Embodied Practices of Black Belonging and Identity Formation in Lynching Drama of the Progressive Era:

The volume authored by Koritha Mitchell is a remarkable contribution to the field of African American drama, as it explores the manifold uses of lynching plays during the Progressive era as crucial tools to ensure community conversation and debate about the difficulties and complexities involved in having to coexist with the terrible reality of lynching. Mitchell’s groundbreaking study reassesses the significance of black theater as an archive and repertoire of embodied practices of black belonging and community-building in the face of constant exposure not only to lynching itself, but to the insidious exhibition of lynching photographs that perpetuated the myth of the black brute and rapist. The publication proposes an innovative critical reading that counteracts this racist practice by investigating the impact of lynching on both the black family and the black home, focusing on lynching dramas written by prominent writers and intellectuals from 1890 to 1930, such as Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Burrill, Georgia Douglass Johnson, Myrtle Smith Livingston, G. D. Lipscomb, and Joseph Mitchell. By analyzing the development of the genre itself, which was initiated by black women, Mitchell highlights how lynching drama helped to “read aright ” the horribl