While recent critical discourse surrounding the institution of slavery throughout the long eighteenth century is overwhelmingly rooted in the textual and theoretical, Spectacular Suffering relocates the site of analysis to the embodied experiences of those, as the subtitle indicates, “witnessing slavery.” “Witness” is used in its two senses: for both those who observe the suffering objects and those who are its subjects. The emphasis, fittingly, is on the latter kind of witness. Throughout the book, these two senses of “witness”—that of observer and that of victim, both of whom offer testimony that arouses sentiment and sympathy and, consequently, moral agency—are employed to examine “how the enslaved subject is constructed in accordance with a set of ideological imperatives, but also into his or her own efforts at self-constitution—in short, into the dual figuration of the slave as both victim and agent.”From the dismembered body of Oroonoko, to the heaving breast of Yarico, the female slave abandoned by her English lover, to the enforced dancing by captives on slave ships, Mallipeddi examines—in exhausting detail—how the suffering of the enslaved body becomes, paradoxically, a form of agency. The evidence he accumulates from historical records, literary texts, and artwork convincingly shows that the displaced, enslaved, and tortured bodies of enslaved persons participated in and cultivated the sentimentality for which the literature of the period is known. Moreover, the melancholy sentiment engendered by this embodied suffering generated literary, economic, and emotional ways of understanding and advancing individual agency, as well as the modern, liberalized world such agency wrought.The introduction opens with an anecdote that illustrates the focus of the book: the agentic power of the suffering body. William Dickson, private secretary to the governor of Barbados, felt the threat of a “deep melancholy” after encountering a heavily scarred and shackled African slave who, when being asked why he was in such a condition, explained it was the right of his owner to inflict such punishment. This “visceral sight of the enslaved body” accomplished for Dickson what reading and hearing about such tortures from afar could not accomplish: it convinced him of “the crime of slavery.” Mallipeddi follows this story with an example of a witness who is the subject rather than the object of such suffering in Olaudah Equiano (also the topic of a later chapter), whose melancholic dread grew out of the fear of bearing, not merely seeing, such torture.The general movement of the book is from object to subject, from the witness who sees the suffering body to the witness who bears the suffering bodily. A parallel movement can be traced as one toward an increasing agency which develops in and by the subjectivity of suffering. Chapter 1 reveals the contradictory nature of Oroonoko. Significantly, one of the first fictional portrayals of the commodification of enslaved bodies, the work reflects various tensions among sympathy, sentimentality, romance, and realism. Ultimately, Mallipeddi argues, Behn fetishizes the hero’s enslaved and tortured body as a “delightful spectacle,” put on display for the narrator and the reader. In contrast to this treatment of the captive as object, Sterne treats the slave as subject, but his portrayal of these victims is, Mallipeddi argues, a stand-in for his true concern, the English subject. For Sterne, slavery serves as “a trope, a metaphor for constraint,” a force against liberty and the underlying spirit of liberalism coming to dominate the age (and, along with sentimentalism, countering the pro-slavery spirit).The most arresting, possibly groundbreaking, portion of the book is chapter 5, “‘A Fixed Melancholy’: Memories of Migration in Atlantic Slavery.” As he does throughout the book, Mallipeddi uses a variety of textual and visual records to demonstrate the way in which embodied experiences of melancholy, nostalgia, and memory cultivated enslaved persons’ agency—even if only to the tragic point of self-destruction, whether through dejection and melancholy or self-privations leading to disease or even death. In these and seemingly infinite varieties of ways, dispossession from land, family, and body became, Mallipeddi shows, a form of self-possession.The last chapter offers an effective counterpoint to the sentimentalized object in the character of Oroonoko, which had opened the book. Like the other figures examined, Olaudah Equiano is informed and formed by the literary, political, and moral tropes of the age. These include his sense of himself as both victim and agent based on his seizure into slavery and his acts of self-invention. Yet, as shown in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Equiano “reverses the hegemonic logic of sentimentality: instead of familiarizing the political, Equiano politicizes the familial... to create ever inclusive constituencies encompassing clan, community, nation, and diaspora.” Central to Equiano’s self-making and community-creating is the role of memory.Memory and other components of subjectivity which receive in-depth treatment throughout the book—in particular, melancholy, nostalgia, and suffering itself—are suggestive for the emerging field of trauma studies. Indeed Spectacular Suffering contributes significant documentation and analysis that would prove fruitful for continued explorations of how extreme experiences of violence, disruption, or loss are produced by and resistant to the limitations of language and representation—and yet can be agentic. As Mallipeddi shows, human bodies possess and exert an agency that precedes and supersedes textual bodies.Such fertile ground is, perhaps, the book’s strength and its weakness. As a text, Spectacular Suffering is dense, detailed, and diffuse. The editorial text on the jacket claims that the work “focuses on commodification and discipline.” Another jacket review says it accomplishes its significant contribution to the field by “keeping the question of slave agency always at its center.” Mallipeddi writes in the introduction that the book “pursues two interconnected agendas: a re-evaluation of sentimental sympathy and a theorization of slave agency.” The fact that all these descriptions are correct is witness to a strikingly ambitious and meticulous study. In his desire to cover his subject thoroughly, Mallipeddi may at times veer into fairly obvious territory—as when he informs the reader that a “dead slave is worthless because the lifeless body is not a laboring body.” But when it comes to this subject, and this approach to slavery as subjectivity, it is probably better to err on the side of too much said rather than too little.