Enfilade

From the University of California Press:

Caitlin Meehye Beach, Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0520343269, £47 / $60.

From abolitionist medallions to statues of bondspeople bearing broken chains, sculpture gave visual and material form to narratives about the end of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery sheds light on the complex—and at times contradictory—place of such works as they moved through a world contoured both by the devastating economy of enslavement and by international abolitionist campaigns. By examining matters of making, circulation, display, and reception, Caitlin Meehye Beach argues that sculpture stood as a highly visible but deeply unstable site from which to interrogate the politics of slavery. With focus on works by Josiah Wedgwood, Hiram Powers, Edmonia Lewis, John Bell, and Francesco Pezzicar, Beach uncovers both the radical possibilities and the conflicting limitations of art in the pursuit of justice in racial capitalism’s wake.

Part of the Phillips Collection Book Prize Series and supported by the Simpson Imprint in Humanities.

Caitlin Meehye Beach is Assistant Professor in Art History and Affiliated Faculty in African and African American Studies at Fordham University.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction — ‘Within a Few Steps of the Spot’: Art in an Age of Racial Capitalism
1  Grasping Images: Antislavery and the Sculptural
2  ‘The Mute Language of the Marble’: Slavery and Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave
3  Sentiment, Manufactured: John Bell and the Abolitionist Image under Empire
4  Relief Work: Edmonia Lewis and the Poetics of Plaster
5  Between Liberty and Emancipation: Francesco Pezzicar’s The Abolition of Slavery
Coda — ‘Sculptured Dream of Liberty’

Notes
List of Illustrations
Index

From Amsterdam UP:

Sarah Adams, Repertoires of Slavery: Dutch Theater between Abolitionism and Colonial Subjection, 1770–1810 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 252 pages, ISBN: 978-9463726863, €117.

Through the lens of a hitherto unstudied repertoire of Dutch abolitionist theatre productions, Repertoires of Slavery prises open the conflicting ideological functions of antislavery discourse within and outside the walls of the theatre and examines the ways in which abolitionist protesters wielded the strife-ridden question of slavery to negotiate the meanings of human rights, subjecthood, and subjection. The book explores how dramatic visions of antislavery provided a site for (re)mediating a white metropolitan—and at times a specifically Dutch—identity. It offers insight into the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century theatrical modes, tropes, and scenarios of racialised subjection and considers them as materials of the ‘Dutch cultural archive’, or the Dutch ‘reservoir’ of sentiments, knowledge, fantasies, and beliefs about race and slavery that have shaped the dominant sense of the Dutch self up to the present day.

Sarah J. Adams holds a Ph.D. in Dutch Literature (Ghent University, 2020). Her postdoctoral project Blackface Burlesques, funded by the Research Foundation — Flanders, investigates the scenarios, tropes, and techniques used to design and represent ‘Blackness’ on the comic stage of the Low Countries before the heyday of minstrel culture.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements
List of Figures

Introduction
1  Dutch Politics, the Slavery-Based Economy, and Theatrical Culture in 1800
2  Suffering Victims: Slavery, Sympathy, and White Self-Glorification
3  Contented Fools: Ridiculing and Re-Commercializing Slavery
4  Black Rebels: Slavery, Human Rights, and the Legitimacy of Resistance
5  Conclusions

Bibliography
Consulted Archives, Collections, and Databases
Literature
Appendix