“Come with me and stroll along the Thames River to the Haymarket Theatre Royal on August 4, 1787. Shackled African slaves are being marched to Greenwich, where a ship will transport them to the Americas” (1). So begins Jenna Gibbs's engaging study of the impact of performance culture on anti-slavery sentiment and the politics of race on both sides of the Atlantic, from the aftermath of the American Revolution to the lead-up to the Civil War. From these opening moments, through a series of chapters that track shifting cultural currents through time, Performing the Temple of Liberty marshals a wealth of performance, literary, journalistic, and visual evidence to show how representations of African and African American characters in the playhouse and in the popular culture at large “had a critical part to play in the development of transatlantic antislavery feelings,” and yet at the same time “were instrumental in animating incipient notions of racialized human difference” (5, 6). Building on previous work such as Heather S. Nathans's Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861 (2009), Franca Dellarosa's Slavery on Stage: Representations of Slavery in British Theatre, 1760s–1830s (2009), and Robert Nowatski’s Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (2010), Gibbs makes the case for how racialized representation in London and Philadelphia articulated and indeed helped shape “an enduring contestation over British and American national identities that hinged on contrasting views of slavery and liberty” (248).

Gibbs's study of the adaptation of George Colman's Inkle and Yarico (1787) to the Philadelphia situation in the early 1790s is a model of how to tease out the subtle sociopolitical implications of cultural productions for which few historical records exist. The method here is not just comparative for, like the best examples of transatlantic scholarship, Gibbs's study finds connections among ostensibly disparate phenomena that informed social practice and attitude in both the Old World and the New. A key contribution of her study is to read blackface minstrelsy not as a nineteenth-century American phenomenon, but as one that developed through transatlantic exchange from the late eighteenth century onward. Gibbs tracks a central paradox, that blackface could act to support anti-slavery sympathies, by staging pathetic scenes of slaves in distress, and yet at the same time was deployed on the stage and in visual media to undercut the abolitionist cause, by stoking fears of miscegenation (in English cartoons depicting freed slaves invading the metropole), or by reinforcing stereotypes of black characters as childish, passive, or foolish (in American stagings and later in literary works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)).

Readers will note that the book lacks a comprehensive bibliography, though included is an “Essay on Sources,” which acts a guide to archive holdings of performance-history ephemera as well as a thorough survey of recent scholarship in the overlapping areas of research with which Gibbs is in dialogue. Performing the Temple of Liberty is an impressive contribution, adding to our understanding of the role played by performance and popular media culture in the geopolitics of the Anglo-Atlantic during the postrevolutionary period. Its most powerful contribution is perhaps the insight it gives us into the enduring hold of racialized tropes and theatrical traditions; as Gibbs chillingly points out, only in 2005 did the Royal Opera House bring to an end the practice of white actors smudging up their faces to play the part of the African.