyzes a broad and eclectic range of theatrical, literary, polemical, and graphic depictions of slavery, abolitionism, liberty, African Americans, and British and American identities and explains how the exchanges of these representations between two major cities in the Atlantic arena helped shape the culture of the United Kingdom and the United States from the advent of the American Revolution to the decade preceding the American Civil War. As Gibbs states, the book “examines the performance of slavery, race, and rights in theatrical and popular culture in relation to the political enactment of slave-trade abolition and emancipation in order to understand the transatlantic development of realities and discourses of race and slavery; the relationship between abolitionism and blackface performance; and the role of theater and popular culture in shaping and popularizing debates about slavery” (5). Such a project is ambitious, and Gibbs’s analysis of a myriad of cultural artifacts within a complex, transatlantic cultural and ideological network is impressive and insightful.

Gibbs opens the book by describing the cultural milieu surrounding George Colman Jr.’s antislavery play Inkle and Yarico in London and Philadelphia and uses the play as an example of transatlantic culture that reflected and shaped popular attitudes toward slavery and race in both cities. The remainder of the book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines how actors, illustrators, poets, and abolitionists in London and Philadelphia depicted white goddesses who liberated black slaves when the Atlantic abolitionist movement formed during the late eighteenth century and led to the ban on the slave trade by both nations in 1807–8. In Philadelphia, the goddess Columbia celebrated the American rejection of British tyranny while defining Americanness and liberty as white. In London, the goddess Britannia glorified Britain’s abolitionist identity while emphasizing the nation’s imperial power and its mission of civilizing Africa. Gibbs explores the links between racialized depictions of British and American liberty and the development of racial burlesque in Isaac Bickerstaffe’s play The Padlock and James Powell’s play Furibond; or, Harlequin Negro.

Part 2 focuses on racist caricature in picaresque narratives in London and Philadelphia, both in cartoons and on stage, during the 1820s and 1830s and ties these representations to British and American discourses about American democracy, free black men, and emancipation in the British West Indies. Gibbs analyzes William Thomas Moncrieff’s play Life in London; or, Tom and Jerry and the blackface caricature series Life in London by George Cruikshank and Life in Philadelphia by Edward Clay. She also analyzes the blackface performances of the English actor Charles Mathews in his play Trip to America, which ridiculed black men while echoing British travel writers who criticized America for perpetuating slavery while celebrating democracy. Gibbs demonstrates how the depictions of ridiculous black dandies by Cruikshank, Clay, and Mathews during the 1820s laid the groundwork for blackface minstrelsy.

In part 3 Gibbs shifts her focus to the 1830s and 1840s and examines the emerging discourses of revolutionary utopianism linked to revolts in the U.S. South, Jamaica, and Europe and the use of racial burlesque in expressing these radical discourses. She explores the use of blackface caricature in celebrating revolution in two plays depicting Spartacus’s slave revolt in ancient Rome: Jacob Jones’s Spartacus; or, The Roman Gladiator and Robert Montgomery...