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Jack London, Photographer by Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Sara S. Hodson, and Philip Adam (review)

center-stage for the architects of these symbolic moments and their erstwhile enslaving nations, now transformed into bastions of liberty, with the recipients of their largesse at best bit players passively awaiting deliverance, but often entirely excluded from the action. In his subtle reading of arts and crafts, texts and treatises, anniversary celebrations, philately, film and imagery, Wood reveals a consistent set of “narrative falsehoods” (354) that operate as much to assuage white consciences as deflect their responsibility for the horror of chattel bondage and its baneful and enduring legacies. In image after image, for example, it is the allegorical representations of freedom, white and feminized, who are displaying the emblematic liberty caps, rather than the enslaved whose possession of this iconic garb would have symbolically empowered them to challenge their bondage. Instead, the ubiquitous depictions of near-naked black men and women, kneeling, supplicant, entreating and still shackled, best known in the Abolition Seal “Am I Not A Man And A Brother?” would secure the place and role of bondspeople in the machinery of mythmaking. With equal parts acerbity and insight, Wood interrogates various manifestations of these wishful thoughts and conceits as he moves through two centuries of objects and representation (the well-known plan of the slave ship Brookes and numerous commemorative postage stamps, for example, are painstakingly scrutinized), and he culminates by deriding the smugly sanctimonious excesses of the so-called “Wilberfest” of 2007 that marked the bicentennial of Britain’s Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, before laying bare the pretensions and agendas of the risible movie, Amazing Grace, released the following year. Elsewhere Wood laments how the “tall tales” (94) spun by imperialist historians from Trevelyan to Schama have lent credence and authority to the fictions of freedom. Wood’s polemical tone best suits the scathing and uncompromising critique that dominates his text, but he offers astute and balanced suggestions for correcting emancipation’s falsehoods and delusions that reference and promote scholarship on the agency of the enslaved. He probably should have retained consistent nomenclature by not referring to Harriet Tubman as Harriet (224)—one of the few black women he discusses, she is alone among Wood’s dramatis personae identified by first name (save for his adherence to the odd convention of using Toussaint to reference the Haitian leader). And Wood does err in identifying Haiti’s “famous motto [as] ‘Liberty or Death’” (238) when discussing revolutionary empowerment, although the correct idiom, “Unity is Strength,” makes his case equally well. The Horrible Gift of Freedom offers an invaluable corrective to over two hundred years of pernicious mythmaking while indicating that much work remains in eradicating the malefaction it has wrought. Rider University Roderick A. McDonald