Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 by Koritha Mitchell, and: Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching by Crystal N. Feimster (review)

At the keynote address to "Lynching and Racial Violence in America: Histories and Legacies," Emory University's 2002 conference, Fitzhugh Brundage famously suggested that the flourishing of scholarship on the subject was a kind of exhumation. The conference, he noted, was the first since 1940 to treat collective violence. Perhaps an epoch of writing on racialized violence began at that moment, and in more recent years, scholarship on lynching has undoubtedly proliferated. However, despite the upsurge of scholarship on lynching, Koritha Mitchell's Living with Lynching suggests that the process of redress has scarcely begun.

Mitchell begins her book with a bracing introduction that radically reimagines the relationship between scholarship on lynching and the photography of the dead that appeared in James Allen and John Littlefield's Without Sanctuary exhibition. When the exhibition first opened in New York City in 2000, the historian Grace Elizabeth Hale reviewed it for the Journal of American History, suggesting that "viewers [are] left with an exhibit that is too close to the spectacle created by the lynchers themselves" and demanding that curators contextualize these images with writings by African American authors that resisted the images' associations of blackness with victimization (993). While Hale's critique engaged with long-standing debates about the ethics of representing violence, Mitchell suggests that the means of dehumanization is not simply photographic circulation but the removal of the lynched person from his or her community. Decades after the crime, the exhibition of the photographed body creates the illusion that lynching happened to singular bodies—usually men's—rather than to lovers, siblings, children, and communities. However iconic their representations of dead black men, lynching photographs cannot communicate the texture of black life in Jim Crow America. They exhibit singular persons rather than collective people, the experience of death rather than durable survival, and the consummation of the mob's desire rather than the spiritual strivings of African America.

Yet, as Mitchell argues, the circulation of images of atrocity bespeaks not only "the authority that modern society has granted to photography" (5) but also the elision of an important archive of African American expressive culture: lynching plays by figures like Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Burrill, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Myrtle Smith Livingston. As Mitchell argues, these women have not been canonized within literary studies; their productions have been delegitimized not only by the centrality of the photograph but also by the canonization of male writers and the geographical centering of Harlem. By contrast, these playwrights operated in the liminal space of Washington, dc, a city where lynching dramas breathed in amateur performance sites within domestic spaces of the black community but where anti-lynching legislation went to die in the white walls of the US Capitol.

The second section of Mitchell's book, "Developing a Genre, Asserting Black Citizenship," not only provides compelling analyses of Grimké's Rachel, Dunbar-Nelson's Mine Eyes Have Seen, and Mary Burrill's Aftermath but also powerfully adumbrates the conventions of lynching plays. These texts share certain formulaic elements—stock characters including lawyers and mothers, protagonists doomed by imminent lynching or secrets of white paternity, conceptions of religious and domestic virtue, and the "degeneration" of familial stability expressed in the absence of family members disappeared by violence—that reveal the extent to which reiteration is not repetition and repetition is not sameness (71-72). The genre itself created new possibilities of black identities and communities, "generat[ing] discourses and practices that shield[ed]" its audience "from the social forces designed to destroy their self-conceptions" (95). Each...