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Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865. By Marcus Wood. (New York: Routledge, 2000. xxii, 341 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 0-415-92697-1. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 0-415-92698-X.)
Marcus Wood, a British art historian and artist, has produced a prodigious study of the visual images that profoundly influenced the political and cultural discourse regarding slavery and abolition in the antebellum years. Hey has compiled a stunning, and sometimes overwhelming, archive of the prints, drawings, and paintings that underscored Western assumptions about blackness and slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In so doing, Wood meticulously traces the cultural, aesthetic, and political connections between classic works such as J. M. W Turner's Slaver Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying and commercial schematic designs of slave ships, or between Giotto's Flagellation of Christ and abolitionist depictions...