The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800-1852 by Martha J. Cutter (review)

Martha J. Cutters The Illustrated Slave approaches abolition as "a multimedia and multimodal political movement" powered by "emerging visual technologies" in the first half of the nineteenth century (8). As stereotyping made woodcuts more durable, woodcuts and steam presses made engravings cheaper, and new forms of printmaking like lithography developed, abolitionists "flood[ed] the U.S. market with illustrated pamphlets, books, and broadsides that complemented and competed with antislavery illustrated works from England" (17). This visual culture has been extensively studied, yet as Cutter points out, "the archive of antislavery illustrated books that appeared before Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) has been virtually ignored" (11). Cutter's deeply researched exploration of this Anglo-American archive of works produced "by authors popular in their own time but mostly forgotten in ours, such as Thomas Branagan, Amelia Opie, George Bourne, Moses Roper, Lydia Maria Child, Henry Bibb, and Henry Box Brown" (9), contributes to scholarship across several fields of study: anti-slavery literature and history, visual culture, African American studies, interdisciplinary empathy studies, and history of the book.

Among the most original contributions of The Illustrated Slave is that it not only extends but also challenges the scholarly emphasis on abolitionist representations of slaves as abject, denied "power and subjectivity" within a "scopic regime of enslavement" (xviii, 25). Reduced to spectacles, these figures of abjection reinforce white power, re-victimize the enslaved in representations of torture as Marcus Wood demonstrates, or reflect the voyeuristic "allure of bondage" in Karen Sánchez-Eppler's terms, often through what Hortense Spillers describes as "pornotroping" (xii, 39). Cutter frequently explores the insidious effects of this dynamic within abolitionist visual and literary culture, including "low, unfinished, disabled, childlike" representations of the enslaved in abolitionist images from the Wedgewood icon to the "lowly" enslaved in Uncle Tom's Cabin (10, 178). Like others, she also examines the violently sexual pornotroping of enslaved women in the widely reproduced engravings of John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), among them William Blake's "Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave" and images of the Surinese woman Joanna, commodified as a "beautiful mulatto body" (43). A more groundbreaking dimension of Cutter's study, however, lies in her focus on illustrations that contest racialized structures of scopic surveillance. She is especially interested in "moments" when representations of the enslaved "try to shift a reader's horizon of expectations," when "words and pictures work synergistically" to portray "the enslaved as possessing both power over the tools of oppression and modes of agency," generating "a politics of empathy and intersubjectivity" (xii).

Cutter fashions an innovative trans-medial, interdisciplinary conceptual apparatus to illumine how "new visual-verbal figurations" can retain affiliations with hierarchical abolitionist representations of slave abjection even as they "shift toward new empathetic" responses that may foster activism (138). Visual rhetoric methodologies inform her many insightful analyses of "focalizing features such as light or margins," "sight lines" (21) that place enslaved figures in "parallel lines of equality" with free subjects and viewers (23), actions that grant the enslaved agency, the blurring or entangling of "white and black" bodies (23), and "prosthetic observing presences" in the illustrations she treats (21). "[G]raphic narrative theory involving the manipulation of captioning, speech bubbles, frames (or their lack)" facilitates her exploration of the complex interactions between visual and verbal dimensions in the texts she discusses (22), as in treating George Bourne's Pictures of American Slavery (1834), which uses image captions like "Torturing American Citizens" alongside terms like "citizen man-stealer" in the text to foster an "intersubjectivity in which it may become increasingly difficult to disentangle the enslaved" from those who torture them (94). Cutter also adeptly interweaves methodologies from graphic narrative and visual culture scholarship with new...