On Without Sanctuary

On Wit hout Sanct uar y Nat asha Barnes To talk about Without Sanctuary and its making to be in the center of a conundrum, a conundrum that is as much intellectual as it is ethical and political, about the meanings of racial violence in our national memory. Since the publication of the book, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America has been successfully exhibited in seven different venues , attracting record attendance levels in each installation , and been covered extensively in local and national news stories. Many of us here in New York remember 88* I M k a Journal of Cont em porary African Art the first exhibition venue in the upper East Side of New York in 2000, in which the postcards of Without Sanctuary were hung on the walls of the Ruth Horowitz Gallery, a tiny gallery that normally purveys art photographs. Hundreds of New Yorkers braved record-cold temperatures to line up outside the Ruth Horowitz Gallery to witness the tiny postcard images and the repressed history that they told. Postcards were hung simply on bare walls, without any of the accouterments of professional curatorship : they had no sequence, no markers of time and place, no captions of any kind. James Allen, who collected the photographs and published the book, was the only one on hand to act as interlocutor to those spectators who wanted more information. An intense intimacy was unconsciously created through this experience: New York fire regulations meant that the gallery could not hold more than thirty people at a time and witnesses to the exhibition forged a sense of community both inside the gallery and in the wait outside in the unforgiving weather. After having seen all of the seven Without Sanctuary exhibits, many of them professionally handled by curators, trained historians , installation designers, and the like, I am reminded of the "rightness" of this unembellished first exhibit: where New Yorkers, black and white, old and young forced themselves to see images unmediated by professionals and historical experts. They allowed themselves to become strangers to the immediacy of the lynching postcards and the multiplicity of their conflicting meanings. For all its success as a major exhibition event, and the scores of ways the iconography of Without Sanctuaryhas changed the way we see power and terror operating in the United States, Without Sanctuary remains "minor" in the sense articulated by Deleuze and Guattari1 . It operates at the margins of a larger national history that alternatively minimizes state violence against its racialized others and safely defers such acts of atrocity to its past history. Lynching violence, unlike the relationship of the apartheid era to the new South Africa, or Nazi atrocity to post-World War II Germany, has no official place in American national narratives. The pieties of American exceptionalism have ensured that systemic state violence against its citizenry, unlike the many examples of ethnic cleansings, pogroms, and genocides that it mediates internationally, always happen Fall 2006 N k a - 8 9 somewhere else. Lynching histories are enmeshed in a politics that necessarily buckles against the legacies of indifference and amnesia that configure the abject status of the black body in pain. Our intellectual traditions furnish countless examples of the fact that African American personhood is beyond the pale of legal and ethical purview when "crimes again humanity" pit white perpetrators against black victims . The history of Without Sanctuary maps the terrain of this repression: The collection has no permanent institutional "home"—and it may never have one—which ensures that exhibition is dependant on public museum venues that are increasingly under surveillance by the conservatives quick to attack public expenditure on histories deemed as "unpatriotic " and socially "divisive." Contrary to the logic that defines the meaning of civic culture racially, the installation of Without Sanctuary sometimes fares no better in "black"-owned-and- operated public institutions than in "white" historical sites. The showings at the two exhibition sites that could be could be seen as venues sympathetic to the agenda of the African American historical legacy had its own complications. In 2002, the Martin Luther King Jr. Historical Site, operated by the National Park Service, had to mediate several altercations with its mainly working...