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Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (review)

and renewed’?”(9) Or of this, in relation to Christy Minstrels: “Spectators were thus implicated as subjects of power along with the black performers, who were subjects to that power and therefore unequal in this exercise, in which meaning was created from representation?” (99) Alongside sentences that verge on the meaningless, there are claims made which seem at best exaggerated. Can we really downplay the significance of class in society simply by observing that different classes might sometimes be in the same circus auditorium, and move from that to writing as if there were one unproblematic ‘unofficial popular culture’? We have become much used to ‘moral panics’, but are we not investing too much in the notion when it is applied to concern about child acrobats which is said to have reached ‘its sensational pitch’ (151) in the Dangerous Performances Act of 1879, which was at best a cautious piece of legislation? Or, take Assael’s attempt to undermine W.L. Burn’s age of equipoise. She first extends the period from 1867 (the end for Burn) to the 1870s, and then argues that the debate about child acrobats somehow undermines the notion of equipoise. As for the myths of rational recreation, they appear to be Assael’s myths. She seems to think that there is a view that the only recreation available in the mid-Victorian period was ‘rational’, rather than, as was the case, that rational recreationists offered their wares in a market for leisure in which they were sometimes, but by no means always, successful. Her use of the celebrated fall to her death from a trapeze wire of ‘Madame Blondin’ in 1863 to illustrate her case in fact simply confirms that rational recreation and other forms of recreation were in conflict with one another. Assael has much of interest to tell us when she forgets about her theories: About Wellington and Napoleon as heroic figures, about the poverty of clowns, about the import of wild animals, about sexuality and the performances of acrobats, about the wages that performers could earn, and much more. But these well-grounded passages have to be disinterred from others where she overplays her cards by claiming too much for circus. Performers in circus always had to be alert to the need for novelty; sometimes they reached too far, and the attempts ended in disaster. Assael also is so keen to be at the cutting edge that she risks a fate similar to that of the over-ambitious circus performer.