Blood at the root : lynching as American cultural nucleus

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of English, 2009.Since the exhibition Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000), responses to the historical tragedy of lynching have proliferated with case studies, memoirs, and literary and historical analyses that attempt to rescue those killed by the practice from aporias of memory. My dissertation explores lynching’s constitutive formations of black and white citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I examine privileged legal and psychological constructions of white subjectivity while investigating the oppression of black subjects forced to relinquish personhood in the American public sphere, where the privileges of citizenship were preserved by extending exclusively to white men the power to touch, observe, and torture the body of the Other with curiosity and violence. The public squares, court houses, and churches that served as settings for lynching are now valorized by American exceptionalism, but for African-Americans they were stages of suffering, as Saidiya V. Hartman has called them, as well as places of political lack. “Self and State: Lynching’s Intimate Violence,” the introduction to my project, delineates the mechanism of lynching outside of contemporary scholarship’s analogies of the practice with torture and hate crimes – both located in exceptional rather than public spaces – and places it instead in early twentieth-century debates about expanding definitions of citizenship, nationalism, and state power. In order to banish lynching from the public sphere in which it once thrived, Americans discursively quarantine racial violence in the South, thereby exempting the nation from the charge of racism. In my first chapter, “Confederate Vistas? Ida Wells-Barnett and Southern Citizenship,” I examine the construction of the South as a byword for racism, despite its constitutive role in African diasporic culture-formation. In Ida Wells-Barnett’s Southern Horrors (1892), the word “Southern” replaced “lynching” to modify “horrors.” My work restores Wells-Barnett to the context of migration, considering how her deployments of language fix Southern Horrors at the moment of movement rather than the moment of arrival, a moment fraught with disappointment at the discovery of racial violence in the Northern metropole. The displacement of lynching as a Southern crime rather than a national one easily accommodates American exceptionalism: if American civil religion is conceived with the sense that the nation is considerably more moral than others, then the cultural logic for treating racist anomalies is to surgically remove their locations from the body of the nation. I explore Wells-Barnett’s sense that lynching is the constitutive experience of black citizenship, and argue that traumatic witness enables people of color to lay claim to both “Southern” and “American” as categories of citizenship, despite the fact that these terms are often used without racial markers to indicate the identities of white people. Through analysis of George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) and Jean Toomer’s “A Portrait in Georgia” from Cane (1923), the second chapter, “Beneath the Skin: George Schuyler and the Fantasy of Race,” considers the uses of fantasy and dreaming in representations of lynching as theorizations of the public/private binary. Toomer’s poem describes the beauty of a white woman, but is interrupted by language that evokes lynching’s violent interventions. Within Schuyler’s novel, protagonist Max Disher finds, after being rejected by a white woman, that his fantasy of consummating his desire for her is interrupted by nightmare lynchers. Beginning with a psychoanalytic reading of fantasy as a mode of privacy denied to African-American subjects, I read the sexual longings of Toomer and Schuyler’s characters as regulated and policed by invisible white lynchers. The grim success of racism arises from its ability to produce a burdened subject that self-polices pleasure and internalizes discourses of responsibility and guilt, shifting accountability for lynching from the mob to the victim. Between Reconstruction and modernism, the character of fantasy is not substantively transformed; cross-racial affiliation – figured as utopian fantasy – violates the body of the race-crosser and punishes sexual desire. In Schuyler’s novel, which takes place in an America cosmetically changed by a machine that bleaches the skin of non-whites, race does not disappear. Instead, the means of accessing it travel from the visual to the genealogical and finally to the visceral, when the bodies of lynch victims are torn open in a quest to find the source of racial difference underneath the skin. Like Schuyler’s Black No More, William Faulkner’s short stories “Dry September” (1931) and “Pantaloon in Black” (1942) examine what can and cannot be seen, but they are specifically concerned with the trauma of witness. As I argue in my third chapter, “'Peaceful and Unfathomable and Unbearable Eyes’: William Faulkner and the Elision of Witness,” Faulkner foreclosed traumatic witness as the model from which to write about race, refusing to write a lynching story for Vanity Fair because, as he told Morton Goldman, he “never saw a lynching and could not describe one” (Blotner 89). By the time he made this claim, he had already written “Dry September,” a short story that prominently features mob violence but resists present-tense narration with rhetorical strategies that shift to unseeing witnesses – people who hear lynchings or hear of them secondhand. These strategies preserve the veracity of Faulkner’s claim of never having seen a lynching, despite the spectacle lynchings of Nelse Patton (1908) and Ellwood Higginbotham (1935) in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. The narrative invisibility of lynching in Faulkner’s “Dry September” and “Pantaloon in Black,” simultaneously preserves and dismantles the collectivity of the act, refusing to show its public face so that perpetrators could be at once everyone and no one. Even before Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the language of visibility and invisibility typified the discourses around race in America. The hierarchical structure of vision imposed by racial violence evinces that deprivileged subjects do not disappear under the weight of racism. Indeed, invisibility produces its opposite: surveillance of racial others by the dominant culture. Treating the opposition between visibility and invisibility, my fourth chapter, “The Lynched Woman: Kara Walker, Laura Nelson, and the Question of Agency,” considers popular and critical responses to two exhibitions – James Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000) and Kara Walker’s My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (2007) – as symptomatic of what I call the anxiety of audience, the fear that visual artifacts of racism may be consumed by the “wrong” spectators – ones either committed to white supremacy or overly-invested in their own ability to transcend racism with the act of sympathetic looking. This fear is activated in spectators who look at Walker’s work and the photograph of Laura Nelson’s hanged body in James Allen’s collection, by the longstanding association between woman and spectacle. Informed by feminist theorizations of the gaze and the politics of representation, I consider the difficulty of imposing resistant agency as the privileged mode of response to both oppression and spatially-bound spectatorship within exhibition space. Moving from my institutional home in Western New York to three lynching sites, my conclusion, “Vacant Lots: Public Memory and the Practice of Forgetting” is at once a memoir, polemic, and critical essay that examines historical and popular memories of lynching. The tone of this chapter is far more intimate than that of the project from which it is extracted, as it is a travelogue with stops in Greenville, South Carolina, a rapidly-expanding city near the idyllic Blue Ridge mountains; Port Jervis, New York, a commuter town on its state's New Jersey and Pennsylvania borders; and Marion, Indiana, where the paradigmatic lynching photograph was taken in 1930, in a spectacle of violence that continues to fuel local debates about memorialization. In Greenville, I found that the roads that once housed the Southern Provisions Company, a slaughterhouse where the mutilated body of accused murderer Willie Earle was found, have been literally trimmed to make them more remote, cutting off their connection to the Saluda River, the still-functioning railroad, and the junction with Interstate 85. At this site, development is the intimate companion of forgetting, foreclosing lynching’s publicness in favor of rural remoteness, whereas Port Jervis exhibits the exceptionalist tendencies of monument cultures, with public space dominated by memories of settlement and war, yet devoid of memory of the lynching of Robert Jackson Lewis in 1892. In Marion, the imagined national innocence created by the courthouse’s war memorials are belied by living memory of the town’s Depression-Era lynching, which its citizens have attempted to forget in a 2003 referendum that saw 473 participants voting against and 8 voting for a memorial for lynching victims Tom Shipp and Abe Smith. Analyzing public memory and culture through the lens of post-9/11 spectacles of national sentiment, I claim my project's literary and cultural archive as counter-public sphere and counter-memorial occluded by the entrenched desire to locate lynching's violence in states of exception, far from the idealized locations of the American homeland