Part of the transatlantic cultural turn in the humanities, Performing the Temple of Liberty focuses on visual depictions of a variety of real and fictional black characters during the slave trade, slavery, and their dismantling; simultaneously, it incorporates the related debates transacted through competing representations of national symbols—the Temple of Liberty, Britannia, and Columbia. Jenna Gibbs's rich, dynamic treatment of the theater and print culture as central to a series of transatlantic exchanges, some originating in London and others in Philadelphia, is the most original aspect of her book. Arguing persuasively that the popular slave figures “were multivalent characters whose meaning was contingent on context and in whom cultural producers fused discourses of antislavery, racism, and partisan satire” (45), Gibbs demonstrates that cultural producers also struggled over the meanings of the national symbols, all of which had English, American, French, and African inflections that varied over time. Gibbs shows that “theater and popular culture played a critical role in how ideas about human variety and race developed differently in Great Britain and the United States” (6); specifically, the 1810s through 1820s represented a watershed in which religion, philosophy, theater, and transatlantic exchange “helped create and disseminate newly racialized typologies of human difference” (89).

Individual chapters investigate a history of transatlantic representations that responded complexly not only to slavery and abolition but also to democracy, schemes to colonize Africa, and emancipation plans that created free black populations in Philadelphia and the West Indies, with an eye to the connections and tensions between class and racism. Gibbs analyzes a stunning array of visual analogues to social change that includes eighteenth-century forms such as farce, pantomime, sentimental comic opera, and visual satire/cartoons, and new nineteenth-century forms of racial ridicule and satire, such as the urban picaresque cartoon, blackface minstrelsy, the apparently opposite forms (but actually secret sharers) of racialized burlesque and utopian discourses of slavery and race, as well as other kinds of performances of enslavement and freedom. The chapters treating the 1820s and 1830s, the energetic heart of the project, illuminate Gibbs's two greatest strengths: her dialectical treatment of black characters and her deft synthesis of large swathes of history and social change, including slave revolts and free blacks' agitation concerning major labor and slavery issues in the United Sates, as well as American antiblack protests. The complexity that Gibbs unearths through her impressive comparative method deservedly will inspire other scholars.

Given my admiration of Performing the Temple of Liberty, I reluctantly note that Gibbs misreads Act 1.i of James Powell's pantomime Furibond; or, Harlequin Negro (1807) and miscasts the former slave/Harlequin figure as oversexualized. The Larpent Manuscript version, online versions, the extensive review in the European Magazine and London Review 53 (Jan.–June 1808), and David Worrall's Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period Subcultures 1773–1832 (2006), the secondary source that Gibbs cites, all remark that the personifications of Britannia and the Genius of Britain (and her attendants) release all of Sir Peevish Antique's plantation slaves from their chains, not just the future Harlequin, as Gibbs erroneously states (81–82), and Act 1.i concludes with the cruel slave driver's plunge into a dungeon from which he never returns. These symbolic anti-slavery events do not support Gibbs's related interpretation that “gradual emancipation was promoted [on the stage] over immediate liberty” (54, 79). No textual or performance evidence suggests that the former slave/Harlequin character can be interpreted partially as a “lascivious,” “good-for-nothing ‘Buck’” (198) whose “hypersexuality” presages the Jim Crow figure (54) because he marries his former owner's daughter Columbine, another commedia dell'arte figure, in the final London scene. Similarly, I find no evidence that this Harlequin character embodies “racialist anxiety about the threat of black emancipation to Britons' racial purity” (54, 82). To make these claims about the pantomime, Gibbs imports a quotation from a 1764 proslavery writer and a 1792 didactic writer. In 1787, Elizabeth Inchbald did not persuade George Colman the younger to make Yarico an African (2) rather than a native American character; consequently, the London and Philadelphia versions of his comic opera Inkle and Yarico (1787) did not differ in regard to Yarico's ethnicity (1, 2, 4, 246). In Isaac Bickerstaff's The Padlock (1768), Mungo is not a “blackface rebel slave” (47) “kept chained” (65). In padlocking the outside door to his Salamanca house, Don Diego imprisons in his absence the resentful Mungo, the duenna Ursula, and the marriageable Leonora to ensure her virginity; her suitor Leander is not a former Barbary slave (44) but only pretends that he had been.

The burden on comparative historians to master two national cultures is considerable; even with the supplementary “Essay on Sources” (297–302), Gibbs overlooks Dian Kriz's path-breaking Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies 1700–1840 (2008) that details both the art history and cultural milieu of printed and painted representations of slaves and free people of color, including some images in Gibbs's book. Influential British theater histories that situate black characters in the contexts of racism, slavery, abolition, and imperialism in several plays that Gibbs analyzes are also missing: Frank Felsenstein's English Trader Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yarico Reader (1999), David Worrall's Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment (2007), Michael Ragussis's Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain (2010), Daniel O'Quinn's Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London 1770–1800 (2005) and his Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium (2011). Joanne Pope Melish's Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (1998) and Catherine Molineux's Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (2012) offer similar and more in-depth analyses of some of the same images and cultural moments, but Gibbs does not engage them intellectually. On balance, however, Gibbs's important book exceeds its few shortcomings.