Marcus Wood
Biographic Data
| ID | 3634990 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marcus Wood |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marcus |
| FAMILY NAME | Wood |
| SIGNATURE | WOOD M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 102 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Afrodiasporic Forms
Slavery in small things
Slavery in small things: slavery and modern cultural habits." Slavery & Abolition, 39(1), pp. 227–228
Historic Williamsburg
How has Colonial Williamsburg theatricalized slavery during the last three hundred years? John D. Rockefeller and an appointed corporate team in the two decades before the Second World War reconstructed Williamsburg to celebrate a white patriarchal American mythography concerning the birth of freedom. That is still what it reflects. There was however a period of remarkable intensity in the early 1990s when things were done there which turned the …
Brazilian and North American Slavery Propagandas
The first comparative study to consider the key elements differentiating Brazilian approaches to slavery propganda from those of Europe and the rest of the Americas. Special attention is paid to the importance of photography and carnival to the development of the Brazilian anti slavery movement.
Photography and Slavery in America and Brazil
This chapter provides a comparative aesthetic and historic discussion of the large range of photographic material recording slavery generated across Brazil and North America from the invention of the form, up until the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. It opens with a detailed survey of the technical and formal evolution of photographic forms and genres in terms of how they related to the recording of the two greatest slave systems of the A…
Brazil, Slavery, and the Limits of Institutional Display from Lina Bo Bardi to Escrava Anastácia
This chapter considers Brazilian museological approaches to displaying and remembering slavery. The chapter has two parts. The first is an extended discussion of the life and work of Lina Bo Bardi. Bo Bardi is shown as a visionary architect, artist, and museum designer who learned from Afrocentric syncretism in Brazil to produce museum and performance cultures that could present the memory of slave life and experience in completely new and unprec…
Slavery and the Romantic sketch
Valency and Abjection in the Lynching Postcard
If lynchings were often theatrically constructed and essentially public performative rituals, then a question arises: is it possible to construct a photograph of the black lynched body as a record of performance art? In the following essay, focusing on postcard images of lynching produced during what might ironically be termed the form's ‘heyday’, from 1899 to 1910, I shall be thinking around this question. This article will also speculate on how…
Slaves Waiting for Sale
Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade, by Maurie D. McInnis, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011, 268 pp., $40.00, ISBN 9780226559339 http://dx.doi.org/10.10
Black Milk
This book provides an in-depth analysis of the visual archives that effloresced around slavery in Brazil and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its latter stages, the book also explores the very different ways in which the museum cultures of North America and Brazil have constructed slavery over the last hundred years. The book forces the vast visual archives generated within the two greatest Nations of the Atlantic slav…
Debating the Slave Trade
Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815, by Srividhya Swaminathan, Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2009, xiii + 245 pp., US$99.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-6767-4 http
The Museu do Negro in Rio and the Cult of Anastácia as a New Model for the Memory of Slavery
The following analysis concerns the figure of Anastácia, a mythical African princess who was supposedly enslaved and then tortured to death on a Brazilian plantation. She has become the focus for a wide variety of devotional activity within northeastern Brazil. The ways in which she is worshipped and displayed suggest that the syncretic religions of Umbanda and Candomblé may offer dynamic new ways for thinking about the traumatic memory of Atlant…
Significant Silence
One of the high points in the media coverage of 1807/2007 was Lola Young’s long article entitled ‘The Truth in Chains’, published in the Guardian on 15 March, on the brink of the Bicentennial carnival week.1 This constituted a brilliantly compressed, but not reduced, account of the different forces swirling within the culture wars, and inheritance debates, thrown up by the anniversary. Young clearly outlined how interest groups with axes to grind…
Slavery, Memory, and Museum Display in Baltimore
This paper meditates upon a conundrum: Can there be a right way to represent the traumatic experience of Atlantic slavery within the context of a museum setting? The analysis deals with the question by focusing on the radically contrasting museological, aesthetic, and ethical codes of the Great Blacks in Wax Museum, and the Reginald Lewis Museum, both situated in Baltimore, Maryland. Three key sites are isolated for discussion: the names of the m…
Atlantic Slavery and Traumatic Representation in Museums
This article uses the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, as a context for thinking about the success and failure of British institutional attempts to commemorate the traumatic memory of Atlantic slavery in 2007. The analysis opens with a contextualising history of the development and philosophy of Elmer and Joanne Martin, the co-founders of the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. Three special exhibits - namely, '100 Greatest Bla…
Packaging Liberty and Marketing the Gift of Freedom
Packaging Liberty and Marketing the Gift of Freedom:1807 and the Legacy of Clarkson's Chest Marcus Wood (bio) How slavery should now best be remembered through the display of art and material objects is an almost impossible problem to solve. The following discussion tries to get close to three things. Firstly, I want to think about why the most successful images and objects developed by the abolition movement were made the way they were. Secondly…
Packaging Liberty and Marketing the Gift of Freedom
Creative confusions
Wood uses the graphic satirist Angelo Agostini in order to think about the fundamental differences that separate Brazilian abolition propaganda from the slavery propagandas produced in England and North America in the nineteenth century. He opens by setting out the fundamental elements that made Brazilian abolition different from that of the Anglo-American tradition. The lack of a North/South slave divide, the absence of women as activists, the l…
Celebrating the middle passage
This paper concerns the fictionalisation of the phenomenon of the “middle passage” within Atlantic cultures. Scholarly construction of the middle passage has tended to be grounded in the analysis of abuse, guilt and suffering. The ground rules for this set of cultural emphases were laid down in England in the late eighteenth century, and then seeped through the Americas. Yet much may be gained by moving away from this inheritance, by looking at t…
Beautiful People
Journal Article Beautiful People Get access Marcus Wood Marcus Wood Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 57, Issue 1, SPRING 2004, Pages 275–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/57.1.275 Published: 01 March 2004
Blind memory
Seeing is believing, or finding ‘truth’ in slave narrative
(1997). Seeing is believing, or finding ‘truth’ in slave narrative: The narrative of Henry Bibb as perfect misrepresentation. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 174-211
Noah's Ark
Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790-1822
Blind memory
Black Milk
This book provides an in-depth analysis of the visual archives that effloresced around slavery in Brazil and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its latter stages, the book also explores the very different ways in which the museum cultures of North America and Brazil have constructed slavery over the last hundred years. The book forces the vast visual archives generated within the two greatest Nations of the Atlantic slav…
Slavery and the Romantic sketch
Slavery in small things
Slavery in small things: slavery and modern cultural habits." Slavery & Abolition, 39(1), pp. 227–228
The Museu do Negro in Rio and the Cult of Anastácia as a New Model for the Memory of Slavery
The following analysis concerns the figure of Anastácia, a mythical African princess who was supposedly enslaved and then tortured to death on a Brazilian plantation. She has become the focus for a wide variety of devotional activity within northeastern Brazil. The ways in which she is worshipped and displayed suggest that the syncretic religions of Umbanda and Candomblé may offer dynamic new ways for thinking about the traumatic memory of Atlant…
Slavery, Memory, and Museum Display in Baltimore
This paper meditates upon a conundrum: Can there be a right way to represent the traumatic experience of Atlantic slavery within the context of a museum setting? The analysis deals with the question by focusing on the radically contrasting museological, aesthetic, and ethical codes of the Great Blacks in Wax Museum, and the Reginald Lewis Museum, both situated in Baltimore, Maryland. Three key sites are isolated for discussion: the names of the m…
Creative confusions
Wood uses the graphic satirist Angelo Agostini in order to think about the fundamental differences that separate Brazilian abolition propaganda from the slavery propagandas produced in England and North America in the nineteenth century. He opens by setting out the fundamental elements that made Brazilian abolition different from that of the Anglo-American tradition. The lack of a North/South slave divide, the absence of women as activists, the l…
Celebrating the middle passage
This paper concerns the fictionalisation of the phenomenon of the “middle passage” within Atlantic cultures. Scholarly construction of the middle passage has tended to be grounded in the analysis of abuse, guilt and suffering. The ground rules for this set of cultural emphases were laid down in England in the late eighteenth century, and then seeped through the Americas. Yet much may be gained by moving away from this inheritance, by looking at t…
Seeing is believing, or finding ‘truth’ in slave narrative
(1997). Seeing is believing, or finding ‘truth’ in slave narrative: The narrative of Henry Bibb as perfect misrepresentation. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 174-211
Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790-1822
Seeing is believing, or finding ‘truth’ in slave narrative
(1997). Seeing is believing, or finding ‘truth’ in slave narrative: The narrative of Henry Bibb as perfect misrepresentation. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 174-211
Noah's Ark
Blind memory
Celebrating the middle passage
This paper concerns the fictionalisation of the phenomenon of the “middle passage” within Atlantic cultures. Scholarly construction of the middle passage has tended to be grounded in the analysis of abuse, guilt and suffering. The ground rules for this set of cultural emphases were laid down in England in the late eighteenth century, and then seeped through the Americas. Yet much may be gained by moving away from this inheritance, by looking at t…
Beautiful People
Journal Article Beautiful People Get access Marcus Wood Marcus Wood Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 57, Issue 1, SPRING 2004, Pages 275–278, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/57.1.275 Published: 01 March 2004
Packaging Liberty and Marketing the Gift of Freedom
Packaging Liberty and Marketing the Gift of Freedom:1807 and the Legacy of Clarkson's Chest Marcus Wood (bio) How slavery should now best be remembered through the display of art and material objects is an almost impossible problem to solve. The following discussion tries to get close to three things. Firstly, I want to think about why the most successful images and objects developed by the abolition movement were made the way they were. Secondly…
Packaging Liberty and Marketing the Gift of Freedom
Creative confusions
Wood uses the graphic satirist Angelo Agostini in order to think about the fundamental differences that separate Brazilian abolition propaganda from the slavery propagandas produced in England and North America in the nineteenth century. He opens by setting out the fundamental elements that made Brazilian abolition different from that of the Anglo-American tradition. The lack of a North/South slave divide, the absence of women as activists, the l…
Atlantic Slavery and Traumatic Representation in Museums
This article uses the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, as a context for thinking about the success and failure of British institutional attempts to commemorate the traumatic memory of Atlantic slavery in 2007. The analysis opens with a contextualising history of the development and philosophy of Elmer and Joanne Martin, the co-founders of the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. Three special exhibits - namely, '100 Greatest Bla…
Slavery, Memory, and Museum Display in Baltimore
This paper meditates upon a conundrum: Can there be a right way to represent the traumatic experience of Atlantic slavery within the context of a museum setting? The analysis deals with the question by focusing on the radically contrasting museological, aesthetic, and ethical codes of the Great Blacks in Wax Museum, and the Reginald Lewis Museum, both situated in Baltimore, Maryland. Three key sites are isolated for discussion: the names of the m…
Significant Silence
One of the high points in the media coverage of 1807/2007 was Lola Young’s long article entitled ‘The Truth in Chains’, published in the Guardian on 15 March, on the brink of the Bicentennial carnival week.1 This constituted a brilliantly compressed, but not reduced, account of the different forces swirling within the culture wars, and inheritance debates, thrown up by the anniversary. Young clearly outlined how interest groups with axes to grind…
Debating the Slave Trade
Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815, by Srividhya Swaminathan, Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2009, xiii + 245 pp., US$99.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-6767-4 http
The Museu do Negro in Rio and the Cult of Anastácia as a New Model for the Memory of Slavery
The following analysis concerns the figure of Anastácia, a mythical African princess who was supposedly enslaved and then tortured to death on a Brazilian plantation. She has become the focus for a wide variety of devotional activity within northeastern Brazil. The ways in which she is worshipped and displayed suggest that the syncretic religions of Umbanda and Candomblé may offer dynamic new ways for thinking about the traumatic memory of Atlant…
Brazilian and North American Slavery Propagandas
The first comparative study to consider the key elements differentiating Brazilian approaches to slavery propganda from those of Europe and the rest of the Americas. Special attention is paid to the importance of photography and carnival to the development of the Brazilian anti slavery movement.
Photography and Slavery in America and Brazil
This chapter provides a comparative aesthetic and historic discussion of the large range of photographic material recording slavery generated across Brazil and North America from the invention of the form, up until the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. It opens with a detailed survey of the technical and formal evolution of photographic forms and genres in terms of how they related to the recording of the two greatest slave systems of the A…
Brazil, Slavery, and the Limits of Institutional Display from Lina Bo Bardi to Escrava Anastácia
This chapter considers Brazilian museological approaches to displaying and remembering slavery. The chapter has two parts. The first is an extended discussion of the life and work of Lina Bo Bardi. Bo Bardi is shown as a visionary architect, artist, and museum designer who learned from Afrocentric syncretism in Brazil to produce museum and performance cultures that could present the memory of slave life and experience in completely new and unprec…
Slavery and the Romantic sketch
Valency and Abjection in the Lynching Postcard
If lynchings were often theatrically constructed and essentially public performative rituals, then a question arises: is it possible to construct a photograph of the black lynched body as a record of performance art? In the following essay, focusing on postcard images of lynching produced during what might ironically be termed the form's ‘heyday’, from 1899 to 1910, I shall be thinking around this question. This article will also speculate on how…
Slaves Waiting for Sale
Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade, by Maurie D. McInnis, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011, 268 pp., $40.00, ISBN 9780226559339 http://dx.doi.org/10.10
Black Milk
This book provides an in-depth analysis of the visual archives that effloresced around slavery in Brazil and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its latter stages, the book also explores the very different ways in which the museum cultures of North America and Brazil have constructed slavery over the last hundred years. The book forces the vast visual archives generated within the two greatest Nations of the Atlantic slav…
Historic Williamsburg
How has Colonial Williamsburg theatricalized slavery during the last three hundred years? John D. Rockefeller and an appointed corporate team in the two decades before the Second World War reconstructed Williamsburg to celebrate a white patriarchal American mythography concerning the birth of freedom. That is still what it reflects. There was however a period of remarkable intensity in the early 1990s when things were done there which turned the …
Slavery in small things
Slavery in small things: slavery and modern cultural habits." Slavery & Abolition, 39(1), pp. 227–228
Afrodiasporic Forms
Art (18 works) · History (18 works) · Sociology (13 works) · History (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Art history (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (6 works)