Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760-1850. By Jenna M. Gibbs. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. 328. $55.00.)Reviewed by Peter P. ReedSamuel Jennings's 1790 painting Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences, or, 7 he Genius of A merica Encouraging the Emancipation of the Blacks offers a striking point of entry into Jenna Gibbs's excellent new study of trans-Atlantic performances of race. The painting, as Gibbs explains, imagines the relationship between Atlantic humanism and chattel slavery. A classically draped female Liberty sits among the neo-classical props of western humanism-musical instruments, architectural ornaments, art supplies, books, even a liberty pole represent AngloAmerican artistic, scientific, and political achievements. Most strikingly, Liberty inclines benevolently toward a genuflecting black audience, slaves or former slaves, more of whom remain outside in the scene's open-air background.That image of a white feminized Liberty offering the fruits of the Enlightenment to slaves, as Gibbs explains, gives tangible foim to some of the book's central questions. How, for example, did the AngloAdantic world imagine knowledge, culture, progress, and liberty? How did neoclassical humanist ideologies intermingle with the emergent national ideologies of the Revolutionary era? Most importantly, what happened when those concepts came into contact with the people, practices, and discourses of slavery, abolitionism, and racial revolution?For Gibbs, the answers to these questions lie not only in the conventional archive of intellectual and literary history, but also in the world of embodied performance, stage pageantiy, plebeian poetry, and popular images. Its sustained attention to the rich interplay between performances and other kinds of cultural phenomena seems one of the most distinctive contributions of Gibbs's study. In the style of Jean-Christophe Agnew's Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American T hought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge, UK, 1988) and Jeffrey H. Richards's Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American Nexo Republic (Cambridge, UK, 2008), Gibbs recognizes that U.S. theatre shared dramatic content and institutional form with its trans-Atlantic interlocutors. Racial performance, however, has long been treated as a distinctive feature of American theatre, and the study of blackface minstrelsy has only gradually outgrown its reliance on national frameworks. After all, as Eric Lott persuasively argued, minstrelsy marketed its invented origins in southern U.S. slavery to working-class white Americans. At the same time, the theatre of racial mimicry also had roots in Anglo-Atlantic folk customs and English pantomime, as Dale Cockrell and John O'Brien have shown. Blackface, moreover, became one of the trans-Atlantic entertainment world's most successful acts, as W. T. Lhamon demonstrates. Gibbs's study avoids searching for folkloric proto-minstrelsy altogether, imagining the history of racial performance as something that from its earliest moments traversed Atlantic routes and overleapt national ideologies.Supported by a thorough and imaginatively assembled range of published and unpublished archival sources, Performing the Temple of Liberty focuses on the performance cultures and intellectual life of London and Philadelphia. Centering on two of the era's most energetic centers of theatrical and cultural production means that Gibbs's study neither promises nor delivers the circum-Atlantic variety of the work of Joseph Roach or, more recently, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. …