Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery 1780-1865 by Marcus WoodReview by: Alan RiceCallaloo, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 1278-1281Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300285 .

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CALLALOO

2. As the title of her essay "The Souls of White Folks" in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (43- 71) suggests, Mab Segrest centers on Du Bois, but only for a moment, as a springboard to her assessment of the psychological and spiritual cost of whiteness to white people, or what Du Bois called the "psychological wage" of being white.

WORKS CITED

Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. New York: Holt, 1993.

--. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fightfor Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. New York: Holt, 2000. Lipsitz, George. "'Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac': White Supremacy, Antiblack Racism, and the New

Historicism." American Literary History 7 (1995): 700-25. Lott, Eric. "White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness."

Cultures of United States Imperialism. Ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. 474-95.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992. Roediger, David R., ed. Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. New York: Schocken,

1998. -The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. London:

Verso, 1999. Ward, Patricia. Crossing the Color Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery 1780-1865. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.

The front cover reproduction of J.M.W. Turner's monumental oil painting Slavers

Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying, Typhoon Coming On is a gesture of intent

by Marcus Wood and his publisher. The study itself aims for a similar canonicity in academia to that which the painting has achieved in the Fine Art tradition. It follows the groundbreaking work of Hugh Honour and Albert Boime, telescopes the period covered and expands into book illustration to show the importance of the visual

throughout the multiple depictions of the slave experience. Especially novel is Wood's interest in the panoply of images associated with slavery in popular culture. Wood takes them seriously and submits them to extensive and usually erudite discussion aiming to counteract an academic tradition wherein "the imagery of

slavery has not been taken as seriously as it should have been" (6). The breadth of the discussion and its intensity, together with the hundreds of famous and obscure

images collected in the text make this a wonderful resource for the classroom and it should be a recommended text on any course on the culture of the Atlantic slave trade.

Especially engaging are the extended and wonderfully contextualized discussions of Turner's 1840 painting and the 1789 Description of a Slave Ship. The latter's progress to a defining image of the anti-slave trade movement in Europe and to a lesser extent in America is plotted with great acuity. Wood describes how the "conjunction of technical engraving with the depiction of a mass of black human flesh is a superb semiotic shock tactic" (27). He also describes how the image transcends its age becoming symbolic of the trade even into the late twentieth century where it is used

CALLALOO

2. As the title of her essay "The Souls of White Folks" in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (43- 71) suggests, Mab Segrest centers on Du Bois, but only for a moment, as a springboard to her assessment of the psychological and spiritual cost of whiteness to white people, or what Du Bois called the "psychological wage" of being white.

WORKS CITED

Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. New York: Holt, 1993.

--. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fightfor Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. New York: Holt, 2000. Lipsitz, George. "'Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac': White Supremacy, Antiblack Racism, and the New

Historicism." American Literary History 7 (1995): 700-25. Lott, Eric. "White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness."

Cultures of United States Imperialism. Ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. 474-95.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992. Roediger, David R., ed. Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. New York: Schocken,

1998. -The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. London:

Verso, 1999. Ward, Patricia. Crossing the Color Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture.

Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery 1780-1865. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.

The front cover reproduction of J.M.W. Turner's monumental oil painting Slavers

Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying, Typhoon Coming On is a gesture of intent

by Marcus Wood and his publisher. The study itself aims for a similar canonicity in academia to that which the painting has achieved in the Fine Art tradition. It follows the groundbreaking work of Hugh Honour and Albert Boime, telescopes the period covered and expands into book illustration to show the importance of the visual

throughout the multiple depictions of the slave experience. Especially novel is Wood's interest in the panoply of images associated with slavery in popular culture. Wood takes them seriously and submits them to extensive and usually erudite discussion aiming to counteract an academic tradition wherein "the imagery of

slavery has not been taken as seriously as it should have been" (6). The breadth of the discussion and its intensity, together with the hundreds of famous and obscure

images collected in the text make this a wonderful resource for the classroom and it should be a recommended text on any course on the culture of the Atlantic slave trade.

Especially engaging are the extended and wonderfully contextualized discussions of Turner's 1840 painting and the 1789 Description of a Slave Ship. The latter's progress to a defining image of the anti-slave trade movement in Europe and to a lesser extent in America is plotted with great acuity. Wood describes how the "conjunction of technical engraving with the depiction of a mass of black human flesh is a superb semiotic shock tactic" (27). He also describes how the image transcends its age becoming symbolic of the trade even into the late twentieth century where it is used

1278 1278

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on book covers (both literary and academic) and even on a Bob Marley album cover (Survival 1979). Wood concludes "that, for better or worse, this image is as close as the abolition movement in Britain got to the creation of a final monument to the middle

passage" (36). Disappointingly, Wood only talks in a footnote about diasporic African responses

to the Description, failing to mention at all the African-American Tom Feelings' wonderfully wrought reimagination of the Brooks imprinted on the body of a victim of slavery in his illustrated book The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargoes (1995). Wood concludes that, "Twentieth-century adaptations suggest that Western Society's memory of the middle passage may still be dominated by eighteenth century English abolitionist models for the memorial reconstruction of the slave trade" (19). This

might be true of the majority culture, but such a sweeping generalisation elides radicalised adaptions such as that by Feelings and his compatriot Howarda Pindell whose Slave Narratives: Memorial (1993) with its tight-packed, crouched bodies resem-

bling chains talks back to the Description. Contemporary Black British art is also absent here as he eschews letting the Empire speak back through such figures as Keith Piper and Lubaina Himid. The latter's Memorial to Zong (1991) engages directly with Turner's epic painting and more indirectly with the Description. She, and Piper, take the detritus of the imagery of slavery and use it to comment acerbically on historical abuses and contemporary racism making sure that "the memory of the trade" does not "become primarily the meaning of its glorious Abolition" (8) as the majority culture after the 1820's seemed intent to make it. Obviously Wood's principal time frame is 1789-1865; however, if he stretches it to look at contemporary book and record sleeves

surely he could find a few pages to talk about a contemporary field of art which is too little discussed in the academy as it is.

The extended discussion of Turner's painting is an exemplary piece of historical and fine art criticism that shows an interdisciplinarity and a keen eye for detail that is best explained by Wood's background as both painter and academic. He believes the painting does not reduce the slave bodies to mere "flotsam and jetsam" as Honour had contended or wallow in radical nostalgia by invoking an image from sixty years before as Boime implied, but that the epic scale of the work foregrounds its "memorial function" (45) as the sea is "witness, executioner, victim and tomb" (63). He then

proceeds to a closely contextualized reading of the work's multiplicities. He uses Ruskin's famous discussion of the painting to reveal how it is "an act of artistic

salvage" as

(t)he deaths of the slaves thrown overboard are to be saved from their debased historico-economic context.... Turner makes these deaths mean something, by bathing them in one of his most terrific seascapes and one of his most sublime sunsets. The gold of the slave trade is shifted into an ironically gorgeous light. (63)

The very painterly qualities that other critics have described as undermining the

depiction of horror are invoked by Wood as key to the painting's power, not as mere

seascape, but as a purveyor of the tragedy of loss. Wood does omit some aspects that

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would have made his reading even more astute. The fact that the painting talks also to the contemporary illegal slave trade is elided as is the connection I believe the

painting makes to the industrialization slavery helped bring about; however, the extended reading here is surely the most astute to date.

After skillfully interrogating the visual imagery of slavery in two of the most famous images of the middle passage, Wood moves to investigate the visual aspect of various slave narratives. Much of this work is excellent, foregrounding the way in which stock images are used that often bear little relation to the narrative thrust of the individual slave histories. He is particularly acerbic about the images accompanying Henry Bibb's Narrative (1849). In particular he shows how an abolitionist image of Granville Sharp rescuing a young African is reworked as an illustration in the Bibb book so that the white philanthropist is transfigured into a representative of the slave

power. This is a peculiarly inappropriate use of an illustration, but as Wood shows there are many instances of such strange juxtapositions making a constant slippage between the narrative and the accompanying pictorial representation. Wood makes much of this, but surely it is generally more important as a device to save time and

money and a refuge of lazy printers and its unconscious effects, though interesting, are rather over-emphasized here.

Wood's vision, as befits someone who has spent several fruitful years researching such horrors, is rather Manichean. For instance, he is rather harsh on museums that

try to document Transatlantic Slavery. Particularly acerbic criticism is reserved for the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool. Here Wood seems to want the museum to bear the burden of its locale and act as both an information resource and a memorial touchstone. It fails to do the latter, but then most museums do. If you want memorial touchstones visit grave sites (there are excellent sites in Lancashire like Sambo's grave at Sunderland Point) or memorial

sculptures. Obviously, there are not enough of these and they are inadequate but this is not the museum's fault, rather the town's burghers. Some of his criticism is

wrongheaded including the claim that the subtitle of the exhibit, Against Human

Dignity is a "wonderfully English verdict on what Atlantic slavery was against" (296). This verdict flies in the face of the fact that the title is coined from the French. His excellent chapter on torture also falls victim to a slightly supercilious air. He argues that "(t)he artifacts which were applied and attached to the bodies of slaves and which were then preserved either in museums or in representation in books, are not a

gateway to knowledge of the events which produced them, or a substitute for the

experience of anyone, white or black involved in the process of use" (219-220). However, Toni Morrison uses them precisely as a gateway in her novel Beloved as she

explained to Melvyn Bragg in her 1988 South Bank Show interview. Their anaesthetized

presentation in museums is Morrison's entry point to crucial details of her narrative.

Obviously, they are not enough in themselves to explicate the slave experience, but their ugly functionality is crucial for educating museum visitors and indeed for Morrison's own fuller understanding of the horrors of slavery.

Wood's other lacunae are ambivalent texts like John Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. Wood quotes at length from a passage wherein a rebellious African, Neptune, is tortured to death. Wood notes the

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sophistication of Stedman's account but still insists it is "disempowering" through the use of a "black humour" (234). I would prefer to stress how the tortured slave is

empowered through his powerful signifying discourse that turns the trick on his oppressors by labeling them the disgusting uncivilized cannibals. Rather than being "simply incredible" (234) this dialogue posits a counter-hegemonic discourse that Stedman allows to burst through the frame of his Narrative. Wood's rather didactic account does not allow for the subtleties in the positions of the historical figures he discusses.

We can see this as well in his critique of anti-abolitionist propaganda. Thus he describes a Peterloo medal that pointed out the hypocrisy of the middle class abolitionist disavowal of working-class struggle in terms that sideline radical black British figures like Robert Wedderburn. Their reaction to slavery's abuses was immediately to compare them to the abuses of wage slavery in the industrial home- land so that an image like that on the Peterloo medal despite its distorted racial

signifiers would strike a real chord. The medal is just as much a contemporary semiotic shock tactic as the Description, it just did not have the middle-class currency of that image. In comparing the abuse of slaves and others in the British imperium, Wood contends that "(t)he slave's experience of violence, when it is submerged in a common pool of suffering innocence, is in danger of being erased by philanthropic enthusiasm" (274). Figures like Wedderburn would contend that the linking of the

whipping of slaves to that of sailors in the press-ganged navy and workers in the mills has little to do with "philanthropic enthusiasm" and much to do with the attempt to move to a genuine multi-racial class-based oppositional politics. His absence from Wood's study makes it all to easy to ignore or downplay such a politics in the overall argument. Another notable absentee here is Mary Prince whose 1831 History would have broadened out the narrative examples geographically and introduced more centrally the question of gender through a subaltern voice.

This excellent volume is already crucial in both my teaching and research in the field of the black Atlantic; for, despite faults of omission and commission, its intellec- tual range and comprehensive treatment of a wide range of images is exemplary and

deserving of the highest praise. Alan Rice

University of Central Lancashire

Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Sharon Patricia Holland. Duke University Press, 2000.

Perhaps it's not altogether ironic that a book about the strange ways black life (and death) haunt the conceits of American identity would also be "haunted" by a pair of black critical works, silent in the background of Sharon Patricia Holland's new book. If not for the implicit heteronormative bias which Holland reveals to be so exactly unproductive elucidating acts of formal influence (see chapter four), Raising the Dead:

Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity might be said to have descended directly from

CALLALOO

sophistication of Stedman's account but still insists it is "disempowering" through the use of a "black humour" (234). I would prefer to stress how the tortured slave is

empowered through his powerful signifying discourse that turns the trick on his oppressors by labeling them the disgusting uncivilized cannibals. Rather than being "simply incredible" (234) this dialogue posits a counter-hegemonic discourse that Stedman allows to burst through the frame of his Narrative. Wood's rather didactic account does not allow for the subtleties in the positions of the historical figures he discusses.

We can see this as well in his critique of anti-abolitionist propaganda. Thus he describes a Peterloo medal that pointed out the hypocrisy of the middle class abolitionist disavowal of working-class struggle in terms that sideline radical black British figures like Robert Wedderburn. Their reaction to slavery's abuses was immediately to compare them to the abuses of wage slavery in the industrial home- land so that an image like that on the Peterloo medal despite its distorted racial

signifiers would strike a real chord. The medal is just as much a contemporary semiotic shock tactic as the Description, it just did not have the middle-class currency of that image. In comparing the abuse of slaves and others in the British imperium, Wood contends that "(t)he slave's experience of violence, when it is submerged in a common pool of suffering innocence, is in danger of being erased by philanthropic enthusiasm" (274). Figures like Wedderburn would contend that the linking of the

whipping of slaves to that of sailors in the press-ganged navy and workers in the mills has little to do with "philanthropic enthusiasm" and much to do with the attempt to move to a genuine multi-racial class-based oppositional politics. His absence from Wood's study makes it all to easy to ignore or downplay such a politics in the overall argument. Another notable absentee here is Mary Prince whose 1831 History would have broadened out the narrative examples geographically and introduced more centrally the question of gender through a subaltern voice.

This excellent volume is already crucial in both my teaching and research in the field of the black Atlantic; for, despite faults of omission and commission, its intellec- tual range and comprehensive treatment of a wide range of images is exemplary and

deserving of the highest praise. Alan Rice

University of Central Lancashire

Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Sharon Patricia Holland. Duke University Press, 2000.

Perhaps it's not altogether ironic that a book about the strange ways black life (and death) haunt the conceits of American identity would also be "haunted" by a pair of black critical works, silent in the background of Sharon Patricia Holland's new book. If not for the implicit heteronormative bias which Holland reveals to be so exactly unproductive elucidating acts of formal influence (see chapter four), Raising the Dead:

Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity might be said to have descended directly from

1281 1281

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