From the Editors

FROM THE EDITORS With this issue, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art embarks on a new venture by dedicating special issues to specific themes related to African and African Diaspora arts and visual culture. This approach allows Nka to provide cutting edge texts and imagery that explore, in depth, the critical issues that have come to define our visual reality and imaginary. It may be useful to begin by addressing why Nka dedicated this inaugural special issue to a collection of essays from the proceedings of Strange Fruit: Lynching, Visuality and Empire, a two-day symposium on Lynching Violence and the Politics of Representation, held at Cornell University (March 11-12, 2006), in addition to other essays from scholars of lynching. The history of lynching and its visual representation through photography in particular, have once again become part of the American public consciousness due in large part to the publication of James Allen's collection of images in Without Sanctuary (Twin Palms, 2000), and its traveling exhibition, which first appeared in New York at the Roth Horowitz Gallery and then at the New York Historical Society in 1999, and again in Atlanta at the King Center in 2002. The exhibition, its companion book, and the public reaction to both have spurred an entirely new area of scholarly inquiry that looks at lynching photographs, and their circulation and display . Recent acclaimed works, including Shawn Michele Smith's American Archives: Gender, Race and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 1999), and Dora Apel's Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women and the Mob (Rutgers University Press, 2004), have delved deeply into the racial, gender and class politics of lynching photography and its historical and contemporary implications. Their works, like that of Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), and the now classic work of Ida B. Wells, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, A Red Record, Mob Rule in New Orleans (1969), have pointed to the centrality of lynching to the making of whiteness and to the articulation of its privilege and wealth in American society. The essays in this issue direct attention to lynching as a historical event and to the extremely complex and interrelated processes of recording and representing those events, and of encountering them through different types of representations. Countless questions about the processes of human meaning-making are bound up with this subject matter. So is the question of the inextricable link between meaning-making and relations of power. The same processes through which lynching and the workings of racial violence as a fundamental aspect of the American experience have been so long marginalized and denied—because the manifestations of this violence are treated as an aberration , an accident, a triviality—are still at work and form the immediate context for discussion in the essays. In unpacking these processes we must engage historical analysis and interdisciplinary approaches transformed by new voices and previously hidden perspectives, as well as visual culture discourses and their insights on the representation and re-presentation of lynching and other forms of violence perpetrated against non-white bodies nationally and internationally . For some the topic of lynching might seem a little temporally, if not geographically out of place, or without meaningful links to discourses in contemporary art and visual cultures. On the contrary, as the essays in this volume attest, lynching is neither something of the past, nor particularly American, although in many ways it is 'as American as apple pie.' Contemporary events in the United States and abroad, reminds us that racial violence is hardly a matter of the past, a problem of the US, or its southern part. One need only recall the recent church-burnings in Alabama, and the brutal killing of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, by a gang of three white men to know that the past is present. As lynching moves into the center of scholarly discourses , we are now aware of the link between such acts of violence and the creation and sustenance of hierarchies based on race, class and gender. Yet, as W. F. Brundage reminds us, "the extreme spectacle of lynching distracts us from the pervasiveness of violence of every...