The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others: A Global Perspective explores the complex, myriad ways in which colonial powers distorted and undermined black emancipatory movements. Lezra outlines the methodology in chapter 1, discussing her engagement with historical documents, literary texts, and artworks derived from archives in locations like the Americas, Spain, and England. She demonstrates how the resistant cultural heritage created by colonized peoples was “mistranslated” (30) into monstrous fantasies that justified the brutality of colonial atrocities visited upon them. “Submerged collective” agencies of resistance triggered colonial systems to beat black rebellion down (20). Lezra's imaginative approach employs an archaeology of people, rituals, objects, and events that generate unlikely, interesting, lines of inquiry.

Chapter 3, set in the Hispano-Caribbean, exposes the counternarrative embedded in the administrative letters of a weakening colonial regime dependent upon the labor of blacks and “American castas” to support the Spanish crown. The threat of revolt motivated Spain to manufacture an indirect and deceptive form of hegemony aimed at containing its nonwhite populations by instituting varied categories of racial mixture. Lezra's reading unveils a covert political agenda accepting of African heritage, but actually practicing a “coerced cultural syncretism” and racial mixing that endorsed “whitening” in exchange for citizenship (70).

Chapter 4 is about the rebel, Solitude. Freed in the first abolition of 1794, she joined the maroons fighting Napoleon's restoration of slavery in 1802. Expertly wielding a machete, Solitude was fearless in battle and skilled in strategy. Captured and sentenced to death, the execution was delayed until she gave birth in November of 1802. Solitude was kept alive in the oral histories of her people. She became known to the outside world due to one paragraph in the 1858 history written by Auguste Lacour, La Guadaloupe dans l'histoire. Lacour drew upon the people's stories, but portrayed Solitude as an evil, violent wretch. Using the 1972 novel La mulatresse Solitude by André Schwartz-Bart, Lezra reimagines Lacour's “mistranslation” into the diabolic, highlighting enslaved women's experiences of rape and sexual exploitation. She detects Solitude between the spaces of literature and history, describing the product of her mother's “colonial rape” as a “living dead body” (99). Pain expressed itself in altered, violent behavior resistant to colonial authority. At times Solitude barked like a dog, yet was also praised for a beautiful singing voice and movements in dance. Her strangeness and passion inspired the fierce resistant tactics of the maroons. In 1999 the people of Guadeloupe used the arts to honor their revolutionary heroine. Today, Solitude stands proud and pregnant with life at the De La Croix roundabout intersection in Abymes, Guadeloupe. Social memory, oral history, historical texts, literature, and monuments of art revived a black radical woman leader previously erased from the colonial archive.

In chapter 2, Lezra examines John Gabriel Stedman's 1790 travel narrative, The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in close proximity to the images illustrating the text by artist William Blake. She reads between the lines of Steadman's “empathy” for Neptune, expressed in his witnessing of the slave's black body broken into pieces upon the rack of torture. The execution does not kill Neptune but leaves him alive. From his position of horrific suffering, Neptune critiques and condemns his colonial oppressors. Lezra describes Steadman's portrayal of himself as a white victim of the colonial enterprise as a “mistranslation” of revolutionary black agency. Blake's collaborative images are just as confounding, as Neptune levitates between that of revolutionary hero and colonized victim. Lezra interprets the figure of Neptune as a “transfigure” (21), a depiction of extreme colonial domination so horrible that it mutates into a representation of black radicalism (39–40).

The three eighteenth-century case studies most effectively illustrate Lezra's thesis, explaining the history of demonizing black resistance in order to uphold the superiority of Western values. However, chapter 5 is the lone case study confronting the present by looking at contemporary images of the “Arab figure.” The book would have benefited from additional case studies expanding the thesis into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Case studies analyzing contemporary injustices still impacted by attitudes and practices of subjugation would have clarified the historical patterns of brutality and violence. Nevertheless, Lezra's book is an important critique of white fantasies about anticolonial struggles and the challenging ways in which dominant regimes manipulate cultural memory.