Satirical prints and caricature provide a basis for study of the eighteenth-century British world that is as diverting as it is immersive and illuminating. As Temi Odumosu points out in the preface to Africans in English Caricature, it can ruin a good joke to explain why it is funny. However, her work not only reveals the intended humor in the prints she considers; it also shows that there are good reasons to give these jokes analytical attention.

Odumosu, in her first monograph, builds on a body of work that sheds light on issues of visual culture and memory in the long eighteenth century. Her experience as both a public and academic historian gives an outward-looking approach to the book, which sets out to show how people of African descent were represented in the satirical prints and caricature of Georgian England. It centers on London, but its arguments reach beyond this setting to comment both on a wider geographical context, and the modern-day implications of eighteenth-century representations. It is a thought-provoking, readable, and richly illustrated book, grounded in scholarship, yet not overwhelmed by jargon.

Despite increased interest and discourse in the presence of black people in the metropole and in eighteenth-century British art, there has been relatively little scholarly coverage of the role of humorous visual culture in interpreting and codifying this presence. Odumosu's work addresses this gap. Crucially, the book provides a lens through which to understand antislavery debates, the “wax and wane of abolitionism in Britain” (26). Especially in its later chapters, it shows interactions between legal and political debates on slavery and visual culture depicting Africans. This is a key theme of the book and a valuable contribution to scholarship on British antislavery, as case studies of caricature and satire take the reader into a broader context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century race discourse. White English interpretations of black people could both confirm and subvert common stereotypes and assumptions: a fact that the humor in satirical images throws into sharp relief.

The book is organized into four chapters, in addition to the introduction and the epilogue. The first and second are survey chapters, dealing with the visibility of African slaves in caricatures of English domestic life, and the fetishization of both male and female slaves as pets and sexual objects. Chapter 1 examines in particular the trope of “Mungo,” the put-upon male slave character who originated in a popular stage show and came to symbolize both African presence and English corruption. Together with the symbolism of the foppish dandy type called “Macaroni,” the Mungo trope was used to mock the slave's attempt to raise himself out of the degraded, subservient state widely supposed to be part of a natural race and class hierarchy. But portrayals could also be sympathetic, at least in part, and satirical prints could critique both the cruelties of slavery and the decadence of the aristocracy, while also confirming notions of racial difference and distance. Images also expressed anxieties about the dangers of abolition and emancipation, shown in themes such as the reversal of master and slave roles. Such anxieties speak to the present as well as the past; every age contains its own examples of fearmongering by those who fear the erosion of their privilege.

The sexual dangers of interracial mixing were also apparent in portrayals of men and women of African descent. Chapter 2 shows this with particular attention to images of black women, who were often rendered grotesque and degraded, yet also sexually fetishized. The analysis shows that in images of both men and women, the African body was exploited to comment on aristocratic folly and excess. In these images, black servants were objectified and grossly caricatured, a vehicle for humor, but the burdens they bore may also have been intended to inspire the audience's sympathy. Slavery symbolized corruption. Often the presence of Africans represented a wider sense of the “high” exploiting the “low,” or the powerful the powerless. There is also a clear sense that the colonies corrupted the metropolis both with the unsettling presence of African bodies and the moral stain of slavery. As Odumosu argues, however, this is complicated by the implication that any contact between black and white had corrupting and order-inverting influences. So, while it is clear that satirical prints responded to the sociopolitical climate of antislavery, Odumosu rightly points out the ambivalence that artists displayed toward progressive change.

The influence of slavery and abolition discourses upon eighteenth-century English caricature comes out most strongly in the latter two chapters, which are both case studies. Chapter 3 deals with James Gillray's 1788 print “Wouski” and details the creation of a black female trope based on an earlier comic love story. It also comments on how caricature could be used overtly to expose the cruelties of slavery. Chapter 4 centers on a print published after abolition, in 1819—Cruickshank and Marryat's “The New Union Club.” Having already established the common tropes of Africans as degraded and grotesque, Odumosu connects the overt racism depicted in this disordered scene with a larger context of contempt and fear that pro-slavery English people felt toward the antislavery movement and its would-be beneficiaries, especially once the focus had shifted from abolition to emancipation.

Odumosu's exposure of the common themes of race, gender, and sexuality in satirical prints, and importantly the exploitation of black bodies as either targets or vehicles for English humor, makes for a convincing argument. Odumosu also amply demonstrates the vitality of this subject as a medium for understanding black presences and race discourses in Georgian Britain, while providing insight into the long-term functioning of racial stereotypes and their origins in colonial and slaveholding enterprises. It is well known that racism and slavery have a nonlinear relationship; the former was a by-product of the latter as well as a justification for it. The images in Odumosu's study show racial stereotypes and anxieties functioning in a cultural framework that the institution of slavery facilitated. Our modern inheritance of these stereotypes is therefore also rooted in that institution.