Blinded by Sight (Including Your Own): Looking at Slavery and Race in Anglo-American Culture

Abstract

When we get a little farther away from the conflict, Frederick Douglass once said, some brave and truth-loving man, with all the facts before him ... will give us an impartial history of the grandest moral conflict of the [nineteenth] century.' Historians of Anglo-American bondage still grapple with Douglass's words. Research on the institution of slavery (and the closely related fields of abolitionism and racial formation) pours out of university presses, graduate programs, and conferences. Indeed, far from a commanding masterwork, scholars have answered Douglass's call by producing whole new historiographies of slavery and race. And now the issue of reparations has created a popular analog to scholarly debate, ensuring that slavery will remain a vibrant part of public discourse as well. Against this backdrop, Marcus Wood's Blind Memory attempts to chart new territory by surveying the graphic history of slavery and racial perception in British and American culture. An artist and cultural historian, Wood illuminates the remarkable depth and history of racial iconography in AngloAmerican discourse during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The real power of his book comes from the images themselves-over 150 reproductions in all. Wood makes no point without reference to an image the reader can examine too. These pictures are wonderfully reproduced, most in vibrant color. In short, students and specialists will gain much from this exhaustive and challenging book. But what precisely will they gain? In other words, what is the image of race and slavery that Wood himself provides readers? Despite his claim to novelty, Wood' s study underscores one of the oldest themes in the study of slavery: white power over black bodies. And yet, particularly in an age that has uncovered so much about black agency and the contested nature of bondage,