The Horrible Gift of Freedom - Book Report/Review Example

The Horrible Gift of Freedom (a book by Marcus Wood) 24 March (estimated word count – (721) The book The Horrible Gift of Freedom written by Marcus Wood and first published in 2010 is a different but very welcome addition to the academic and public discourse on the saga of black slaves and their eventual emancipation a few centuries later. His book is entirely different because it examined the story and irony of black freedom from a visual perspective rather than the usual written text. In this regard, his book is a superior analysis of the mirage of black freedom because this supposed freedom is in name only, a symbolic emancipation.

It can be said his book gave a new insight into how the supposed gift of freedom is actually just an attempt to cover up white culpability in human trade that is an aberration in history. If freedom is indeed a gift, it is a horrible gift in the sense the iconography which often accompanied the portrayal of emancipation in discourses is wrong and perpetuated the myths and misconceptions on what actually happened. In the first place, freedom cannot be a gift as it avoided white culpability as to why the black people were enslaved in the first place.

It may be noted that in earlier centuries before the Atlantic black slave trade started, there was also an existing slave trade but this time in the reverse; black slave traders from Africa, in particular along the Barbary Coast of Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Libya, captured whites for sale. Marcus Wood employed academic rigor in producing his book and the iconography he cited in his work included postage stamps, wood carvings, bronze bas reliefs, paintings, and other artworks of a visual nature.

His book is a necessary and refreshing look at slavery from a different perspective since the usual discoursive written texts were mostly written from the white race viewpoint. His narrative is a contrast to the usual white-race perspective and offers the reader some sort of a revisionist view of one of the darkest chapters in human history. The Horrible Gift of Freedom is a fascinating look at a chapter in human history that is often glossed over. Indeed, slavery and emancipation were juxtaposed from a white viewpoint and largely ignores the black outrage at the gift of freedom that was flawed and incomplete.

It is in many ways what Marcus Wood called as the “great swindle” because black slaves were given the impression to be extremely thankful for their freedom when it should be otherwise. The enslavement of black people was perhaps totally unnecessary and a complete aberration of the human spirit of compassion. Slavery was justified through white religion as a gift from God and most abolitionist literature emphasized emancipation as a divine gift that should be appreciated by the blacks themselves; as a gift from the whites to the blacks, it was horrible.

Marcus Wood largely demolished the celebratory aspects of emancipation as mainly a product of the need for white people to diminish their culpability and feelings of guilt. In the many visual portrayals of emancipation, there is an inherent narrative of an intrinsic goodness of abolitionist white people but there is an escapable feeling of attempts at cover up. As an old adage goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words” and if one may add, “pictures never lie” as another saying goes. The book by Marcus has given readers what can be called as the gift of a new perspective and clear insight on how the on-going narrative of emancipation is wrong.

An essence of this book is to trigger a new and healthy debate on the subject of emancipation. Current depictions and representations of emancipation as a white gift needs to be duly re-assessed to give justice to the enslaved blacks whose supposed freedom did not materialize as expected (Marcus 75). Freedom was largely an illusion and this continues even today in the form of subtle and indirect racial discrimination. The illusory nature of emancipation is often cited in discussions of the Reconstruction Period after the Civil War which was a big failure.

Written texts on emancipation only present an incomplete picture of what really happened and the book by Wood amply illustrates what is called by some historians as merely a continuation of the coercive white power machinery in the subjectification of black people (Lezra 18).Works CitedWood, Marcus. The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation. Athens, GA, USA: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Print.Lezra, Esther. The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others: A Global Perspective.

New York, NY, USA: Routledge, 2014. Print.