Blood at the Root: Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus

Love, Debt,Collaboration, and Thanks

Love, Debt, Collaboration, and Thanks In May 2003, Andy Doolen—then an assistant professor at Clemson University —lent me his copy of Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. At the time, I was writing Reconstructing Hitler’s Body in Cinema, an examination of the relationship between Axis propaganda and the “heroic comedies” of the Allied countries, a study subsequently submitted as a thesis for the Masters of Arts at Clemson University. After three months of reading, researching, screening, writing, and arguing about Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens, I was astonished at the distinction between the modes of propaganda I knew and the one with which Doolen had forced an encounter. In the length of Riefenstahl’s film, neither Hitler nor his lieutenants use the word Jew, and words like race and religion are studiously avoided, though blood is mentioned once. Gazing at Laura Nelson’s raped and mutilated corpse, Leo Frank’s slashed throat, and Jesse Washington’s charred flesh made it impossible for me to look across an ocean for modes of racist propaganda, when citizens of my own nation had created forms of propaganda that placed neither racism’s violence nor virulence under erasure, but displayed both as proudly as its politicians wave its flag. I dedicated myself to the completion of “Blood at the Root”: Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus on that day in 2003. Though I have lived with this violence, I acknowledge, like James Allen, the curator of Without Sanctuary, that it has given me purpose and, in the pursuit of that purpose, a hunger that will not be sated until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24). I must thank a remarkable group of scholars at the institutions at which I have made my homes, most especially Jeffrey Tucker, Stephanie Li, David Bleich, Joan Saab, Greta Niu, and Genevieve Guenther at the University of Rochester, as well as Catherine Paul, Martin Jacobi, and Beth Daniell at Clemson, and Greg Forter, Ed Madden, and Pamela Barnett at University xi xii Love, Debt, Collaboration, and Thanks of South Carolina. Two professors at Clemson—Lee Morrissey and the late Fred Shilstone—trained me as a stylist, relieving me of the misguided sense that academic writing ought to be sapped of rhetorical beauty. I am grateful to both, and wish that I could thank Fred once again. The faculty and staff of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies at University of Rochester—Professors Jeffrey Runner and Honey Meconi, as well as administrators Aimee Senise Bohn and Angela Clark-Taylor—have made the writing of this project much more comfortable than it would have been without them. At the University of Rochester, I learned much from my peers—particularly Russell Sbriglia, Kristi Castleberry, Jessie Crabill, and Rachel Lee—who have been patient, kind, and attentive readers of this project and loving readers of this strange animal. All of them are very dear to me. Hobart and William Smith Colleges, which hired me the morning of my dissertation defense, were willing to take a risk on a scholar and teacher who had already shown herself to be the bastard child of her discipline of study. Little did I know that my illegitimacy would prove a boon in an institutional setting where interdisciplinarity is a given, rather than a goal to be striven for. Though I was hired to teach Women’s Studies, I feel almost as though I discovered feminism under the tutelage of the women I met there: my students as well as the tenured women I began to think of (lovingly ) as the Coven. Betty Bayer and Susanne McNally were patient and remarkable guides in the first year of my academic career; anyone would be lucky to experience the intellectual vitality and power that I observed in their presence. Surrounded by Susan Henking’s books in our shared office, I attained my second education in both feminism and psychoanalysis; I am grateful that she trusted me with the knowledge. Anna Creadick offered comfort and kindness more than once. I would be remiss not to thank a number of students who have inspired me. In no particular order: Libby Greene, Patricia Bamonti, Gina Ragusa, Molly DiStefano, David Weisberg, Kyle Roe, Jess McCue, Jamie Frank, Amanda Fleming, Kyvaughn Henry, Julia O’Halloran, Mr. President J. David Schlink, Julianne Nigro, Catherine Yee, George-Tom Rogers (who has nothing to lose but his chains), Joshua Reynolds, Ellie Adair, Leah...