Book excerpt: "Boime presents a major critique and revisionist interpretation of the portrayal of black people in the nineteenth century ... examines the fundamental historical, social, and cultural assumptions of those times. Reading the images as texts, Boime ... demonstrates how the art reveals ... deep-seated attitudes of that time toward blacks ... Though the art revealed the controlling social hierarchy ... it also presented the perspective of blacks themselves, 'insiders' experiencing the oppressiveness of the images that stereotyped and confined them ... Boime shows that art, by shaping and reinforcing social standards, contributed directly to the debasement and subjugation of African peoples and their descendants of the diaspora"--Dustjacket.