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  • Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 by Koritha Mitchell
  • Jarvis C. McInnis (bio)
Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930. Koritha Mitchell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. 272 pages. $40.00 cloth; $28.00 paper.

Koritha Mitchell’s Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 is the first book-length study of early twentieth-century lynching dramas. Drawing on performance theory, Mitchell offers the lynching drama as a literary counterpoint to lynching photographs: whereas the commonplace circulation of images of charred, dismembered, and mutilated black bodies rehearsed and re-performed lynching’s violence and degradation, Mitchell maintains that lynching dramas represent how African American writers responded to these heinous acts of violence by mobilizing the discursive and performative capacities of theater. Set in black homes, these plays challenged visual representations of racial violence by focusing on black domestic interiority. Furthermore, they were published in a one-act format that amateur performers could stage in domestic and communal spaces. The black home, then, functioned as an alternative staging ground where African Americans could mourn their losses, affirm their identities, and engage in discussions and debates about the profound precariousness of their condition as citizen-subjects.

Living with Lynching is divided into two interlocking sections. Part One, comprising the first two chapters, outlines the study’s theoretical and historical framework. In Chapter One, Mitchell elucidates the relationship between lynching, theater, and performance in the early twentieth century, maintaining that lynching was in fact a theatrical event, an “exorcism” whereby mobs used “props, gestures, sounds, and movement . . . to eliminate evil, which they increasingly figured as black and male” (25). At the same time, American theater was becoming an increasingly popular mode of entertainment rife with negative depictions of African Americans. Therefore, black playwrights used lynching drama to fashion a communal theater for the collective expression of black subjectivity and self-representation, at once addressing the violent theatricality of lynching and racist caricatures on the American stage. [End Page 247]

In Chapter Two, Mitchell explores the rise of black-authored drama by tracing the shift from nineteenth-century stage performers to a “new writer-centered conception of black theater” (53) in the 1910s. Importantly, she contends that early black stage performers “preceded playwrights in the struggle to transform U.S. theater” (44). For instance, through musical comedy, African American performers began to wield more control over content and even hired all-black creative teams. Mitchell’s attention to this critical moment in black theater history revises reductionist conceptions of early black theater as sheer racist caricature and buffoonery and establishes black musical performers and composers as key players in the genesis of the black stage tradition.

Still, African American audiences desired playwrights who could exert more creative control over representations of black life and culture. Angelina Weld Grimké, a poet and fiction writer, responded to this call with her play Rachel (1916), which inaugurated the lynching drama. A sentimental three-act play, Rachel underscores the hypocrisy of lynching by depicting “well-to-do blacks who might remind whites of themselves” (54). Whereas Grimké targets white sympathizers, later lynching playwrights such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, “the genre’s most prolific author” (147), revise Grimké’s work by composing one-act plays intended for a primarily black readership and performance community. According to Mitchell, the one-act format was essential for publication in periodicals such as The Crisis and The Liberator that circulated widely among African Americans and liberal whites. The plays were presumably read aloud and performed in black homes, churches, literary salons, and other intimate communal spaces. Through these acts of “communal literacy” (57), black people engaged in “embodied practices of black belonging” (14) that sought to redress and re-suture the dismembered black home. Additionally, by using debate between characters to drive the action of their plays, lynching dramatists created opportunities for readers to engage in lively debate about racial violence and the paradox of African American identity. Thus, in the same way that the black home was transformed into a quotidian stage, readers were transformed into amateur actors and performers as well.

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