Beyond the photograph: a graphic history of lynching; Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5.1 (2014): 15-28 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Terror at My Expense: The Curious Case of Researching Lynching
The exploration into the phenomenon of lynching and the spectacle of lynching photography in America is an area of study that could perpetually lead to multi-field or multidisciplinary avenues of dialogue. Specifically, the analysis of lynching photography provided a social critique and commentary on identity, culture, society, and history in America. However, at the same time a dialogue was initiated between the researcher and journal reviewers, article readers, conference attendees, and students in classrooms, the process of conducting a visual methodology-based research on such a topic also called for a reflexive methodology to be utilized to instigate a dialogue within the (researcher) “self.” The “self” was brought to the forefront and could be expressed through narratives from one’s own life experiences and the reactions from others in the deep questioning of inverting a line of questioning. The discussion of lynching as racially violent acts of extra-judicial justice and leisure-based entertainment allowed the researcher to further contribute to dialogues on racial identity, race-based meanings of place, and the sustained presence of lynching metaphors and effigies along with a concluding commentary on the salience of visual and racial narratives in a unique and beneficial manner for further research and discussion. Lynching photography assaults the person who views and analyzes the imagery, and re-opens the question of how and why images affect us.
Spectacle Lynching and Textual Responses
The spectacle lynchings of the early 20th century performed a ritual that assigned roles and distributed racial identities in American society. Representation was an essential component of the ritual, ensuring its diffusion in the images and narratives produced in response to the events. Beginning with a discussion of the lynching photography gathered in James Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, this essay goes on to consider the difficulties that African American writers confront in responding to the images that cast their people in the role of victims. Richard Wright’s poem “Between the World and Me” illustrates how representations of the lynching ritual induce a recurrent cycle of terror that haunts his black speaker. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 book demonstrates how the political, literary and existential problem endures. Recognizing how representation ensures the replication of racial divisions, Toni Morrison evokes the lynching spectacle in ways that scramble its categories and suggest new configurations of power.
Review Essay: Looking at Lynching: Spectacle, Resistance and Contemporary Transformations
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2011
The study of lynching has a lengthy history of sustained investigation. Early work focused upon compiling empirical evidence of race violence and on contesting dominant explanations for it. 1 Through the 1990s, historians, sociologists, and political scientists worked on placing the material act of race lynching in broader socio-political, economic and historical contexts. 2 Contributions from rhetorical and critical/cultural studies were modest throughout these years. However, in the past decade lynching has become a growing focus in rhetorical and critical/cultural studies. Central themes of these works include the rhetorical history of the intersections of Christian evangelical fervor and lynching, lynching as public performance, visual vocabularies of lynching photography and the appropriation of prolynching rhetorics by antilynching advocacy groups. 3
Embodying Vision, Envisioning Embodiment Conference, Department of Germanic Literatures and Languages, University of Michigan, 2019
Before I begin this talk, I want to take a moment to acknowledge a few important aspects of presenting the images I am about to discuss. I am very much aware of my position as a white scholar exhibiting images of Black individuals in pain or even near death; I am aware that it is with a certain gaze that I view these images and that through presenting it to you, my audience, I am also directing your gaze in a particular manner, even within this academic setting. I nonetheless made the decision to show some of the materials I worked with or happened upon in the course of my research, as I think that these images drive some points home in a way that my words alone could not. These images are sometimes graphic in nature, and though I consciously omitted depictions of lynched and/or mutilated bodies, I still want to acknowledge that the persons depicted are not simply objects of history, but at one time were living and breathing individuals, who suffered great injustices and pain at the hands of a racial system that in some forms continues to this day. It is therefore that I believe, both as a private person and a scholar in American studies, that the discussion about these materials and images is an important one to have, especially in light of the continued media representations of police brutality against Black individuals-both in unmediated formats, such as videos taken on a phone and uploaded to YouTube, and in mediated TV productions such as COPS-and in consequence raises important questions as to who gets to exert agency over their self-representation and what this says about the acknowledgement of the citizenship and personhood of African Americans in the US historically and today.
This article studies Mat Johnson and Walter Pleece’s graphic novel about lynching, Incognegro (2008). It demonstrates how “passing” is central to the public selffashioning, for public consumption, of the African-American, but it is a passing that enables the transgression into spaces of horrific racism, such as lynching. It then moves on to the portrayal of improvisation by the two main protagonists via the use of the erotic (Carl) and the acquisition of a dual cultural citizenship (Zane). The essay concludes with Zane’s fashioning himself as a crusader-witness by continuing to be ‘Incognegro’