A Red Record, Revisited

The recent proliferation of scholarly and artistic treatments of lynching, represented here by a half-dozen publications from as many disciplines, emerges at a strange and bitter conjuncture in the nation's history of racialized torture and terror. On the one hand, this work extends the surge of interest aroused by a series of events, most notably the controversial exhibit in 2000 of photographs from the Allen-Littlefield collection documenting nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century lynchings in the United States. That show, quickly augmented by an interactive Web site and an art book now in its tenth edition,¹ was remounted two years later at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta—its debut in the American South attracting further controversy locally—in conjunction with an interdisciplinary conference, Lynching and Racial Violence in America, held at Emory University, at which four of the authors reviewed here (along with the reviewer) presented work.

On the other hand, that discourse has since been recontextualized by—as it contextualizes—a different set of phenomena, including the global circulation of the Abu Ghraib images and the attendant national debates about torture and terror; the dramatic resurgence of hate crimes involving the noose (deployed now as symbol rather than murder instrument), from a high school in Jena, Louisiana to a faculty office at Columbia University, to a locker room with the U.S. Coast Guard, to the proliferation of such displays that many have associated with the rise of the "Tea Party"; the 2005 Senate resolution apologizing for over a century of failure to enact federal antilynching legislation; and before all this, the metaphoric slide of the term, most infamously in Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's protest against what, in his Senate confirmation hearings, he called "a high-tech lynching." In 2000 Time magazine elected Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit "song of the century," as if in confirmation of W. E. B. Du Bois's pronouncement from that century's beginning, that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line."²

The spate of nooses, while freshly terrifying, seemed as weirdly anachronistic as the Senate apology was insultingly belated. Like the other recent phenomena, its meanings depended upon a certain, peculiar relation to time—and memory and forgetting—and also to representation. And this is fitting, for, as the books reviewed here collectively suggest, time and representation are central to the meanings of lynching per se, insofar as that "se" extends beyond itself both temporally and representationally: as Toni Morrison has put it, lynching is "the metaphor of itself "; if it cannot be metaphorized, this is because metaphor is already an immanent part of its form.³

Jonathan Markovitz's Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory confronts this interplay of temporality and representation head-on by identifying lynching as having always been, in addition to a material practice, an intentional and contested metaphor for U.S. race relations (which is to say, for racism), and then tracing its deployment as such in collective memory and cultural representation. The legacies of lynching, for Markovitz, permeate our collective cultural understanding, inflecting the ongoing processes of racial formation...