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 inextricable from sex and gender signification” (xvi, xxi). It is only recently that British, Canadian, and U.S. art historians have looked afresh at Neoclassicism, its transatlantic character, and its ideological power. Nelson contributes a highly theorized perspective to a growing body of feminist scholarship on Neoclassical sculpture, building upon the work of Joy Kasson and her groundbreaking study, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth Century-American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), and more recently Nancy Proctor’s dissertation, “American Women Sculptors in Rome in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Feminist and Psychoanalytic Readings of a Displaced Canon” (University of Leeds, 1998); Kristen Pai Buick’s dissertation (University of Michigan, 1999, and forthcoming book), “The Sentimental Education of Mary Edmonia Lewis: Identity, Culture and Ideal Works”; Deborah Cherry’s...