Books by Marcus Wood

Focuses on the slavery writings of three of Brazil's literary giants - Machado de Assis, Castro Alves, and Euclides da Cunha. Wood finds that all three writers responded to the memory of slavery in ways that departed from their counterparts in Europe and North America, where emancipation has typically been depicted as a moment of closure.

Why did imagery showing the very instant of the birth of black slave freedom invariably personify Liberty as a white woman? Where did the image of the enchained kneeling slave, ubiquitous in abolitionist visual culture on both sides of the Atlantic, come from? This book attempts to answer these questions.