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  • Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 by Koritha Mitchell
  • Christen Smith
Living With Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930. Koritha Mitchell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011; pp. 272.

Koritha Mitchell's Living with Lynching is a careful investigation of African Americans' use of theatre to survive the unthinkable: decades of racial terror suffered at the hands of white mob violence that ripped families apart. While mainstream white society produced stories and images that justified and glorified the grotesque killing of African Americans, black playwrights, the majority of whom were women, penned plays about lynching that offered a different perspective. Living with Lynching examines these plays, revealing how they registered the impact of this violence on black families and addressed the double jeopardy that African Americans faced as citizens of a nation that denied them due process for supposed "crimes" while condoning vigilante "law."

Focusing on lynching dramas from 1890 to 1930, Mitchell challenges the critical narrative that regards them as mere protest art, arguing instead that the plays helped African Americans survive this difficult moment in US history by preserving a sense of black community, and thus functioned as a source of cultural affirmation. She emphasizes the way that the plays, unlike photographs, humanized their subjects by showing lynching victims in relation to their families and communities. While lynching photographs, typically taken by a member of the mob, framed the brutalized black body as the object of deadly force, lynching dramas refused to portray the act of violence explicitly, concentrating instead on the family members left behind. Engaging black activist Ida B. Wells's contention that lynching was [End Page 296] motivated by white resentment of black success, Mitchell argues that these plays sought to counter the hegemonic narrative that lynching was the justified execution of "isolated brutes," reframing it as an assault on black citizenship (7).

In chapter 1, Mitchell employs Diana Taylor's distinction between the archive and the repertoire to define lynching as a multivalent "scenario of exorcism" (24), noting the theatrical nature of acts of mob violence. Mitchell wittily underscores the gruesome nature of such scenes in her introduction, using the term "master/piece theater" to refer to the practice whereby "whites literally used pieces of black bodies as props to perform their master status" (3; emphasis in original). She builds upon this idea here and throughout, arguing that black playwrights knew that discourse (archive) and embodied practice (repertoire) intertwined to create mob violence and chose to demystify it by using the same tools: publishing one-act plays (discourse) that could provoke discussion (embodied practice). These plays were not ideal for the popular stage, but they were well-suited for staged readings in black homes, making amateur performance a critical part of the genre.

Chapter 2 takes a historical look at early twentieth-century debates among New Negro intellectuals about the political significance of the theatre, explaining that authors like Angelina Weld Grimké were motivated to become playwrights by the need to represent black realities with seriousness, rather than to allow them to be eclipsed by the reified comic stereotypes of blackface minstrel shows. Lynching plays, exemplified by Grimké's Rachel (written in 1914, published in 1920), mark a shift in focus for black theatre-makers, from production and acting to playwriting.

A predominant theme of the genre is the absent father. Reading it fifty years after the infamous Moynihan report was published, Mitchell carefully establishes the theme within the context of a larger narrative of violence against the black family. In these plays, the myth of the dysfunctional black family is disproved; the black home is shown to be a sanctuary of Christian values, the domestic center of family life that is, in fact, ripped apart by what Mitchell refers to as an act of "de-generation" (60) whereby the middle generation, the key to black success, has been violently removed by a white mob. Lynching is shown to be an act of violence not only against individual fathers, brothers, and uncles (and even mothers), but also against the black family and the black community at large.

With her historical and theoretical...

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