Jenna M. Gibbs's Performing the Temple of Liberty weaves an enlightening narrative of how transatlantic American and British theatrical productions and popular culture (print media, songs, parades, speeches, etc.) reflected and informed Anglo ideas of abolitionism and blackness between 1760 and 1850. She strategically focuses on the two largest cities of the British Atlantic world: London and Philadelphia. As hotbeds of antislavery sentiment and of transatlantic exchanges by white theatrical producers, performers, and writers, these cities shared a “constellation of images, tropes, and perspectives on issues of slavery and race” (5). Gibbs convincingly demonstrates how articulations of British and American “civic mythology” (66) and national superiority hinged not only on Revolutionary wartime victory and defeat but also on how popular culture expressed beliefs about slavery, blackness, and the place of black people in the respective, national body politic.
Gibbs shines in her ability to present an informative political and social backdrop to both familiar and lesser-known historical performances. She moves chronologically, sectioning her text into three thematic parts. Centering on the 1790s–1820s, Part I explores what the author describes in the book's conclusion as the transatlantic-racialized “foundational symbols, motifs, and characters” (248) that expressed American and British hypocritical philosophies of liberty and slavery. Chapter 1 chronicles how the anthropomorphized Columbia—the American Goddess of Liberty—transformed from visual culture as an emblem of freedom seated in her “Temple of Liberty” (13) (with the presence of slaves at her feet) to an embodied stage version in The Spirit of Independence (1807) that literally erased the presence of black people. This erasure, Gibbs contextualizes, occurred just as Americans were on the cusp of abolishing the slave trade (the new federal Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves was to take effect in 1808) and while Philadelphia's free black population was growing. Satirists then transformed blackface personas imported from London stages into cartoon and broadside characters to “mock free blacks' claims to membership in the body politic as counterfeit” (50). Thus, Gibbs illuminates how the theatricalized embodiments and erasures of black personas on the American stage and in popular media reflected conceptions of nationhood and freedom at the expense or exclusion of black people.
In Chapter 2, Gibbs crosses the Atlantic and examines how British playwrights, writers, and artists transformed Britannia—another form of the goddess of freedom. Whereas the American transformation of the shared trope erased considerations of black emancipation, the British version relied on blackface characters to revise Britannia's call for liberty to an antislavery message, one that could be used to demonstrate British moral superiority over American hypocrisy. Sambo-like blackface slave characters from London plays, including Mungo, the “clownish buffoon” (66) from Isaac Bickerstaffe's 1767 work The Padlock, whose image and vernacular proliferated beyond the stage to print media, simultaneously were deployed as evidence of British liberalism and as problematic apprehensions of black subjecthood.
In Chapter 3, Gibbs focuses on the distinctive but interconnected American repatriation and British colonization efforts in the African continent, demonstrating how “[m]issionaries, explorers, poets, and thespians on both sides of the Atlantic used shared language and symbols for their post slave-trade abolition visions of imperial expansion” (89). Gibbs's compelling, in-depth analysis of George Colman's 1808 blackface drama The Africans; or, War, Love, and Duty—which crossed the Atlantic to New York in 1810 and Philadelphia in 1811—argues that theatre played a critical role in these “liberation” efforts because the stage could embody and popularize racist theories of African inferiority espoused in travelogues and scientific literature.
Spanning the 1820s–1830s, Part II chronicles how cartoonists, writers, and theatre practitioners improved upon these early motifs and characters through racial burlesque and the picaresque. In Chapter 4, Gibbs persuasively demonstrates how the seeds of the urban black stage dandy (for example, Zip Coon) were planted in the transatlantic exchange of British cartoons and plays like William Thomas Moncrieff's Life in London; or, Tom and Jerry (1821), which made their way to Philadelphia. American cartoonist Edward W. Clay used tropes found therein to create Life in Philadelphia, which satirized “free blacks' aspirations to upward social mobility by painting them as ridiculous and ill-behaved in high-life settings” (134). Clay's cartoons then fed back to London publications like Treager's Black Jokes, which transformed the illustrations into even more grotesque renderings of black people.
In Chapter 5, Gibbs crystallizes “how the media of racial burlesque and radical oratory shared the same stages and grappled with the same issues of race and rights” (170). Comparing and contrasting the transatlantic travels and performances of well-known blackface minstrel actor Charles Mathews and antislavery activist and lecturer Fanny Wright, Gibbs shows how these two Britons exemplified British curiosity about American democracy and how Britons used the theatrical stage to criticize American slavery while ultimately exalting British superiority.
In Part III, Gibbs explores the connections between racial burlesque and utopian radicalism during the 1830s–1850s. Against the backdrop of slave rebellions like Nat Turner's, Chapter 6 argues that the complex figure of T. D. Rice's Jim Crow promoted a problematic representation of a Southern plantation slave and “used the same language of democratic rights and liberty” (211–12) playwrights like Philadelphian Robert Montgomery Bird employed in his 1831 play about Spartacus, the famed leader of a slave revolt in Ancient Rome. Chapter 7 focuses primarily on George Dibdin Pitt's Toussaint L'Ouverture; or, The Black Spartacus (1846) and American George Lippard's Blanche of Brandywine (1846) and Legends of the Revolution (1845–8), a set of transatlantic plays that used blackface minstrelsy in their dramatizations of the Haitian Revolution and the American Revolution, respectively, and which, Gibbs argues, served as a call to “brotherhood” (231) between African slaves and industrial workers. This “blending of reform politics and racial mockery” (252) would perhaps best be seen in one of the most popular performances of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is discussed in the book's conclusion.
An impressively researched history, Performing the Temple of Liberty is an engrossing reframing of mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century transatlantic contestations over liberty. Gibbs renders the fight for American freedom from the yoke of British tyranny and exaltations of British moral superiority over American hypocrisy as terrain better comprehended from the discourse of race in embodied performance genres and popular ephemera.
