Book review of: Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930. By Koritha Mitchell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Gender and Lynching: The Politics of Memory. Edited by Evelyn M. Simien. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Abstract

Between 1890 and 1930, while most white Americans were invested in what they wanted lynching to clearly and singularly denote—what Robyn Wiegman so aptly describes as “the specular assurance that the racial threat...has been rendered incapable of return”—the black community was more interested in exploding such neat and often false conclusions in order to expose lynchings for the questions they both generated and left unanswered, for the various casualties and survivors they left behind in their wake, and for the families whose lives they would continue to haunt for generations. As two recent books on the representational history of lynching violence in the United States suggest, the sufficiency of the word “lynching” to evoke the plenitude of black victimage, on the one hand, and white supremacy, on the other, should no longer be allowed to hold sway. To that end, Koritha Mitchell’s brilliant Living with Lynching takes especial care to remove her readers from the predictable outdoor venue for lynching—popularized by photographic “archives left by perpetrators” (6)—and ushers them, instead, into the quietude of the African American domestic space. The genre of her focus, lynching drama, privileges the black home as a viable, probable, and alternative theatrical space in which to observe the repercussions of lynching violence. In bringing us to the indoor spaces where lynching drama brings her, Mitchell ultimately makes three important interventions in lynching scholarship.