Book Review: Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima, by Tamara J. Walker

Exquisite Slaves centers on clothing and its unique ability to convey an unspoken language of status. Tamara Walker argues that dress served two purposes: it was central to elite dominance and claims of superiority, while it simultaneously provided the means for enslaved men and women to challenge those dominant norms. By examining material culture, Walker examines the racialization of Blackness in colonial and republican Lima, Peru. Her work engages scholars, such as Herman Bennett, Ira Berlin, and Rebecca Earle, who study the legal use and social ramifications of clothing by enslaved people throughout the Americas. Her work, however, shifts the focus to not just the bodies that wore the clothing but also the visual representation of clothing in print culture.Walker uses legal codes, edicts, newsletters, criminal cases, notarial records, wills, and runaway ads to delve into the body politics of Lima. Walker refers to these sources as “fragments” that reveal how clothing took on meaning through “writing . . . acquiring . . . selling . . . and wearing” (pp. 12–13). The book has six chapters that are organized thematically and demonstrate clothing's importance in a society whose bedrock was social hierarchy. The first half of the book details the body politics of dress and how it empowered both slaveholders and the enslaved to break the law; the second half explores dress in print culture and the intended audience for such publications.Chapters 1–3 reveal that Black bodies were constantly disputed spaces. Chapter 1 provides a social and cultural history of Lima centered on sumptuary policies. This chapter sets the stage for a discussion of body politics and highlights the measures taken by Spaniards to break sumptuary laws and use clothing to cover and create an ideal image of Blackness. Chapters 2 and 3 delve into the enslaved population's lived experiences of quotidian activities and their access to clothing. Chapter 2 focuses on the gendered roles of enslaved men and women and their self-fashioning, and their ability to politicize their bodies by way of dress. This self-fashioning often allowed both enslaved men and women to become empowered as they looked to acquire elegance and attire to reclaim their masculinity or femininity. Chapter 3 discusses the results of enslaved and freed men and women's acquired clothing. At times, Walker argues, the procurement of certain garments blurred the strict lines of social hierarchy to such an extent that enslaved and freed men and women reclaimed their coveted bodies, transforming them from units of labor to loving individuals. Her use of wills in this chapter not only reveals the clothing bequeathed to enslaved and freed people but also highlights the intimate relationships formed between slaveholder and the enslaved and between enslaved and freed families.The second half of the book delves into print culture and the visual representations of clothing. Walker's analysis of casta paintings in chapter 4 is to be commended for reminding us that Mexico was not the only place to create casta paintings; furthermore, her method of tracing over generations the use of garments such as headcloth reveals that the goal of these paintings was to emphasize social grooming and institutionalized whitening. Chapter 5 deals with runaway ads and their descriptions of dress. It stands in stark contrast to chapter 4, in which these casta paintings extolled whiteness purity over time. In this chapter clothing is used as a marker to capture rebellious acts of Blackness. Chapter 6 delves into the republican period and the paintings of Francisco “Pancho” Fierro, which depict Black men and women in elegant wear. These paintings suggest that the new republic was egalitarian. The book's epilogue examines the newspaper El Negro to reveal that in the republican period the use of elegant dress by enslaved and free Blacks brought humiliation, instead of emulation experienced in the colonial period. As a result, Walker's book ends with the racialization of Blackness in which Blackness is affiliated with deception and is deemed deserving of discrimination and mockery.Walker's book has stitched together various fragments that remind us that Black life matters and that Black lives constantly sought ways to reclaim their humanity. However, I have one small quibble with this otherwise creative and noteworthy book: Walker's thematic approach requires a careful read for those not familiar with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Peruvian history, a transformative period characterized by the racialization of Blackness. Students and experts interested in the African diaspora, material culture, racial identity, the formation of Blackness, and gender will surely benefit from this book. If clothes truly make the man, Walker skillfully demonstrates that enslaved women and men and freed ladies and gentlemen used clothing as shields that protected and projected their bodies to become representations of who they wanted to be.

Reviewed by: Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Ante-bellum America by Hilary J. Moss Beth Barton Schweiger Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Ante-bellum America. By Hilary J. Moss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009. A half century ago, Bernard Bailyn exhaled a long sigh of frustration over the history of education in Education in the Forming of American Society (1960). The story of schools, he wrote, had been told as if they were “self-contained entities” completely disconnected from other developments in American history. Schools were explained as democratic and progressive institutions, leaving scholars with virtually “no historical leverage on the problems of American education.” With this book, Bailyn, along with Lawrence Cremin, opened a riotous debate about the origins and results of public education in the 1960s and 1970s. A cadre of revisionists such as Michael Katz challenged the orthodoxy that school reform was democratic, progressive, and promoted social mobility. Their critics defended the idealism of reformers such as Horace Mann. Sadly, the energy and creativity of this debate failed to connect the history of schooling with the mainstream of American historiography as Bailyn had hoped. To this day, beyond the small group of scholars devoted to the history of education, remarkably little is known about schooling in early American society, especially beyond New England, which for many historians has meant Massachusetts. Hilary J. Moss’s Schooling Citizens follows in the tradition of Bailyn and others who have argued that the history of education belongs at the heart of American history. Moss’s larger interest in race and citizenship in the early Republic led her to examine schools in three very different cities—New Haven, Baltimore, and Boston. [End Page 168] Like earlier scholars, she finds the case study is best-suited to the history of education, and like them, she defines “education” primarily as “schooling.” Schooling in the nineteenth century, as today, was an intensely local matter, with local conditions and context making all the difference. Moss argues that the early Republic was “a critical moment when many of Americans’ most deeply held ideas about public education took root” (5). Why, she asks, did public schools and opposition to educating free black Americans expand simultaneously in the early nineteenth century? She explains this apparent paradox by arguing that, contrary to the enduring and heroic myth, “the promise of public schooling for all was a fiction from the start” (193). Her study thus confirms what scholars of education have long argued. Moss holds out the intriguing possibility that “white opposition to African American education was never a foregone conclusion” (10). In the eighteenth century, she shows, black education was far less controversial than it was by 1830. So why did this change? Her answer is that by the mid-antebellum period, education was primarily intended to create citizens. In this new context, educating free black people became dangerous to white majority. The pattern has been repeated many times in American history. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, the “prejudice which repels the Negroes seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated” (59). Through her careful study of three communities, Moss puts some historically specific flesh on white racism in the early U.S. Deep anxiety about notions of citizenship lay at the heart of the violent disputes about public schooling. White reformers never intended common schools to spread social equality. Instead, their vision of “universal” education was limited to citizens, and because black children were excluded from citizenship, they had little need for education. Against this narrow vision and fully comprehending its political significance, African American leaders energetically pursued access to public schools. Moss’s most important contribution is to study black education in the slave city of Baltimore, relying on a careful reading of apprenticeship contracts, advertisements, and census records. Her findings confirm what historians have long argued—that the presence of slavery in the upper South sometimes afforded free black people there more (albeit sharply qualified) freedoms than free blacks enjoyed in free states. Unlike the white residents of New Haven and Boston, white Baltimoreans seemed relatively unconcerned about black academies because slavery guaranteed the continued subordination of...

Reviewed by: Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia by Ted Maris-Wolf Patrick H. Breen Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia. By Ted Maris-Wolf. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [xii], 324. Paper, $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2007-7.) Ted Maris-Wolf’s Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia is notable for its narrow scope and broad ambitions. The book focuses on an unusual law passed by the Virginia legislature in 1856 and revised in 1861 that allowed free blacks to petition to be sold into slavery to a master of their own choosing. This option may not sound attractive, but for at least 110 people who petitioned under this law, it was better than either leaving their homes and families forever, as was required of free blacks whose family’s freedom did not predate Virginia’s 1806 emancipation law, or being charged with residing illegally in Virginia for more than a year after their emancipation, a crime that could lead to being sold at auction to the highest bidder. However, such an outcome was unlikely; Maris-Wolf’s meticulous research uncovered only one person in Virginia, Mary Dunmore, who was involuntarily sold into slavery after 1856. Maris-Wolf’s goal is far more ambitious than simply writing the collective biographies of a handful of unusual people facing a terrible dilemma. Instead, he hopes to use these petitions to help historians think more carefully about slavery itself. Slavery, according to Maris-Wolf, was “adaptable, even amorphous,” and the story of the 1856 law reveals how whites and blacks used and shaped the peculiar institution in surprising ways (p. 130). For example, the 1856 law was not championed by fire-eaters but was inspired by Andrew Doswell and Willis Doswell, two black men freed in 1842, who, with the help of powerful neighbors, petitioned the legislature for an act allowing their voluntary enslavement to their landlord, the nephew of their former master. The act that provided for their enslavement became the model not only for the 1856 law but also for voluntary enslavement laws throughout the South. Maris-Wolf goes further than the evidentiary record when he describes Andrew and Willis Doswell as the “fathers of Virginia’s first self-enslavement law,” but his argument that free blacks and their white allies used the voluntary enslavement law to their advantage is convincing (p. 97). In about a third of the cases, this law provided a handy form of legal insurance: free blacks living in Virginia illegally could file a petition for voluntary enslavement and then fail to appear in court. In such a case, the petition would have no effect because the court could not act until it had examined the free black petitioner. If the free black person who had filed a petition was later charged with violating the 1806 law, then the petition for enslavement could be revived, thus preventing prosecution under the 1806 law. Although some people used the law as a legal maneuver, the majority of the free blacks who petitioned to be enslaved did surrender their freedom. They did this in order to remain with their families and maintain their place in the community under the ownership of a person of their choosing. Maris-Wolf’s enthralling stories—of slave women who were granted freedom upon the death of their children’s father, of men who traveled to Liberia and decided to return to Virginia, of a successful free black entrepreneur whose businesses flourished during his second enslavement—all remind even the most jaded scholars that [End Page 425] the most peculiar things about the antebellum world are the varied ways that whites and blacks, slaves and free people, experienced slavery. Patrick H. Breen Providence College Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

In the Times Literary Supplement of 20 May 1977, a notice of a new book on landscape gardens in the eighteenth century contrasted French and English gardens in political terms, and purported to show that the free English people had free gardens where they might expatiate freely, while the French tyranny, had manicured, trimmed restrictive gardens... The opposition is, in eighteenth-century terms, rather nice; but it is false. One might well judge of gardens in political terms, but only if one admits as a first proposition that aesthetics precede politics, which may indeed have been the case in the eighteenth century, in which case the opposition of the two garden types is not one between a free people and one under tyranny, an opinion only possible after the French revolution polemically voiced by revolutionaries, but between different aesthetic systems in regard to something the eighteenth century never ceased talking and writing about, Nature. Obviously to our post-romantic eye and mind the so-called English garden looks more natural than the French, but in fact neither was natural. By the end of the eighteenth century the term had become rather vague and all-embracing, as the Marquis de Sade well saw. The Grand Siecle had known better.

Considering the Revolution

Like many previous works, this book reminds us that the Spanish imperial hierarchy distinguished rank in a multilayered fashion, primarily on the basis of calidad and policía rather than the more ethnically and racially oriented limpieza de sangre. Indeed, given the nature of the hierarchy, Carrera questions whether colonial notions of raza as lineage can be compared to nineteenth-century notions of race derived from social Darwinism. She uses court documents, literary sources, and edicts and decrees, as would any historian; however, as a trained art historian, she integrates a thorough review of the eighteenth-century casta paintings by Miguel Cabrera, Andrés de Islas, and others. She demonstrates that the clothing worn and mannerisms displayed define the quality and character of the Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans portrayed. This emphasis in late colonial iconography (which does not completely eliminate racial notions more akin to limpieza) helps to explain the transformations, by means of clothing and discourse, found in José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento (most of which was published serially between 1816 and 1820). Through the iconography and written discourse of the time, Carrera shows just how much late colonial Mexican society loved metamorphosis, as well as the attempts of royal officials to maintain a static order based on the separation of ranks. The casta paintings demonstrate just how difficult this ideal of separation was to maintain.The strengths of this book are manifold, and they are especially manifested in Carrera’s analysis of an anonymous late eighteenth-century casta painting entitled De Alvina y Español produce Negro torna atrás, Juan Antonio Prado’s Plaza Mayor de la ciudad de México (1767), and Retrato de Matías de Gálvez, attributed to Andrés López. In the first, a Spanish man gazes through a handheld telescope at the geometrical orderliness of Mexico City’s Alameda Park—replete with orderly members of the elite on promenade. This painting can only be contrasted to Prado’s, where the Plaza Mayor—complete with vendors and thieves—threatens the separation of hierarchical ranks with all sorts of legal and illicit mixing. Spaniards surveying this society from afar, like the man with the telescope in the anonymous painting, are thereby warned that their edicts and decrees do not always effect their desires for social control. That fear, according to Carrera, appears in the portrait of Viceroy de Gálvez, where two well-dressed young men are deliberately contrasted with “two shoeless, unkempt, and dark-skinned boys . . . who may represent artisans” (p. 138). Carrera’s analysis is compelling, and while she is influenced by Foucauldian notions of surveillance and Homi Bhabha’s views on “hybridity,” she uses postmodernism judiciously and avoids the dangers inherent in its proclivity to use ambiguous jargon.While Carrera’s use of court cases regarding raza is well done by any historical standards, her use of the historiographical literature is not as broad as some might desire. The discussion of ideology, discourse, and perception might have been informed by the insights of David Brading’s The First America (1991) and Eric Van Young’s The Other Rebellion (2001)—especially Van Young’s analysis of Timothy Anna’s work on the ethnic breakdown of Mexican insurgents, compared to that of New Spain as a whole. Likewise, her skillful epilogue regarding the iconography of citizenship in nineteenth-century Mexican art might have been balanced by some reference to the sixteenth century’s struggle with the hierarchical question. “Hybridity” existed where the républica de españoles and républica de indios were concerned. Her extensive use of Alejandro Cañeque’s recent dissertation on the body politic in seventeenth-century New Spain (1999) is a more than valid contextualization of her work, but she ignores use of the body politic image in the sixteenth century. The imagery of the policía’s body politic used clothing display in the sixteenth as well as the eighteenth century. Likewise, the question of racial mixing was obviously not new to the seventeenth century, and Carrera references Elizabeth Kuznesof’s excellent studies of it. There was a continuity, as well as change, in colonial discourse, as there is throughout human history. No period is so unique that it does not speak to us, despite current rhetorical strategies targeting difference.Still, Imagining Identity in New Spain accomplishes its goals and adds to the art historical literature on casta paintings. By incorporating some key works by historians, she adds to the discussion begun by María Concepción García Sáiz’s 1989 catalog and continued by the works of Ilona Katzew and others. Carrera’s book stands as a real contribution within the conversation on casta paintings.

Since the inception of queer theory, there has been an ongoing and perhaps constitutive resistance to its squarely confronting the manner in which Black people are placed in what Saidiya Hartman (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 185) has called "the position of the unthought." This blind spot includes, but is not limited to, the manner in which queer theory has often failed to "include" blackness (Reid-Pharr 2001: chap. 5), if by inclusion we mean the additive approach through which, for instance, black and brown stripes were recently added to the redesigned rainbow flag (Campbell 2019: 82–87). Even in inclusionary or additive gestures, race often serves either as an analogy to sexuality or as a past historical social struggle (aka. "the civil rights movement") upon which the LGBT movement now builds (Johnson and Henderson 2005: 4–5). As recently as 2005, Jack Halberstam (2005: 220) could remark how the archive of queer theory remained predominantly white, Western, and canonical, despite the emergence of queer of color scholarship. In the past two decades, an emergent field of Black queer and trans studies has continued to address this blind spot, but its recurrence in queer studies as a field must by now be attributed to something deeper than ignorance.1This recurrence, I have argued elsewhere, suggests that Black and Queer may not operate as "equally actualized signifiers" but instead depend upon a process of occulting of the Black. In order for "queer" to become visible, following Lacan's account of metaphor, "black" must be occulted, or hidden, in the chain of signifiers (Nyong'o 2008: 98–99). Three recent books help us think through this complex interplay of blackness and queerness and offer new avenues of possible redress. They each do so with distinct methodological approaches and disciplinary commitments, and they arrive at different conclusions. Even their sense of audience differs, making the task of reviewing them together less a summing up of a particular academic field than an articulation of tensions roiling underneath the disciplines and interdisciplines. Our present conjuncture—in which Black trans* and queer lives are politically central to the practice of Black revolution in previously unimaginable ways—justifies the usefulness of thinking these texts together. And while only one author under view, Amber Jamilla Musser, addresses her text extensively to the development of queer theory "proper," all three books hold great significance for the improper and heterodox itineraries for queerness that are found in Black and/or Black feminist histories and futurities.Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a landmark work of the historical imagination that centers the unruly and anarchic lives of Black girls and women at the turn of the twentieth century. This is a period sometimes known as "the Nadir" in Black history (1877–1923)—a time when the backlash against emancipation and reconstruction led to Jim Crow laws, virulent white supremacy, and lynching. It is a period that students often learn through the stories of charismatic Black male leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and his rival Booker T. Washington. Black women leaders such as anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, who spearheaded the African American women's club movement, also figure prominently. Wayward Lives acknowledges these leading figures (Du Bois in particular), but comes at the period from a different angle. Here Hartman, a scholar known for her scouring critiques of acts of archival recovery, turns to a technique she terms the "close narration" (xiii) of the lives of ordinary girls and women who migrated to Philadelphia and New York City from the South. Reading both with and against the archival grain, close narration highlights the continuity between the violence done to her subjects and the historical records through which she must access them.In order to produce a text that can center their desire to live life on their terms rather than as either respectable race women or obedient drudges, Hartman refuses the conventions of standard historiography. As such, the book defies easy summary, and the most I can hope to do in this review is encourage you to read it in its entirety. Close narration enables Hartman to re-narrate history in ways that decenter the most famous and recognizable figures in order to ask new questions about those who remain present but anonymous in the historical record and to notice those whose unrealized ambitions did not make their errancy any less real. And she also poses crucial questions about history itself, at times turning to a kind of ficto-criticism to do so. For instance, she fabulates the well-known story of Gladys Bentley, the legendary bulldagger blues singer, as "Mistah Beauty, the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Woman, Select Scenes from a Film Never Cast by Oscar Micheaux" (the legendary early Black film director). She remaps the sexual geography of the city from the vantage point of the lesbian chorine Mabel Hampton, who aspires to become a concert singer but ends up offering her services on the infamous "Bronx Slave Market" of Black female domestic day laborers. And in the final section of the book, the chorus itself becomes a space of Black queer feminist narrative possibility, as their movements in concert on stage, in cabarets, and in close historical narration constantly test the limits of an anti-Black world. By rearranging and defamiliarizing the historical record, Wayward Lives is itself a beautiful experiment in freeing us up from our dependence on linear temporalities of progress, completion, and/or recovery.While a momentous work of cultural history, Wayward Lives also resonates in our moment because of the way it brings together blackness and queerness at the site of a revolution in ordinary life. By deemphasizing the narratives of social reformers, soapbox radicals, and official ideologies, Hartman reimagines the history of anarchism and queer refusal as a quotidian practice spontaneously adopted by these Black girls and women who simply willed their lives to be otherwise. In a short, credo-like chapter, Hartman (227–28) defines this waywardness: Waywardness: the avid longing for a world not ruled by master, man or the police. The errant path taken by the leaderless swarm in search of a place better than here. The social poesis of the dispossessed. . . . To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. . . . It is the directionless search for a free territory; it is a practice of making and relation that enfolds within the policed boundaries of the dark ghetto; it is the mutual aid offered in the open-air prison. It is a queer resource of black survival. It is a beautiful experiment in how-to-live.In passages like this, Wayward Lives speaks directly to our own moment, as the best history always does. In offering up a history of the present, it redefines concepts like mutual aid, fugitivity, opacity, and queer wildness in Black feminist terms.2Another text that centers Black feminist genealogies in queer theory is Musser's Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (full disclosure: I am a coeditor of the series in which this book was published). Like Hartman, Musser is deeply invested in the wayward and insurrectionary potential of feminine desire. But where Wayward Lives adopts a close narration (or counternarration) of archives meant to police, expose, and regulate Black women's bodies, Sensual Excess employs feminist and psychoanalytic theory to launch a series of provocative readings of contemporary art. At the center of Musser's concern is a reappraisal of the body/flesh distinction in the work of Hortense Spillers and of Spillers's (2003) influential theories of the pornotroping of Black women's bodies. Whereas some readers have taken Spillers as arguing for absence or lack as constitutive of Black sexuality (emphasizing her account of slavery acting to ungender the Black body), Musser argues instead for a reading of the pornotrope as leading to sensual "excess." Musser deploys the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance in order to interrupt the popular belief that pleasure derived from this excess fulfills or satisfies the subject, rather than dividing it from itself. At the same time as the excess that is jouissance undoes theories of blackness as lack, brownness for Musser serves a means of "expanding the parameters" of the pornotrope "beyond blackness" (7). Here she joins other queer of color critics in arguing for the value of Black feminist theory for reading Asian, Latinx, and other racialized peoples' lives, moving "away from theorizing blackness as the space of negation by positioning it in relation to multiple forms of brownness" (8).3 Subsequent readings of Black and women of color artists expand upon the multiple dimensions of queer femininity that are manifested through the particular ways blackness and brownness expose histories of slavery, colonialism, and genocide.Musser's (7) detailed readings demonstrate the manner in which Black and brown queer feminine jouissance creates "inhabitations of the pornotrope" theorized by Spillers. The first two chapters directly engage inhabitations of the pornotrope through extended readings of yonic imagery in the work of Kara Walker and Mickalene Thomas. Musser's work here offers a heterotopic rereading of the feminine body, showing how labial feminist artwork often castigated as essentialist (or trans-exclusionary) is in fact engaged in a process of corporeal reterritorialization. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to performances of listening and witnessing in the work of Cheryl Dunye, Xandra Ibarra, and Carrie Mae Weems, while 5 and 6 veer toward considerations of automaticity and aggression, respectively, in the work of Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, and Maureen Catbagan. With impressive sweep, Musser in each case combines close description of the aesthetic maneuvers of these artists with rigorous revisions of the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance by way of a feminist account of these artists' work. She concludes the book with a riposte to both the Lacanian neglect of the mother's desire and queer femininity's relative silence around the figure of the maternal.Even as Sensual Excess seeks to expand the parameters of the pornotrope without abandoning its grounding in Black feminist theory, the book also intervenes in the calcifying debates over "pleasure" versus "criticality" in readings of racialized sexuality. Those critics who argue against accepting lack as the condition of blackness are often accused in return of uncritically celebrating pleasure. (And to be sure, there are some who do indeed see Black pleasure as reparative or healing in a direct way, but this is not the case with any of the authors under present review.) Pushing this debate beyond the pleasure principle affords Musser new opportunities for rendering the affect and aesthetic of what she calls the brown feminine. It also affords a timely opportunity to reconsider Audre Lorde's writings on the erotic, of which Musser is among our most able contemporary critics. A return to Lorde is warranted, Musser persuasively argues, less to recuperate pleasure in sensuality and more to redress the overly self-conscious break with prior women of color feminisms that the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s effected. Reclaiming a Black socialist lesbian feminism discarded as too essentialist during the heyday of poststructuralism, Sensual Excess invites us to think with the surface and textures that queer feminism continue to afford aesthetic and erotic experimentation.In a telling coda, Musser (172–73) even revives the contested figure of the mother, arguing that a queered motherhood has been central to her book all along: "To think the mother as a place, not a void, works toward a framework of generativity, fleshiness, and sensuality. Black and brown mothers have haunted the pages of this book, sometimes appearing and sometimes absent, but always hovering. . . . This is not about producing the maternal as homeland, but about reaching toward the black and brown maternal as horizon." The jouissance of the Black mother is so frequently rendered as monstrous in the anti-Black imagination that citing examples seems fruitless (although a return to Hartman's Wayward Lives might provide one useful inventory). And while the final book under review here swerves sharply away from the inclusionary gestures of queer of color critique instanced in Musser, it shares with her text a powerful conviction that the Black body (and flesh) is a continuous shock to thought.Calvin L. Warren's Ontological Terror brings together the historiographical and theoretical concerns of the above two books with its focus on the ontology of antiblackness. On an initial approach, Warren could be counted among those critics for whom blackness must be theorized through negation and lack. In his work, the very word being, in relation to Black people, can appear only under erasure, as being. The very notion of freedom, for Black people, can only appear under the double negation "is not." As with other critics working in an Afropessimist frame, Warren argues both that anti-Black racism is a permanent feature of modernity and that appeals to Black humanity, suffering, and/or hope only intensify this bleak condition.4 Rather than pessimism per se, Warren's book foregrounds nihilism, a term rich with philosophical controversy. Ontological Terror can be read both as a defense of Black nihilism in the face of gratuitous violence and as a carefully wrought argument about how anti-Black violence works. Its combination of theoretical rigor and interrogation of legal, political, scientific, and visual archives place it squarely in conversation with contemporary debates in Africana philosophy. Of the multiple threads Warren pulls together, I will focus here on his treatment of Martin Heidegger's critique of metaphysics (at the risk of some simplification), because it provides a useful entry point into some of the central claims of the text.For Warren, the free Black "is not" because "being" is a crucial attribute of humanness, and it is precisely the humanness of the Black that is refused by modalities of power in the modern world (both under slavery and during its afterlives). Heidegger conceives human being (dasein) as a world-building and tool-bearing animal. But because the human builds his, her, or their world by reducing the slave to a tool, Warren argues, no act of mutual human recognition can be forthcoming between the human and the slave. Instead, the human must reduce the slave to a worldless thing: a tool. The free Black, the "slave without a master," is nothing to the white man (Berlin 1974). Warren accepts that Black people exist and inhabit the world (13) but denies that this existence adds up to the sort of being that grounds "metaphysical schemes of political hope, freedom, and humanity" (172). Rather than inveigh against this logic as a calumny against Black humanity, Warren aims to destitute it through a Heideggerian Destruktion. In a section titled "Chief Justice Roger Taney: Ontometaphysician" (76–87), for instance, Warren destructs the language of the notorious Dred Scott decision, not in order to retrieve the human rights that Taney's decision travesties but in order to argue "the absurdity that any right could ever change the formulation of black existence as nonexistence" (85). Following Taney, the freed or emancipated Black is not a proto-citizen ready to join human society but, as a now-broken tool, becomes newly visible in its brokenness as an insoluble problem for civil society.In a chapter titled "Catachrestic Fantasies," Warren delivers one of the most elegant destructions of anti-Black nineteenth-century visual culture in the recent critical literature. Drawing upon Frantz Fanon, David Marriott, and others, he argues for the significance of the free Black body as a site of fantasy projection in which Black being is characterized by white supremacy as a site of continuous malapropism and category collapse. This chapter is a contribution to debates on troping (and stereotyping) insofar as it focuses on the contrastive mechanism of catachresis: the misapplication of a word to describe something that would otherwise go unnamed. Where stereotype discourse presumes the repetition of a familiar trope, catachrestic fantasy intimates the disturbance of the anti-Black imaginary from within. Free blackness is this unnamed thing: it is not troped or stereotyped, it is the site of perpetual and structural misrecognition.I am summarizing all too quickly, but the nihilistic, existentialist, and at times even mystical gist of Ontological Terror should already be apparent, as should its departure from the more Hegelian account of the master-slave dialectic preferred by thinkers such as Paul Gilroy (1993) and Susan Buck-Morss (2000). Rather than a struggle to the death and consequent bid for mutual recognition, for Warren there is only "ontological terror"—a title that we must take in a double sense to indicate both the terror Black people felt at the gratuitous violence we faced before and after emancipation and, crucially, the ontological terror the anti-Black imagination experiences in encountering Black being as an inexplicable nothingness that somehow is. Here, I believe, is a crucial contribution of this book to the Afropessimist polemic: its positioning of the anti-Black human as terrified. Warren (9; emphasis added) writes: A mentor once asked me a terrifying question: why are blacks hated all over the world? Stunned, I remained silent, but the question remained with me. . . . We can call this hatred antiblackness: an accretion of practices, knowledge systems, and institutions designed to impose nothing onto blackness and the unending domination/eradication of black presence as nothing incarnated. Put differently, antiblackness is anti-nothing. What is hated about blacks is this nothing, the ontological terror, they must embody for the metaphysical world.The rhetorical doubling of terror in this passage, as something experienced by Black people and, at the same time, something caused by our existence, returns me both to waywardness as "errant path" and to "feminine jouissance" as that which splits, rather than consolidates, the subject of "pleasure." In making this observation, I am not over the and even among these critical Instead, I am to the thinking that has to Black critical theory, in its with queerness to be can so often take a one sexuality and are to Black critical Warren for instance, on when he a reading of the Black (or the of the Lacanian for the that as deeply within a of Black bodies, in these will be and On the other such a turn (or to even a placed under the of dark is what Warren with an argument against critics such as Musser and Scott who he Black in the by such a In a that such with Warren emphasis added) do not within is no more a against antiblackness than or metaphysical its when the body is and pleasure in a black is not by black death or through black from the perhaps of jouissance in this reaching its from also the of his own critical in I also to the feminism to the logic of reading as What Musser in Sensual Excess as the of thinking of in with those of is not a to theories of antiblackness through to sexual pleasure. is it to of feminine jouissance with of they as the very sort of double and negation that Warren Musser that psychoanalytic feminist such as have to logic of and as Musser it is not a to but a means of why "the problem of the black body is not as being to the problem of At on this is a question that Ontological Terror also to of this review it will have been to the of queer theory as it to with the and to Black studies in its ongoing with The that some see between and the is not one that would queerness as it to the of and sexuality or could be as a human and when it comes to the of it is a case of to these and ongoing two might be in their theoretical there may be a value in in the of both the Afropessimist and the precisely in order to to the surface all the through which and life is under the of And I would hope this review has a point of all would to an act of to or Black feminist debates over terror, and the insofar as they both and queer we are with the psychoanalytic or a more in recent critical has as a of it At the same time, it the case that the in such to the of not always do to the very of struggle they This is less a I of to hope, or as rhetorical and less a of the in the order of antiblackness. It is more a question of the archive of Black queer feminist as to as to the of the human order of metaphysical her Audre Lorde an into such of Black lesbian feminist refusal when she writes: is there for us to be after we have face to face with death and not I the existence of as a life who can ever have power over me in the terror of death is as Warren critical pleasure in the of a possible by refusal not As Hartman suggests at the of Wayward Lives, the would be the to that there is a in theoretical and perhaps even political our debates over and But there may not be two one to and the other to sensuality and Even if it would make it for of us if there

The ample record of medieval and early modern sumptuary laws represents an extensive historical period and a broad geographical area. Though scholars have not completely ignored these laws, they deserve far more attention and should be explored from many critical approaches. Because of the physical distance separating the documentary evidence, rarely have comparisons been made between sumptuary laws from different geographical areas. This study offers just such a comparison of the laws enacted in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and England between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries, in order to show how these laws operated to reconcile the interests of the privileged few with the common good. Legislators and preachers aimed to redistribute resources by taking advantage of the wealthy's passion for ostentation. The moral rationale for regulating consumption stressed the need for the rich to reserve at least part of their resources for social measures in the form of charity. By regulating luxury through various forms of fines and penalties, sumptuary laws helped to benefit the less privileged and the city in general. Critiques of consumption, of disproportionate individual spending, and, simply put, of luxury, gained significant momentum as a result of sumptuary laws.

Prior to the eighteenth century, organized effort toward the-education of the slave and the free Negro was almost wholly restricted to that of the different religious sects. The Puritans, the Quakers, the French and Spanish Catholics, and later, the Baptists and Methodists worked with some consistency to educate the slave and his child. This work remained, however, a minor part of the activities of these religious orders throughout this period. Its greatest merit is that, first, it was sufficiently successful to justify the extension of the work by these sects during the eighteenth century; and, second, it inspired the organization of an agency, the sole purpose of which was to aid and enlighten the underprivileged in this country. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the first philanthropic organization was created for the distinct purpose of enlightenment of the Negro. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was organized in the year 1701 within the established Church of London for missionary and educational work among Negroes and Indians. Dr. Thomas Bray, who had been in the colonies and had seen the need for effort in behalf of the education of the slave, led the movement to establish this organization.1 In the year 1701 the first educational foundation definitely established to benefit the Negro in North America came into existence. Dr. Bray secured an endowment of nine hundred pounds from the private secretary of King William at The Hague, the proceeds of which were to be used in the instruction of the Negroes in the West Indies and in North America. In honor of his leadership, upon Dr. Bray's death, an association was formed, called the Associates of Dr. Bray, which maintained educational work in the colonies for practically a century, using the proceeds from the above endowment as well as from other funds, in behalf of the Negro, both slave and free.2 Inspired by earlier successes, the Quakers greatly extended their efforts for the enlightenment of the Negro during the eighteenth century. Leadership was assumed along the following lines. A large and permanent

Measuring Ingredients: Food and Domesticity in Mexican Casta PaintingsMexican casta paintings flourished as a popular art form in the eighteenth century. No one is sure of the exact origin of this type of painting, which depicted racial mixtures accompanied by local foods; most likely it was an export item for wealthy Spaniards who were returning home and wanted a souvenir of colorful and exotic Mexico.Casta paintings were generally created in sets of sixteen canvases, and depicted all manner of racial hybridization among Whites, Blacks and Amerindians. The common trope was to portray a father, a mother, and an offspring, beginning with the Spanish male with Indian and Black consorts, and ending with an Indian couple, groupings which reflected social hierarchies of the colonial world. Most were painted by anonymous artists, though the canvases analyzed in this study are by known painters. Because of the emphasis on domestic relations, couples were often portrayed in kitchens or markets, which gives us valuable information on this aspect of daily life. The foods associated with the different castes also reflected socio-economic hierarchies, as well as reinforced the idea of America as land of bounty.Colonial artists generally imitated European models, but with the casta paintings Mexican artists were instead urged to paint what distinguished their country from Spain, hereby contributing to a growing sense of independence from the metropolis.

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter Seth Wilson Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole. By Joel Schechter. U of Exeter P, 2016. Cloth $85.00, Paper $34.00. 288 pages. Joel Schechter may have written the perfect book for this historical moment. His purpose is "a mapping of paths to future theatrical satire and activism, through a survey of earlier routes explored by Brecht and his precursors in England" (3). Schechter locates these precursors, as his title suggests, in the eighteenth century. He offers a framework for evaluating British theatre artists like George Farquhar, John Gay, Henry Fielding, and Charlotte Charke, among others, as pioneers of the techniques that Bertolt Brecht would later use in forging his Epic theatre. Combining methodological approaches from theatre history, literary studies, performance studies, and historical fiction, Schechter clearly demonstrates Brecht's debt to the eighteenth-century British stage as he forcefully advocates for the importance of today's theatre drawing on the same techniques in service of speaking truth to power. Schechter brings a lively and highly readable style to Eighteenth-Century Brechtians, which makes the daunting task of teasing out the parallels between two seemingly disparate aesthetic movements easy to follow. The breadth of the connections that Schechter makes is impressive: he weaves together Brecht with eighteenth-century satirists like Fielding and Gay, performers like Charke and David Garrick, later twentieth-century writers like Dario Fo, Vaclav Havel, and Carl Grose, and the contemporary social protest of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The most successful section of the book, and one that illustrates Schechter's methodology clearly is chapter 21, where Schechter puts James Boswell, William Hogarth, Garrick, and the comic book artist R. Crumb into creative tension with one another. Beginning by discussing Hogarth's prints of Macheath, Schechter then positions Crumb as a latter-day Hogarth whose comics are a similar type of visual satire. Examining Crumb's pornographic comic illustrations of Boswell, Schechter discusses the idea of extra-theatrical social performance before transitioning to the debate between Boswell and Johnson over Garrick's relative merits as an actor. Schechter concludes by reading Boswell's defense of Garrick as an early example of Brechtian Epic theatre wherein the actor's presentation of the character is meant to disrupt a total identification. Throughout, Schechter makes a complex thread lively and easy to follow, and uses the Brechtian theory to enhance his readings of each object. Another similarly successful case study, chapter 5, details the relationship between John Gay and his patron, the Duchess of Queensberry, as she champions his work and becomes, in Schechter's estimation, a real-life Polly Peachum. Chapter 9 positions Fielding's work with his Great Mongol company at the Haymarket as analogous to Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, while chapter 10 uses the Brechtian conceit of the book to offer novel readings of The London Merchant and Fielding's The Covent-Garden Tragedy, concluding that Fielding's satirical take on domestic tragedy prefigures the ways in which late capitalism will commodify human beings. Finally, chapter 16 uses both Brecht and Marx to analyze the precarious nature of the acting profession in the eighteenth century through a number of labor disputes. Obviously, in each of these chapters, he teases out a number of threads; nonetheless, Schechter's writing remains lucid throughout. The result is a clear, [End Page 147] nuanced, novel reading of theatrical events and plays that demonstrates their vitality and relevance today. The most striking feature of Eighteenth-Century Brechtians is the frequent historical fiction interludes that Schechter employs. These serve both to creatively fill in gaps where the historical record is incomplete, and to offer an example to practitioners interested in taking up the mantle of the eighteenth-century Brechtians. Seven of the chapters are imaginative reconstructions of various items, including "lost" Messingkauf Dialogues, the fictional memoirs of Macheath, imagined diary entries, and dramatizations of the historical personae going about the business of mounting productions. One additional piece is a fictional future press release that hopefully imagines a day when the National Theatre—under the command of Cate Blanchett—stages Gay's Polly and prepares...

Casta painting, the distinctive Hispanic genre that depicts biracial families, has been well studied by scholars for what it reveals about colonial Latin America. We study its reception in nineteenth-century Britain, which is where some of the earliest known examples of these paintings first appear in the historical record. As we show, they were consistently ascribed to early modern Spanish artists such as Velázquez. Taking seriously such misattributions reveals what nineteenth-century Britons understood by Spanish art and helps recover the period eye that made them plausible. Misattributions are not mere mistakes to be corrected but important subjects in their own right.

Reviewed by: Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland by Jennifer Hull Dorsey Jewel Spangler (bio) Keywords Labor, Slavery, Maryland, Manumission, Migration Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland. By Jennifer Hull Dorsey. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. 224. Cloth, $45.00.) Jennifer Hull Dorsey means to fill what she calls an "inexplicable gap in African American studies" by closely examining the relationship between [End Page 390] the First Emancipation and "the nascent wage labor system" in the early national countryside (ix). Drawing her inspiration from predominant strains in Reconstruction historiography, Dorsey reveals much about the working lives of free and freed post-Revolutionary African Americans in the agricultural counties of Maryland's upper Eastern Shore, as well as exploring the familiar, closely related themes of migration, family, and community. It is well known that Maryland's farmers and planters began to shift from tobacco to commercial grain production (and, to a lesser extent, other foodstuffs) well before the American Revolution, and concomitantly were increasingly drawn into the economic orbit of Baltimore and Philadelphia, from which these crops were shipped to Atlantic and Caribbean markets. While slave labor initially produced much of this agricultural surplus, rural free labor expanded after independence. Manumissions rose after the war, and Marylanders, unlike other southerners, left the process virtually unregulated for a long period. This meant immediate freedom for some, and the emergence of a complex system of self-purchase, redemption, and term slavery for others, and created an unusual potential labor force of slaves, freedmen, the free born, and those in transition to freedom. Organized thematically, Hirelings turns first to the question of work. Rural Marylanders enjoyed rising grain prices between the1790s and the 1810s that put free African American labor in demand. Some became cottagers, but wage labor was more typical. Grain production "masculinized" in this period, and rural freedwomen's wage-labor opportunities became limited largely to spinning and miscellaneous farm work. Some free people also made a living from nonagricultural work in household production, the trades, herding, peddling, and transportation and service occupations. In many respects, free African Americans faced limits to economic opportunity reminiscent of the challenges of Reconstruction. Economic independence through land ownership was an unattainable dream for most, and manumission itself, Dorsey illustrates, was contingent upon slaveholders' belief that ex-slaves would remain an integral part of the labor force that benefitted, and was controlled by, landholders. Turning to migration, this book demonstrates that, as with general emancipation in the 1860s, some early national freedpeople sought to improve their economic lot by relocating. Dorsey illustrates the emergence of a regional labor market that enticed predominantly young adult [End Page 391] men and women to leave home singly, in search of more desirable work in urban centers or neighboring counties. Others migrated out of the United States entirely (to Africa or the Caribbean) in this period, typically traveling in family groups. While during Reconstruction ex-slaves used migration as a tool of labor negotiation, Dorsey's findings suggest that the continuation of slavery in the early republic reduced the effectiveness of this tactic. Slavery's interference with free labor negotiations is nowhere clearer than in Dorsey's discussion of family and community. She examines how ex-slaves and their children fought to build autonomous households and the contributions of religious institutions (especially the AME Church) to the emergence of sustained free African American communities in the region. At the same time, she traces how manumission, in contrast to slavery's full destruction, had a tendency to put family connections at risk, as it was a common strategy among slaveholders to free one generation but leave the next in a state of partial or full servitude. This approach limited workers' ability to migrate and focused their surplus earnings on self and family purchases rather than household economic advancement more generally. Freedpeople operated under considerable legal constraints as well, which were intended to ensure that African Americans, even in freedom, remained subordinate to Euro Americans. The economic decline that hit grain markets starting in 1807 and accelerated after 1815 marked an important change for Maryland's rural African Americans, according to Dorsey...

In February 1745, English gentlewoman Gertrude Savile paid the large sum of almost 24 pounds (not including labour) for a gold-trimmed green damask sack dress with matching petticoat. The opulence of these materials and their high cost would have made for a rich, formal ensemble. Despite regular acquisitions of other fine textiles and clothes, the green damask reappeared in Savile’s account books numerous times over the ensuing decade. Thanks to her meticulous account-keeping, we find that Savile’s gown was retrimmed and made over multiple times and that leftover materials were used to fashion additional items such as pairs of shoes. The obvious motive behind these activities is thrift; however, by the time the green damask entered her life, she was a woman of significant independent means. And from the loose narrative, or lifestory, of this ensemble, several additional thematic threads may be teased: the practical interaction between women and fashion during the eighteenth century; the changing functions and status of garments within an individual’s wardrobe; aspects of personal taste and attachment to garments and even relationships and marks of affection between women.

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals