Marcus Wood. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865. New York: Routledge, 2000. ISBN: 041592698X. Price: US$32.95.

It may be useful to read Wood's Blind Memory with some understanding of the revitalization of slavery studies that has taken place over the last three decades. Interest in the study of slavery, critical or otherwise, is long-standing, not least of all because slavery stands highly visible, although not unique, as a mode of domination and labor which has crossed continents and which appears to traverse the "ancient" and "modern" worlds. Some aspect of the study of slavery has found a place in nearly every discipline. It need hardly be said that slavery's historical importance should not be underestimated. In the specific context of transatlantic relations, enslaved Africans were as much responsible as European colonists for creating circum-Atlantic cultural connections. In the United States, the context I am most familiar with, this renewal has been due strongly to the work of the generations of African-American Studies scholars who took the perspectives, experiences, artistic production, and cultures of Africans and the African Diaspora seriously. The emergence of Black British cultural studies has been no less vital and has, in part, transfused an important element of Marxist cultural studies into the American academy. A third influence among many has been the assimilation of what was already well underway outside of the borders of the U.S. academy: the critical study of colonialism and decolonization. In the context of civil rights and human rights struggles, one notable facet of slavery studies has been a heightened critical attention to the self-representations of white abolitionists, not least of all in order to understand why anti-black racism deepened and imperialist aspirations expanded, even as anti-slavery humanitarianism succeeded. Wood's book is a powerful addition to what is already a vital body of cross-disciplinary study. Each chapter explores, in vigorous but nuanced prose, the images surrounding a critical battleground in American and British slavery debates: the middle passage, the desire of slaves to flee captivity, narratives and novels about the experience of slavery, and the torture of slaves. Certain conclusions are not unexpected. Wood argues that the mainstream of abolitionist thought during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relied upon images of black passivity and suffering, while recoiling from the idea of black men and women taking their fate into their own hands, as in the case of the Haitian revolution. In their woodcuts, etchings, and portraits of slave ships, abolitionists attempted to show the squalor and violence inherent to slave ships. However, they quickly reached the limits of representational possibilities by relying heavily upon a vision of slaves as creatures defined by their captivity and who possessed agency only insofar as they pleaded for succor. This is not startling: in their writings, abolitionists regarded black men and women as human, certainly, but not as equals. For example, both pro- and anti-slavery writers found so-called racial "intermixture" distasteful. Abolitionist writings appear to have offered few significant challenges to the hardening of nineteenth-century "scientific" racism. If this seems a cynical interpretive path (were not abolitionists simply working with the representational tools at hand, after all?), Wood's meditation on J. M. W. Turner's Slaver Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (1840) gives us an alternative, telling us in the process something about Romanticism's potential for a powerful political aesthetic. Wood reads the painting through John Ruskin's commentary on it. Rather than attempt to summarize a tightly woven intertextual analysis, I will simply present a sample of it: Wood's reading of Turner is valuable, certainly, but there is also something else at work. More broadly, Wood transforms the visual archive of Anglo-American slavery. By taking the visual representations of the interior of …