A haunting tour de force, Marcus Wood's recent book The Horrible Gift of Freedom offers a provocative and challenging examination of dominant sites and sights of memory and representation vis-à-vis Atlantic slavery. Providing an unflinching exploration of white abolitionist paternalism and skewed protest dynamics predicated upon white spiritual emancipation rather than black freedoms, Wood's book addresses the post-emancipation moment and its aftermath to rupture excessively self-congratulatory and celebratory accounts which continue to circulate in a white national imaginary. Where, he asks, is the space for black agency and authority in such dogmatic and troubled paradigms, ideologies and iconographies? These are the debates that Judie Newman, Bill Lawson, Fionnghuala Sweeney and Zoe Trodd examine in their in-depth reviews as they adopt an interdisciplinary perspective to assess Wood's book in terms of, variously, histories of gift exchange, shifting philosophical constructions of freedom, competing paradigms of nationalism and citizenship as well as, of course, fraught and frequently irreconciled legacies of white and black activism, protest and radical resistance. More tellingly still, as a work of art history, Wood's volume considers an array of materials including paintings, illustrations, lithographs, woodcuts and installations among many other forms to interrogate the political, intellectual, philosophical and theoretical as well as aesthetic dimensions embedded in representing no less than conferring this “horrible gift of freedom.”

Freedom has been getting a bad press of late, as a rhetorical construct. Laura Doyle's recent Freedom's Empire traces the prehistory of the rhetoric of freedom, in relation to race, back to the emergent transatlantic England of the 1620s in which the ruling race is envisaged as superior because of the capacity for liberty.Footnote ¹ Doyle argues that where freedom functions as a reigning value in Atlantic narratives, it behoves the critic to tread warily, and to consider foregrounding instead such values as social dignity, mutuality or economic justice. Other reconsiderations of the rhetoric of freedom include Marika Sherwood blowing the whistle on the British involvement in slavery after the abolition of the slave trade, not to mention a myriad of commentators on American presidential oratory.Footnote ² In like fashion, Marcus Wood's third monograph on the representation of slavery constitutes a blistering dissection of the archive of liberatory fantasy, building upon the central concept of freedom as an “Indian gift” (though he avoids that term) invariably represented as handed over from whites to grateful blacks, crushing the agency of the latter and buttressing the moral superiority of the former. Wood understands the abolition of slave status as sharing the features of a threshold gift (celebrating the passage from one state to another), thus involving an absolute transformation from bondage to perfect liberation. As he demonstrates, in representation after representation glorious white philanthropists (Wilberforce, Garrison, Lincoln, Schoelcher) combine with abstract female personifications (Liberty, Justice, Columbia) to break the chains of slaves, usually depicted kneeling in humble gratitude or capering ecstatically. Slave agency is thus discounted and the slave remains imprisoned within the postures that white society considers appropriate. Human beings have a tendency to invest in the idea of liberty without addressing the reality of how freedom can be achieved and lived through.

While this is an important book, its central concept needed to be framed more carefully. Wood asserts that there is very little serious scholarship on the social history of gift exchange, especially as it concerns human beings as commodities, and argues that gifts are about circulation, reciprocity, trust and mutual respect. This would be a surprise to Franz Boas, whose major work covered Kwakiutl “potlatch,” a form of gift exchange that became famous as the exemplification of the theory of conspicuous consumption advanced by Thorstein Veblen. Potlatch is fundamentally aggressive, designed to eclipse rivals and bolster status. Gift exchange as aggression is as old as the Trojan War. Eli Sagan's Cannibalism, Human Aggression and Cultural Form draws analogies (as did the Kwakiutl) between gift exchange and cannibalism.Footnote ³ Zora Neale Hurston uses it as the structural narrative principle of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in an economic context in which freedom is an ambiguous gift, and the donor is also the taker. In short, there is nothing very new about the paradigm of the aggressive gift.

Once Wood leaves the theory behind, however, the book unfolds a whole sequence of complex and illuminating readings of emancipation propagandas. Much as in his previous books, Wood faces problems in selecting from a mass of material on which scholarship still remains quite thin. In Blind Memory (2000) he focussed on the Middle Passage, slave escape, Uncle Tom and popular imagery, and slave torture, majoring on the analysis of woodcuts, early photography, print culture and political satire. The selective strategy offers a real advantage in the opportunity for thick analysis, though the downside is that the book tends to fall into discrete essays. Its successor, the superb Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (2002), focussed on the self-serving and self-reflexive nature of abolitionist literature, in which parallel fantasies of victim and victimizer are played out within the same imaginative arena, with the abolitionist constructing himself as superior victim. With the third volume, Wood engages with emancipation propaganda, in an argument inflected by Fanon's denunciation of the official mythologies that enshrined emancipation in the public consciousness. There is a magisterial debunking of the 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, as a text concerned to define the manner in which the black body could continue to be exploited. Wood also meticulously traces the evolution (across statues and visual images, in Europe, America and Brazil) of the figure of Liberty, who tends increasingly to feature as a demure white lady, even when wearing the Phrygian cap. The cap itself gets transferred from freed slaves to white women and then, as a consequence of the association with French revolutionary terror, moves to the margins of the image, often displayed on a pole at some distance from the heads below, as more nationalistic goddesses step into the frame. Black corporeality is progressively excised from images of emancipation; abolition is about abolitionist heroes, not slaves.

As Wood demonstrates, the ubiquity of the imagery and especially of what one might well consider examples of a slavery logo (the Abolition Seal, the slave ship Brookes, the slave Gordon's scarred back) makes it exceptionally difficult to mount a counterattack. Elizabeth Heyrick's 1825 pamphlet was an exception, with its image of a confident upright black man and the motto “I am a man, your brother.” Wood engagingly admits that his own parodic 2001 installation reworking the Brookes was a failure. Even modern textbooks tend to tell the same tale of great white men making history at a stroke. The compromised quality of the first Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's general prevarication are firmly ignored in most popular histories. Along the way Wood takes some memorable sideswipes at peddlers of moral jingoism, especially historians and broadcasters. Simon Schama is described as having “engrafted his loquaciousness onto the tall tale of the 1807 act”; Niall Ferguson as serving up piping-hot historical comfort food, with his account of abolition as the work of zealous activists. The commemorations of 2007 are lambasted as part of an attempt by government to gain control of the “Liberty” brand. Moira Stuart and Ms. Dynamite come out of the proceedings with credit, Melvyn Bragg (“the arts fixer and author of light fiction”) rather less so. The account of the errors and misrepresentations in the film Amazing Grace, financed by Philip Anschutz's Walden media and ruthlessly marketed by the Christian right in America and West Africa (including a private showing at the White House, and free tickets, popcorn and hotdogs for 1,500 Ghanaians) makes for sorry reading.

In contrast to the general orthodoxy of black passivity, Wood devotes considerable space to slave resistance, through flight, insurrection or cultural expression. While he establishes the centrality of images of Protestant martyrology to North American slave narratives, the major achievement here (and of the book itself) is an extended analysis of William Still's The Underground Railroad (1872), a text which is hardly ever discussed as a literary and visual artefact. Wood convincingly establishes the subtlety and sophistication of Still's critique of emancipatory fantasy, concealing within a formally conventional frame a series of rhetorical manoeuvres focussed on black agency. A striking example is Still's focus on slave escapes involving the packaging of slaves as freight. The story of Lear Green's escape in a chest is constructed in a fashion designed to dwarf the moral claims of even the keenest abolitionists, portraying her as a woman who liberated herself. The illustration (an early photograph) cleverly counters celebratory images of Henry “Box” Brown emerging from his rather larger and comfortably lined chest, and is artfully designed to evoke the claustrophobia of the box, the risks of death and the courage of the escapee. Brown may have been an ideal construction of white abolitionist publicity, but Still cuts his myth down to size. (He does not, however, ignore the unhappy fate of the white man who packaged Brown, who got caught and spent the best years of his life in the Richmond penitentiary.) Where Still draws on matryrological material he does so in subtle and clever ways, foregrounding the physical suffering of the escapees. Wood's analysis of the language and imagery effectively demonstrates how Still had invented a new semiotics of liberty, countering the orthodoxy of white celebrations of emancipation in all sorts of imaginative ways. This chapter alone will put Still onto any serious course on the literature of slavery. There is one lost opportunity in the discussion of images of slave resistance. Wood does nothing much with theatrical representations. Hazel Waters's thesis that the slave on stage evolved from heroic Oroonoko to Jim Crow between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century would have fitted rather well with his analysis of the ways in which abolition produced a lack of black agency.Footnote ⁴ He also maintains that few works of art show slave rebellion or insurrection. That needs qualification. Insurrection was a feature of British and American stage plays, including such perennial favourites as Thomas Morton's The Slave (1817), though the settings tended to be distanced in time or space. Bird's The Gladiator (1831), performed six weeks after the Turner rebellion, involves slave auction, separation of families and full-scale revolt, though the hero is Spartacus.

On the other hand, Wood is at his best with visual images, particularly in a highly original and fascinating account of commemorative stamps, small, highly mobile, beautifully produced images which permeate every corner of the globe and may be paratextually framed by a variety of cancellation marks and First Day Covers (FDCs). The British commemoratives of 2007 are construed as highly conservative, essentially focussing on heroes of abolition (Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, Hannah More and William Wilberforce, as portrait busts, joined by Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sanchez). America was slightly more adventurous. The 1963 US five-cent stamp has an FDC which commemorates the Emancipation Proclamation with an image of eight white patriarchs (Lincoln and his cabinet) while the stamp shows only a broken chain. On the other hand, Harriet Tubman (thirteen cents in 1961) holds her ground, glaring out with a rifle. The Caribbean is more daring. Martinique features instruments of torture, Haiti celebrates black violence, and Cuba displays a socialist-realist image of Toussaint alongside black slaves butchering white planters. Other countries also tend to suggest a complicated or compromised history. (Trinidad features Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery.) Wood dissects the British commemoratives mercilessly. The blacks are reproduced from poorer-quality etchings, the whites from oil paintings. The whites are positioned against a background of writing; the blacks connected to images of trade and travel. What he fails to consider is the crucial difference between British and other national stamps: the presence of the queen's head. It is possible to read the commemoratives differently if one observes the direction of the queen's implied gaze. The stamps, unusually, vary the position of the head to look right or left. As a result, on the More stamp she shares the gaze and her position with the slave Yamba (the only black breasts on display in a British stamp). On the seventy-two-pence stamp the queen eyeballs a Native American; on the others she looks towards the central figure but also beyond and behind, at a map of the black Atlantic, a petition and the slave ship Brookes. Read in that way (mischievously perhaps, but Wood tends to encourage this level of engagement) the queen manages rather successfully to upstage all the abolitionist heroes and set up an implied dialogue behind their backs.

Marcus Wood writes, “The Horrible Gift of Freedom was a depressing book to write.” I think for many of us it was a depressing book to read. The idea that the “emancipation moment” was a good thing for both the formerly enslaved and the former slaveholders is a well-accepted proposition, Fanon's words of warning aside. Fanon understood that giving freedom, as a gift, was problematic for both the givers and the recipients. The relationship between the givers and the receivers was already one of superiors, whites who are the freedom givers, to inferiors, blacks who had been enslaved by whites and are now being given their freedom. The “emancipation moment” when whites ceremoniously gave the “gift of freedom” to blacks was still circumscribed in the superior–inferior understanding of the moral status of blacks. In this regard, those people held as slaves were denied both humanity and autonomy at the time of their enslavement and regretfully at the moment of emancipation. One might think that at the moment of emancipation there was indeed a feeling of mutual regard and respect on the part of the parties to the act of emancipation. Or, at least, that whites had come to recognize the humanity of blacks and thus emancipation. But it is at this point that Wood thinks a masterful bit of trickery and treachery takes place. Wood's use of Fanon's reading of this moment is insightful.

The view of the slave as inferior is not only kept in the emancipation moment, this inferiority is reinforced by emancipation. As Phillip Honenberger writes about the relationship of the slave to the master after emancipation,

While I have argued that there is a value to the “emancipation moment even if it did not achieve the goal of incorporating blacks fully in the social and political life of the United States,”Footnote ⁶ the sad fact remains that any hope that the change in the slave's legal status meant a change in how the slaves were viewed as moral beings was far from being an established fact. It is on this point that the intellectual rubber meets the road, so to speak.

Wood's project starts from the ideological and philosophical position that many will find already invested with the roots and causes of much of contemporary oppression and exploitation: the liberal conception of the autonomous/unencumbered person.Footnote ⁷ While I will not discuss these concerns, I want to note that at the outset Professor Wood sets the stage for both historical and philosophical debate. This said, at least presently the notion that slavery was wrong because of both its treatment and its regard of Africans as not fully human, and therefore was deplorable and needed to be ended, must be admitted. There is something morally wrong with taking freedom from another human being. Freedom is something that is a natural aspect of what it means to be human. Wood draws on Rousseau, “Mankind is born free …” (3). Here he situates the understanding of the moral status of the African in the Enlightenment understanding of the autonomous moral agent. The utmost respect and regard must be given to the individual's ability to be an agent in the design of his or her life. This means that the natural state of man and woman is that of a free self-regulating being. Hobbes,Footnote ⁸ Locke,Footnote ⁹ and KantFootnote ¹⁰ start with this basic understanding of what it means to be human. Locke's words on this subject are pertinent because of both his involvement in the slave tradeFootnote ¹¹ and the significance his writing has for our understanding of personal liberty. Locke begins the Two Treatises of Government with the claim that “Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that ’tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for't.”Footnote ¹² Locke argues that given the natural liberty and freedom of each man to govern himself, no man could have absolute power over another man. With this emphasis on both liberty and autonomy it is no wonder that writers like Locke, Rousseau, and Kant attempt to show that any restrictions on human agency have to be justified. This, of course, raises questions about the nature of reason and freedom, but it is clear that a person can only by his or her consent be put under the power of another human. Indeed, John Locke goes to great lengths in the Second Treatise of Government to show that slavery cannot be justified unless under very special circumstances. It can be justified, however; but what makes Locke's work problematic is that the enslavement of Africans as chattel slaves and the hereditary nature of that form of slavery does not seem to meet any of his justification criteria for slavery cited in the Second Treatise. Thus there is the question whether Africans were seen as humans that deserved respect as autonomous beings. There is modest agreement that Locke and Kant were racists,Footnote ¹³ but disagreement as to the impact this racism has in/on their philosophical positions as opposed to their daily lived positions. This is another debate we must put aside as we examine Wood's position.

What I want to press for the sake of clarification is that if we start with the liberal conception of the person as autonomous agent, there is no recognition moment of the enslaved as human. The enslaved person was a human that was wrongly enslaved. Actions may have to be taken to “get” the enslavers to respect the humanity of the enslaved. These actions can be performed both by those members of the oppressing group sympathetic to the plight of the enslaved and by those members of the enslaved that have the social mobility to engage the arguments and practices that deny the humanity of the enslaved. I have in mind Wilberforce in England and Frederick Douglass in the United States in this regard. There are, of course, many more persons that could be cited in this struggle for respect.

Wood correctly starts with the view that the enslaved Africans were fully human at the time of enslavement and at the emancipation moment. Yet the celebrations of emancipation as depicted in paintings, prints, sculptures, and such imply the manner in which the lowly slave should be beholden to the benign white man. The former masters and the former slaves do not meet here as moral or social equals. How could they? There had been at least four hundred years of social and moral demarcation between those blacks enslaved and the whites who had enslaved them. In this regard there had been four hundred years of denying the humanity of blacks. Did whites know that Africans were human? Of course they did. Did they disregard this fact? Of course they did. Here Wood's use of Fanon becomes interesting and provocative. Did the long period of enslavement impact on the psychology of both the enslaved and the enslavers? Of course it did. How did the formerly enslaved deal with emancipation? I want to suggest that in the United States the formerly enslaved had to take the position that regardless of how whites viewed them, human or not, blacks in the United States had to act as if they expected respect as fully developed humans and citizens. In part this is because of the expression of liberalism in the founding of the United States. The idea that each individual has moral worth has to be the benchmark for understanding what freedom means in the United States. “We hold these truths to be self evident …” This is why blacks in the United States envisioned and acted as if they were full citizens after emancipation. We now realize that a change in legal status, slave and property, does not mean that there is a concomitant change in one's moral status, citizen and fully human. Many whites in the United States after Emancipation and the Civil War Amendments did not recognize the formerly enslaved as full members of either the state or the human community. Black leaders in the United States understood that blacks had to act as if new black citizens were full citizens and fully human, and also that they should be accorded the rights and recognition of both these statuses. There was also the hope or belief that whites would now come to respect and regard blacks as full citizens and human beings.

We see the hope for respect of blacks as both citizens and humans in the writings of Frederick Douglass. Douglass was happy about the ending of slavery; he viewed his involvement and the ongoing struggle of other blacks, including black troops, as a sign of blacks fighting for their rights. But Douglass, too, is taken by the “emancipation moment.” He thinks that whites will now begin to treat blacks with the respect that should be accorded human beings. When this does not happen, Douglass, perhaps, too late, realizes that emancipation was a fraud.Footnote ¹⁴ White attitudes about blacks had not changed and according to Wood these attitudes were reinforced by the iconic representation of blacks as objects of white benevolence during the act of emancipation. Wood again citing Fanon notes that Fanon's analysis pins down the ingenious limitations of the vision of freedom that the ex-slave societies produced. The myth of the emancipation moment was their official rhetorical response to the unbearable horror of Atlantic slavery, their way, our way, of dressing up the obscenity of what had been done (30). What we have, then, is at least two serious problems for the emancipation moment: the failure to accord the status of autonomous beings to blacks before emancipation and the closely related failure to include blacks fully in the scheme of emancipation. This meant that some thought and discussion had to be given to what freedom meant for both blacks and whites after emancipation. There has to be an active engagement between the parties of emancipation. Indeed it is similar to the ending of a war. The parties must address their concerns and negotiate the manner in which state policies and they will interact after the fighting stops. This type of discussion requires a feeling of mutual respect between the parties. This seems to be consistent with the liberal model. Consider Hobbes here and the move from the state of nature to civil society that requires the mutual respect of all participants.Footnote ¹⁵ Regarding the emancipation and incorporation of the formerly enslaved, respect for the opinions of the formerly enslaved is never even hinted at as being necessary. All that was needed was that white folks do the right thing. Blacks should then be grateful for the gift of freedom. This situation puts blacks, in the United States, in a precarious position. They are expected to behave as if they were ready for full citizenship without any of the experiences of what it meant to be free or without any active engagement or involvement in the policies needed to make their transition sustainable.

Surprisingly, or not, Booker T. Washington was cognizant of this point. I want to cite a rather long quote from Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery. Washington describes the events of the day that the enslaved blacks were told that they now had the gift of freedom:

One has to be struck by the similarity of Washington's words and the writing of Wood and Fanon a hundred years later. Washington seems to understand what Wood and Fanon would later express:

Without active engagement between the former slaves and the former masters about what freedom meant to each, the slave finds him- or herself only slightly better off than before emancipation. Douglass had noted that at least in slavery whites felt some obligation to feed and clothe the slaves.Footnote ¹⁷ At the “emancipation moment,” whites get to experience a feeling of their moral largesse and slaves are left to fend for themselves in a world that still views them as unworthy of total freedom, respect and humanity. Again Washington understood what this meant in the treatment of blacks as citizens and human beings. He writes,

Washington, if we view his work at Tuskegee in this light, is taking on the task left undone by the state before emancipation of the enslaved. Blacks, according to Washington, had the ability to be good citizens and to exhibit the values of being self-respecting, albeit to the gaze of whites. Blacks only needed the opportunity to develop the skills. Washington thinks that the masses of poor blacks have the ability to learn the skills necessary to sustain themselves after slavery as they moved to modernity. But as important and contra Du Bois, they do not need a talented tenth to lead them, when they could themselves teach other blacks. Washington, it seems, understood the need to view blacks after emancipation as full members of both the state and the human community. But he understood that the move from slavery to freedom was not automatic; nonetheless blacks had the mental ability needed to be productive members of the society as full citizens. Washington writes,

To repeat, he knew that blacks had the ability, if given the opportunity. This reading of Washington also highlights why Washington and Du Bois would be at odds. Du Bois thought that there could be no hint that blacks were not ready for freedom. Any language that blacks were not ready was taken as an assault on black people. The way for blacks to advance was to push for their right to full participation as fully autonomous humans. Of course this meant giving whites no hint of black inferiority. Washington, like Du Bois, understood the need to advocate for full humanity of blacks but he also understood the problems this “freedom” brought to blacks given their experiences in slavery. When Washington notes that blacks felt a deep affection for their masters and mistresses he was stating something that had to be true given the history of social interaction between those persons enslaved and their enslavers. He is not claiming that they should feel that way, but that they do. But to Washington's credit he had no doubts about blacks becoming full and productive members of the state. Yet he understood that this “becoming” had to be instituted by those blacks with political and educational clout while using the funding of whites who may not share the same beliefs about the humanity of blacks. Washington was expressing a truth about the impact of emancipation on many blacks in the South. They lacked certain social skills not because they were inferior or nonhuman but because slavery had denied them the opportunity to develop themselves to the best of their abilities. Washington understood the failure of the United States to do what was necessary to prepare blacks for freedom. There was no active engagement with blacks about what freedom demanded and how it would change race relations. I thank Professor Wood for this insight.

In sum, Wood reminds us that the emancipation moment has been used to engender a feeling of the goodness of whites as emancipators and the debt of gratitude that blacks as emancipated should feel towards whites. I think this is right but I find Wood's use of Fanon problematic for the US case, if one is going to use the liberal paradigm which seems to have in it an implicit understanding of the recognition of other humans as worthy of regard and respect. This seems to make the problem of recognition fuzzy in the Hegelian and Fanon sense, in that one can ask, “what does it mean to have whites recognize you, if you and they know that you are a human?” Remember, Douglass refused to argue for the humanity of blacks. The use of the liberal paradigm raises questions about the role of struggle in the process of respecting the humanity of other persons. See, for example, Douglass's discussion of violence as a form of moral suasion. True, they can take away your freedom; I am unclear as to what it means to have them recognize you in this context. Do the enslaved have to do something to make the enslavers realize that they are treating human beings wrongly? If you have to do something to force other people to respect you, when respect of the individual is built into what it means to be a human, this shows that something has gone wrong. The question is, why have whites not respected blacks?

In remembrance of my own youth, I recall the picture of the young black boy standing at the feet of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial looking up with a pious gaze at the great emancipator. I knew that the picture made me and many blacks feel uneasy and Wood helps us to understand why. It causes us forget that the people that set up the emancipation moment are the same people who enslaved us, it works to engender an unnecessary feeling of gratitude for the “gift of freedom,” and it makes us misread and disregard persons like Booker T. Washington who were more astute about the “gift” than we could imagine. The Horrible Gift of Freedom is depressing but insightful. What a gift, this freedom!

Marcus Wood's Horrible Gift is a fitting sequel to his work on the visual archive of the representation of slavery in Britain and the US. Its focus is on the representation of the threshold moment of emancipation, and its significance in the nineteenth century as a strategy of British moral aggrandizement and representative containment, in the period following the abolition of the North Atlantic trade in 1807. The scope of the book is such that this response can only be limited and partial, and can in no way do justice to the complexity of the work as a whole.

Gift is a book very much in two halves. Opening with key observations around the narrative of emancipation that insightfully casts formerly enslaved persons as “iconically imprisoned” (17) within a symbolic framework that, in the British case, underpinned an imperial agenda that fused economic and civilizing missions, Wood points to the pervasiveness, and misleading nature, of the propagandist agenda of ethical statehood that underwrote this process. In a welcome, and somewhat unexpected, return to the neglected Black Skin, White Masks, Wood centres his critique of official memory in Franz Fanon's refusal of the emancipatory benevolence of the French state, specifically the positioning of the emancipated and their descendants as eternally grateful recipients of the freedom gifted from the same benign source responsible for their initial enslavement.

That iconic imprisonment is nowhere more evident than in the pervasiveness of the abolitionist stamp of the kneeling slave, which, as Wood demonstrates, came to underwrite the post-emancipation relationship between the formerly enslaved and their imagined liberators. This identification of the codependent symbolism of patriarchy, paternalism, and freedom in the aftermath of 1807 provides for a rich range of critical possibilities. Those possibilities are pursued in chapter 2 through examination of the use of classical abstraction to place the political values of the trade's abolition outside the historical narrative of western European responsibility for its initiation, or the profits enjoyed by European powers as a result, and to deflect attention from the emancipatory currents of revolution that flowed across and around the Atlantic at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

Significant contributions to the debate, which also pick up on the insight regarding the meaning imposed on black freedom by former slave states (i.e. that former slave states characterize freedom as a gift bestowed rather than a recognized part of the human condition, or even a right asserted or won in the face of adversity), are Wood's readings of the symbolic significance of the Phrygian bonnet, or liberty cap, as it appears in francophone and Anglo-American representative contexts. In the former, in the early days of revolution at least, the cap was depicted as worn, existing therefore in holistic relation with the subject of the representation. The indicative examples chosen are Jean-Louis Darcis's twin copper engravings of male and female busts, entitled Moi libre aussi, together able to signify freedom both as a state of being and as a potent form of individual agency which takes the form of revolutionary citizenship. Unlike British and Anglo-American nineteenth-century uses of the symbolism of the bonnet, in which it is not only not worn and therefore not owned by the liberated subject, but frequently visually marginalized and placed well out of literal reach, examples from the francophone Atlantic suggest a very different configuration of liberty: a moment in fact of contiguous emergence for modern citizenship and the modern state. It is worth noting that the parallel positioning of Anglo and francophone representational responses allows a glimpse of the importance of mediating the relationship between European polities as well as containing the tensions between what in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political worlds were considered the political heartlands, and the economic and ethical peripheries.

One of the overarching themes of the second half of Gift concerns the problem that the UK seemed to have in the recent celebrations in depicting the agency of the enslaved in effecting his/her own emancipation, and the emancipation of others. What as readers we can infer from Wood's discussion here, though it is never directly stated, is that part of the problem may be with historical and actual Anglo models of citizenship, which privilege an isolated and therefore incomplete ideal of “liberty,” which until recently has rarely been qualified by any suggestion of “equality” and never by the final, and democratically necessary, condition “fraternity.” In the US case, the idealized “pursuit of happiness” (property) as a third term might be said to compound rather destabilize the interreliance between statehood and slavery, and the entrenched inequities that are its legacy. Might this hierarchy of value – with liberty first, equality a poor second and fraternity all but absent – be the enabling condition of the paternalism that inflects not just historical but contemporary official engagements with abolition and emancipation (and therefore requires the instatement of a “great man” to occupy the spaces left by these absent terms)?

The author's frustration with the shortcomings of the official memorialization projects and ceremonies of 2007 is clear, as is the reflective and self-reflexive consideration of the kinds of aesthetic interventions that helped or might help to circumvent the dead end of Whig history in its contemporary performative moment. I confess that I do not identify with the British state or any of its moral victories throughout the centuries, and therefore expect little of it. It seems that Wood's engagement with the inadequacies of official memory stems from the hope that the radicalism, the ideals, the “possible futures,” to coin a term, that enslavement produced and emancipation or liberation conceivably enabled stems from a belief that these things are possible to incorporate to new narratives of British statehood.

Black-diaspora politics and culture have been historically internationalist, transnationalist, pan-nationalist and, in the postwar period, anticolonially nationalist, and the very idea that any Western, former slaveholding or slave-trading state should feel the need for such a restrictive approach is testament to the moral leverage and revolutionary potential of black aesthetic expression. To turn this around: is it not aesthetically more desirable that self-emancipation, self-possession, remain excesses that the neo-liberal state must always struggle to contain, particularly given the moral security provided by Britain and the US in the aftermath of World War II, which (as noted by Gilroy) remains the defining ethical context for contemporary British understandings of much British history?

This point regarding the potential of excess is one taken up in chapter 4, which revisits some of the textual and visual memories from the slavery archive addressed in Woods's earlier work, Blind Memory (2000): slave narratives and their visual accompaniments, the tales of runaways, the pervasive iconography of minstrelsy and intractable legacy of Uncle Tom, and the entrenched race prejudice of popular print media in the nineteenth century. “No-go Areas and the Emancipation Moment” tackles the contested terrain of agency, specifically of the agency of enslaved persons in representations of the moment, or indeed the miraculously imagined state, of liberation. This distinction usefully separates depictions of emancipation – a gift given as part, from the enslaved then liberated person's point of view, of a zero-sum game of legal adjustment that leaves the frameworks of power intact – from those more trangressive, illegal and unsanctioned escapes from the vocabulary, and realities, of patriarchal benevolence. The range of examples addressed includes Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); cases from William Stills's The Underground Railroad (1872), which includes the texts and plates evidencing the escapes of Lear Green, Abram Galloway and Richard Eden, and Henry Box Brown; and a discussion of the cult of slavery at the Great Exhibition (1851), which featured Hiram Powers's marble The Greek Slave side by side with her “Virginian Slave” companion, fresh from the pages of Punch. In this last William Wells Brown is seen to play a starring role.

The analyses of the Stills tableaux emphasize Stills's identification of Brown as a point of comparison for the other examples he (Stills) includes in his collection. Wood points to the tensions that exist between Brown's initial self-emancipation, achieved through enactment of the ritual of burial and risk of death, and the celebrity his subsequent re-enactments of the rite of passage and its happy outcome as public spectacles in the US and UK occasioned. Stills, as Wood reads him, is keen to point to Brown's escape as representative of the kinds of measure taken by enslaved individuals, in conjunction with others, in pursuit of the prize which Brown (perhaps Brown alone) is repeatedly (and publicly) able to claim. Picking up on Stills's tendency to use the comparison with Brown as a way of emphasizing the dangers that attended many of the escapees in their bid for freedom, dangers only possible to articulate properly through gothic suggestion, Wood argues that these narratives invoke the cult of Protestant martyrdom in order to express the extent of the suffering endured, and all express clear-cut instances of self-emancipation that takes place outside paternalistic abolitionism.

This emphasis on religious imagery, symbolism and narrative models is important, but it might be usefully combined with a discussion of gender and codes of representation. The visual instances cited resonate beyond the martyrological context and are inflected by other codes that attend both messianic and marianistic representations in Western art. Christian redemption is schematically encoded in the slave narrative in the manner in which the journey from the darkness of slavery to the light of freedom is charted, providing one of the key instances of the messianic potential of the slave who lives again following his or her resurrection from the death of slavery at the moment of emancipation. Casting Lear Green within such a framework might allow for an even more extended reading of the representational radicalism of her depicted moment of self-emancipation. The light that shines in from the left of the picture on Green as she emerges from confinement in the box in which she has hidden is reminiscent of the miraculous light that shines, from the North, in representations of Virgin and Child in some Christian religious painting. Alone in the picture frame, Green in the accompanying narrative occupies the space of resurrection, and as we subsequently learn, of coming motherhood, in a narrative and visual network that recalls Sojourner Truth's liberationist theological statement from her “Aint I a Woman?” speech at Akron, Ohio, that “Christ come from … God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him.”

I suppose my point here is that the ways in which we read visual and narrative art can be as important in generating critical meaning as the artworks themselves. Some readings may even run the risk of reinscribing radical instances of self-emancipation back into paternalistic or patriarchal discursive structures, whose constraining authority in the realm of gender relations remains firm. There may be a danger, for example, that readings of Harriet Jacob's work which position it within the realms of nineteenth-century pornography (quite different from suggesting the strategic adaptations of narrative strains from Richardson by Jacob) reposition it within the realm of sexually exploitative consumption, and undermine the potential solidarity and shelter provided by the female-authored frame, which, for all its faults, attempts to facilitate a discussion of the gendered experience of the enslaved woman by substantiating and supporting Jacob's address to sexual and domestic violence.

Gift contains instances where the work of art itself is so resistant to subsequent constraint, so liberated, that it seems impossible that this should happen. This includes the Darcis profiles, and the self-possessed, and possessing, gaze of Benoist's gorgeous Portrait d'une négresse. Described by Wood as “a unique expression of black liberty rendered by a white artist … [manifesting] [h]er humanity … with a complex force which … no other portrait of a black person painted by a white person has ever achieved” (Wood 49), Portrait is also one of the few examples of portraiture by a woman artist. This may help explain the painting's particular charge, in which the male gaze is excluded, displaced, arguably made irrelevant, by the intimacy and emancipatory logic of this particular aesthetic transaction.

Conversely, the discussion of William Wells Brown's triumph at the Great Exhibition runs the gauntlet of some difficult gender politics, occurring as it does in the context of the profoundly disturbing twin images of objectified white and abject black femininity: Powers's Greek Slave and Punch's parodic engraving of “The Virginian Slave” placed alongside her Greek sister in the exhibition by Brown. There is much to be said about these individual representations, and the gender politics of their deliberate juxtaposition in the wider context of the Exhibition. That those politics remain intractable and continue to bedevil even twenty-first-century feminism is something that might need to be acknowledged. The problems that attend the images are not, I believe, entirely resolved by reading Wells Brown's assertive patrolling of the Exhibition space, a young white British woman on his arm, as an instance of self-liberation that presages the potential for a racially egalitarian utopian future. Control of the performative, physical, representative and kinship spaces of gender remains a question of importance to the discussion of slavery, emancipation, liberty and state formation across the Atlantic world, something each of the illustrations which contain female figures – as abstractions, as objectifications, as abject, as creative self-redeemers – helps, in different ways, to demonstrate. It is probably old hat to say that across the modern Atlantic representations of gender are always overdetermined by questions of enslavement, and vice versa, but no critique of paternalism, even Fanon's, can be complete if it does not at least attempt to address both together.

Sometime in 2008, I noticed two manifestations of “the horrible gift of freedom.” The first emerged in the context of the US presidential election. During the many months of the campaign, historians and journalists frequently noted Barack Obama's use of Abraham Lincoln. Obama paraphrases Lincoln in most of his speeches, claimed one Harvard historian. Obama should ask himself “what would Lincoln do?” suggested Newsweek's lead writer. Meanwhile, Ron English's street painting Abraham Obama melded the faces of Obama and Lincoln into a composite portrait. But this Lincoln fever overlooked the fact that Obama often displayed more interest in black abolitionists than in the “white man's president” (as Frederick Douglass once termed Lincoln). In numerous speeches between 2006 and 2008, Obama quoted from Douglass, including the West India Emancipation speech (1857), with its reminder that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” Obama's book The Audacity of Hope (Crown, 2006) remembers Douglass, Denmark Vesey and Harriet Tubman, and even acknowledges that John Brown's willingness to spill blood helped “force the issue of a nation half slave and half free.” From slaves, black abolitionists and radicals, Obama learned the lesson that “absolute truths may well be absolute,” he explains. On these and numerous other occasions, Obama positioned himself in the African American protest tradition. Yet commentators focussed on the Lincoln echoes.

Another “horrible gift of freedom” was on offer at the same time from the contemporary anti-slavery movement. In 2008 a short-lived US-based anti-slavery organization called Let Us Go adapted the abolitionist woodcut Am I Not a Man and a Brother? for its logo: a color photograph of a twenty-first-century slave's clasped hands, shackled wrists and outstretched arms. Then the organization CHASTE (Churches Alert to Sex Trafficking across Europe) distributed a poster based on the abolitionist broadside Stowage of the British Slave Ship Brookes. The slave ship was now a van, the tiny silhouetted bodies now trafficked west across Europe rather than the Atlantic.

Observing these sites of memory, things seemed just as bad as Marcus Wood suggests in The Horrible Gift of Freedom. The new version of Am I Not a Man and a Brother? reinscribed the visual rhetoric of passivity, humility and gratitude that Wood critiques in nineteenth-century abolitionism, while the updated Stowage of the British Slave Ship Brookes became, in Wood's words, another piece of “the horrible flotsam and jetsam that the Brookes now tows along with it” (277). Meanwhile, by privileging Lincoln over Douglass in the construction of a pantheon of heroes for Obama, commentators established Obama's debt to the sixteenth President. This language of legacy implied in turn that, were it not for Lincoln, a man of color in the United States would not even be free – never mind running a strong campaign for the presidency. Between the lines of this “Abraham Obama” narrative lurked what Wood describes as the story of heroic and morally pure white heroes who bestowed freedom upon a nameless, powerless mass of black slaves – a story told over and over again by the dominant cultures of the slave diaspora and exposed by Wood in its various forms across the centuries.

In fact, though a large portion of Wood's book deals with the 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of the British slave trade, his visual and rhetorical analysis can be applied to the 2008 US election, ongoing campaigns against slavery in today's world and the bicentennial celebrations of Lincoln's birth in 2009. Inevitably, it also will illuminate the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in 2013 and of the US Civil War between 2011 and 2015. Many commemorations of the Proclamation and the Civil War will accomplish what Wood terms the “great emancipation swindle” (28): they will offer celebratory cultural myths of Lincoln the great white emancipator (and perhaps his fellow white gift horses, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner), downplay the likes of John Brown (who was all take and no give) and ignore black heroism. As during the 2007 bicentennial, the emancipation fantasy of the 2013 sesquicentennial will manipulate history in order to naturalize the political status quo and achieve consent to the existing hierarchy. It will shore up paternalistic power structures and bring to US slavery a corrupt closure that will undermine calls for social change. Ideally, however, Wood's paradigm will have equipped us to dismantle the inevitable propaganda of the sesquicentennial. Perhaps we might identify the “archive of liberation fantasy” (2) at work and reject its “superior sorrow” and “theatricalized sadness” (354). Perhaps we might focus instead on black agency and memory within the slavery and abolition archive. Rather than weeping a little over slavery's horrors before moving on, perhaps we might use the 150-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation to think about slavery's living legacy.

Wood's timely analysis is also valuable for its expansion of existing scholarship. The book joins and challenges the texts of memory studies. For example, some scholars have theorized the memory of slavery in twentieth-century black culture. Most focus on the act of reclaiming and redeeming oppression, and most discuss the past as a collective and individual burden. For example, in Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Ron Eyerman argues that the trauma of slavery has been central to black collective identity, which was forged out of a point of origin in a common past. Many more scholars have examined white southern memories of US slavery. They often focus on white women's memory projects and/or nostalgia for the faithful slave. These include studies of Aunt Jemima, Mammy and the whole plantation mythology that tried to ignore the fact of emancipation (never mind imagine it as a gift from all-powerful whites to grateful slaves). Then there is an even larger body of work on Civil War memory, including David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001) and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), Jim Cullen's The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), William Alan Blair's Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Gary W. Gallagher's Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Equally crowded is the terrain of Lincoln memory, including Merrill Peterson in Lincoln in American Memory (Oxford University Press, 1995) and Barry Schwartz in his two books, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and Abraham Lincoln in the Post-heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Wood both performs an equivalent survey of emancipation memory and offers a new paradigm for these related topics of slavery memory, Lincoln memory and Civil War memory.

As well, his paradigm will aid scholarship on the memory of anti-slavery. Relatively few scholars have looked at the memory of black anti-slavery heroes – notably Scot French in The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) and Celeste-Marie Bernier in the forthcoming “Characters of Blood”: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination. After reading Wood's book, it might be tempting to assume that the relative paucity of scholarship on memories of black anti-slavery action reflects a lack of sources: perhaps all potential representations of black activism and slave resistance were crushed by the sheer weight of “the horrible gift of freedom.” Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Wood's book shows us what black intellectuals, historians, activists and protest writers were up against as they remembered slavery, abolitionism and emancipation. In the decades after the Civil War and throughout the twentieth century, they not only confronted a white southern nostalgia that supported the continuation of lynching – emancipation had made black people miserable and uncivilized, proposed the plantation pastoral, and lynching would restore the kind of racial hierarchy that the loyal ex-slave needed – but also a mainstream, white fantasy of emancipation that reduced white responsibility for mob violence, segregation, peonage and poverty. Wood's analysis of white emancipation propaganda does not so much erase black memories of slavery and emancipation as reveal the host of images that black writers, artists and activists sought to counter.

And counter they did. Former slaves and their descendants observed the “horrible gift of freedom” being waved in their direction. But from the 1870s onward, they called it an empty gift box. Though black Americans are nominally free, they are actually still slaves, observed Frederick Douglass in 1888. In the same speech he termed “so-called emancipation” a “stupendous fraud,” pointing to peonage, disfranchisement and lynching as evidence that the old master class still ruled. Knocking white gift horses in the mouth, black writers and activists forged their own usable past. Not only rejecting the proffered gift of freedom as an empty gesture, they remembered slave resistance and radical and black abolitionists rather than Lincoln and other white freedom symbols. For every celebration of Lincoln, they celebrated Frederick Douglass or John Brown. For every depiction of Liberty as a beautiful young white woman, Britannia or Columbia, African American writers and artists depicted Liberty as an elegant Toussaint Louverture, an imposing Sojourner Truth or a solemn Nat Turner. In so doing, they rejected the story of linear progress and narrated instead a story of loss and recovery. Arguing that the work of abolition had been undone, that lynching and segregation had returned the country to its pre-emancipation state, they looked to antebellum examples of heroism as they began to refight the abolitionist battle. Rather than celebrating emancipation, they remembered the anti-slavery struggle and turned abolitionism into a living protest legacy.

Unlike the mythology that Wood identifies, this was no triumphant celebration of the past. African American activists and protest writers often used the memory of abolitionist failures to expand the limits of the possible in their own times. For example, when W. E. B. Du Bois explained that the NAACP should avoid the color line and embrace full and equal power for its black leaders, he used the limited interracialism of anti-slavery societies as a negative spur: the NAACP should not be a “group of white philanthropists helping the Negro like the Anti-Slavery societies,” he insisted in 1914. Like other black intellectuals and activists in the US, Du Bois embraced vision and defeat – using all the past's resources to help create a different future, and identifying clear legacies of slavery alongside directly applicable lessons from abolitionism's failures and successes. And when they did remember emancipation – especially at the semicentennial in 1913 and the centennial in 1963 – they emphasized that to remember emancipation meant to seek emancipatory goals, not celebrate their achievement. Douglass, Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., and numerous other activists cut through the noise of white paternalist amnesia, revealed by Wood, as well as through white supremacist nostalgia, with protest memory – memory of protest and memory used to protest. Critiquing the limitations in practice of emancipation's ideals, remembering black abolitionists and rebel slaves rather than great white emancipators, they tried to find a usable past amid the past's failures, successes, contradictions and unfinished work. Even as the dominant culture thrust the “horrible gift of freedom” into their hands, black activists sought and found politically engaged memories that functioned as liberating countermyths.

They continue to do so today. Wood is absolutely right to critique the “Wilberfest” approach to the bicentennial in the UK. Even when government officials did try to connect the commemoration to contemporary human rights issues, the ghost of William Wilberforce hovered near. British Home Secretary John Reid even signed the European Convention on Human Trafficking at Wilberforce's desk. In the US, the director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, John Miller, summoned the “spirit” of Wilberforce and Garrison. But alongside these repackagings of the “horrible gift,” anti-slavery groups themselves have continued the tradition of protest memory. The organization Free the Slaves – the American sister group to Anti-slavery International – aids community self-liberations and annually awards the Harriet Tubman Community Award to an organization that works to end slavery and the Frederick Douglass Survivor Award to a former slave who helps to liberate other slaves. Equally, the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation, run by Douglass's great-great-granddaughter Nettie Douglass and great-great-great-grandson Kenneth B. Morris Jr., works against contemporary slavery as well. Morris believes that if Douglass were alive today, he would fight to end the new, globalized slavery of the twenty-first century. “Douglass believed in agitation and he would have expected nothing less from his family,” explains Morris. During the bicentennial celebrations these groups proclaimed the work of anti-slavery to be unfinished, and the role of slaves, former slaves and their descendants to be a central part of ongoing efforts.

Nonetheless, these rejections of the “horrible gift” were all too rare in 2007 and 2008. Wood observes in his conclusion that it was a depressing book to write, and I can see why. But I am grateful that he wrote it. Anyone who studies memory, slavery and African American culture owes him a great service. And next time I encounter Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Lerone Bennett Jr., or any of the twentieth-century black intellectuals and artists who expressed their own sense of depression and horror at white emancipatory fantasies, who felt compelled to respond with countermemories of slave rebellion and black activism, I will know more precisely what they were up against. I will know more deeply what they felt: they felt like Marcus Wood.