Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery by Caitlin Meehye Beach

Beginning with the question "can an image incite change?"(1), Beach states her aim for Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery to "interrogate the place of sculpture in the transatlantic fight to abolish slavery in the United States" (3).She explains in her introduction, "'Within a FewSteps of the Spot': Art in an Age of Racial Capitalism," that sculpture stood at slavery's chronological beginning and end, functioning in conflicting, contradictory, and deeply unstable ways.The author briefly cites numerous scholars of critical race theory in order to lay the conceptual groundwork for her study.Important examples include Cedric J. Robinson on the theory of racial capitalism and Sianne Ngai and Mel Y. Chen on concepts of animatedness and animacy respectively.From the work of these scholars, she forms basic assumptions that will be applied throughout the book: that art in general and sculpture in particular were complicit with and enabled by a global capitalist economy forged by stolen labor, and that sculpture was historically considered as "life like," and was thereby "perpetually yoked to a crisis of racialized subjectivity" (7).Beach asserts throughout the book that the portrayal, ownership, or viewing of a depiction of a Black person was most often a form of violence, and that a work's viability can be judged by its associations, however distant, with racial capitalism.The mass of scholarship cited firmly establishes the author's project of evaluating historical sculpture according to the criteria of present-day critical theory and is used to demonstrate its failure to meet those standards as "sculpture gave way to the complexities and fictions of the idea of abolition in an age of industrial and imperial accretion" (12).Beach employs a case study approach, focusing on works that addressed slavery and emancipation by US and European artists, including Hiram Powers (1805-73), John Bell (1812-95), Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907), and Francesco Pezzicar (1831-90), to address how their work fit into "a larger ecosystem of labor, production, consumption, and reception" (14).Following a summary of the book's five chapters, the author answers her initial query, asserting that the sculptures examined in this volume "were never agents in the fight for the abolition of slavery. . . .Rather, they were inert things . . .