Lynching, Visuality, and the Un/Making of Blackness

Lynching, Visuality, and the Un/ Making of Blackness Leigh Raiford When Ida B. Wells and the NAACP embarked on the sustained and highly visible antilynching campaigns that would help define their respective careers, they each chose to arm themselves with photographs as weapons in their arsenals of evidence. Photographs, celebrated for their veridical capacity, as documents of "truly existing things," could stand side by side with other forms of "proof"—statistics, dominant press accounts, investigative reports—utilized by these antilynching activists to offer testimony to lynching's antidemocratic barbarism. Wells and the NAACP augmented their literature primarily with professionally made photographs of lynchings. Widely circulated and relatively easy to obtain, these images were readily available for public consumption . It is necessary to ask: what is the process by which activists transformed lynching photographs, advertisements for and consolidators of white supremacy, into antilynching photographs, testaments to black endangerment? How exactly were photographs that celebrated the triumph of "civilization" made to herald civilization's demise? What was at stake in such a transformation, its possibilities and limitations, a century ago? And what are the legacies and implications —for racial subjectivities, for national identities , for visual representation—in our contemporary moment? We can begin to answer these questions by interrogating lynching photography as a site of threefold struggle over the meaning, possession, representation , and memorialization of the black body from the late nineteenth century into the early twentyfirst . First, through an examination of lynching and antilynching photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we can understand these images to be sites of struggle over the meaning and possession of the black body between white and black Americans, about the ability to make and unmake racial identity. In the hands of whites, photographs of lynchings, circulated as postcards in this period, served to extend and redefine the boundaries of white community beyond the localities in which lynchings occurred to a larger "imagined community ." In the hands of blacks during the same time period , these photographs were recast as a call to arms against a seeming neverending tide of violent coercion , and transformed into tools for the making of a new African American national identity. Similar, if not the same, images of tortured black bodies were used to articulate—to join up and express—specifically racialized identities in the Progressive Era, a period marked by the expansion of corporate capitalism , the rise of the middle class, and the birth of consumer culture.1 By uncovering and pulling apart the threads of white supremacy and black resistance invested in these photographs, we can also begin to understand Lynching of two unidentified African American males, • white man squatting, hides face as he stills corpses. Si g n ed in n eg at i ve: "Pr ui t t Ph o t o . " Or iginal p h o t o g r ap h circa 1 9 1 0 . Li t h o g r ap h ed p ost er circa 1 9 6 5 . 10 1/ 4 x 16 1/ 4" 2 2 ' N k a Journal of Cont em porary African Art how lynching photography unmakes racial identity. Indeed, the very need to use photographs in campaigns for racial domination or racial justice points to cracks and fissures in these identities. Exposed are the social, sexual, political, and class anxieties that the framing of these images attempt to deny. In their various contexts and incarnations, we can discern how lynching photographs create and coerce, magnify and diminish, the appearance of unified racial identities. These disjunctures in racial epistemology come into sharp relief when we consider the crucial if unacknowledged place photographs of lynchings have occupied in the shadow archive of black representation . The photographer and theorist Allan Sekula describes a shadow archive as an all-inclusive corpus of images that situates individuals according to a socially proscribed hierarchy.2 The second site of struggle finds the lynching archive in conflict and conversation with other photographic representations of African Americans. African Americans themselves sought to unmake the identity created for them in popular (or scientific or criminal or pornographic ) derogatory depictions both by countering with their own carefully cultivated self-images and by reframing...