Charmaine Nelson has produced an important book framing American Neoclassical sculpture within nineteenth-century discourses of race, gender, and colonialism. She explores the ways in which the intersecting categories of “blackness” and “femininity” are socially, politically, culturally, and psychically constructed in and through the representational practices of ideal statuary. As a black feminist scholar, Nelson wants to “render [her] methodological apparatus” transparent and is committed to pursuing a methodology that explores “race and racial signification as...