10 research outputs found
"A Different Kind of 'Strange Fruit': Lynching Drama, African American Identity, and U.S. Culture, 1890-1935"
Since November 1999, the book and exhibition Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America has made nearly 100 pictures of mutilated victims readily available. These images convince Americans that we can plainly see the destruction that mobs caused and encourage us to overlook the disadvantages of equating lynching with the hanging body--what Billie Holiday called "strange fruit." My work argues that we not blindly accept the corpse as the ultimate symbol of racial terrorism by taking seriously the antilynching plays that African Americans wrote in the midst of mob violence (that is, before 1935).
The dramatists insisted upon the body's inability to represent the horror of lynching. Rather than describe the crimes perpetrated on America's trees, telephone poles, and bridges, the genre takes us inside black homes where widows and orphans survive only to suffer. Thus, it is clear that the violence continues long after the corpse has disintegrated and that the home itself is a lynched body. When a father is torn from the family, the household is "castrated" and its head removed. (None of the plays mentions women lynch victims.)
Yet, the scripts do not merely protest racial violence; they also affirm racial pride. African Americans understood that black identity was vulnerable to the power of representation, especially when technology was making the distribution of negative images more efficient. At the turn of the century, blacks proclaimed themselves sophisticated, modern citizensand they knew that mainstream messages to the contrary frequently caused--but more often did more damage than--physical assaults. So, even as recorded lynchings declined in the 1920s, black-authored lynching plays proliferated, in order to address the dehumanizing violence inherent in how the race was represented in America.
In five chapters, this project examines why lynching drama emerged, develops a theoretical framework for understanding the plays, offers close readings of ten plays by black women and three by black men, grapples with the fact that most black-authored lynching dramas were not professionally produced, and argues that appreciating the genre requires complicating our understanding of theatrical value
Writers Talk Featuring Koritha Mitchell
OSU English professor Koritha Mitchell discusses her book Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930.Ohio State University. Center for the Study and Teaching of Writin
Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature
Writers Talk featuring Koritha Mitchell, Lonnie Stuckey, and Chris Pavone
OSU professor Koritha Mitchell discuss Amiri Baraka in conjunction with Black Lit radio with Hopeton Hay. Lonnie Stuckey, the winner of the KIPP Journey School/Writers Talk contest, will read his winning essay. Recent Thurber House guest Chris Pavon will discuss his novel The ExPats.Ohio State University. Center for the Study and Teaching of Writin
IntroductionâLe legs du lynchage : dynamique raciale de la discipline et de la punition dans la culture Ă©tatsunienne
Shame and the Ex-Convict: The New Jim Crow, African American Literature, and Edward P. Jones's âOld Boys, Old Girlsâ
Recommended from our members
Looking Backward, Looking Forward: MLA Members Speak
In 1997 I was asked to organize humanities outreach activities at the University of California, Irvine. The result was the formation of Humanities Out There (HOT). In our workshops, faculty members and graduate students supervise teams of undergraduates in order to take the methods and materials of the university into the larger community.I believe that programs like these will  become increasingly important in the next century, as economic, cultural, and educational divisions deepen in the wake of the demise of affirmative action and as the humanities fight to define their missions in a world driven by technology and its discontents. In this brave new world, what I call the new outreach may have a role to play in responding to social crises as they are visited on the life of the university. The new outreach will be driven by intellectual content, not public relations.It will take its orientation from the faculty rather than administrators. It will engage all the research disciplines rather than remain the purview of education departments. It will be integrated into the professional lives of its participants rather than rely on the spirit of volunteerism alone
Recommended from our members
Looking Backward, Looking Forward: MLA Members Speak
In 1997 I was asked to organize humanities outreach activities at the University of California, Irvine. The result was the formation of Humanities Out There (HOT). In our workshops, faculty members and graduate students supervise teams of undergraduates in order to take the methods and materials of the university into the larger community.I believe that programs like these will  become increasingly important in the next century, as economic, cultural, and educational divisions deepen in the wake of the demise of affirmative action and as the humanities fight to define their missions in a world driven by technology and its discontents. In this brave new world, what I call the new outreach may have a role to play in responding to social crises as they are visited on the life of the university. The new outreach will be driven by intellectual content, not public relations.It will take its orientation from the faculty rather than administrators. It will engage all the research disciplines rather than remain the purview of education departments. It will be integrated into the professional lives of its participants rather than rely on the spirit of volunteerism alone