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Legacies of Lynching Racial Violence and Memory Jonathan Markovitz |
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$60.00 Cloth |
Traces the changing meanings of lynching and examines the political power of lynching as metaphor. Between 1880 and 1930, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Beyond the horrific violence inflicted on these individuals, lynching terrorized whole communities and became a defining characteristic of Southern race relations in the Jim Crow era. As spectacle, lynching was intended to serve as a symbol of white supremacy. Yet, Jonathan Markovitz notes, the act's symbolic power has endured long after the practice of lynching has largely faded away. Legacies of Lynching examines the evolution of lynching as a symbol of racial hatred and a metaphor for race relations in popular culture, art, literature, and political speech. Markovitz credits the efforts of the antilynching movement with helping to ensure that lynching would be understood not as a method of punishment for black rapists but as a terrorist practice that provided stark evidence of the brutality of Southern racism and as America’s most vivid symbol of racial oppression. Cinematic representations of lynching, from Birth of a Nation to Do the Right Thing, he contends, further transform the ways that American audiences remember and understand lynching, as have disturbing recent cases in which alleged or actual acts of racial violence reconfigured stereotypes of black criminality. Markovitz's original and brilliant reinterpretations of the media spectacles surrounding Bernhard Goetz, Susan Smith, and Tawana Brawley provide subtle and compelling examples of the continuing stakes of political battles waged over imagery of race and gender nearly a century ago. Markovitz further reveals how lynching imagery has been politicized in contemporary society with the example of Clarence Thomas, who condemned the Senate's investigation into allegations of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings as a “high-tech lynching.” Even today, as revealed by the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and the national soul-searching it precipitated, lynching continues to pervade America's collective memory. Markovitz concludes with an analysis of debates about a recent exhibition of photographs of lynchings, suggesting again how lynching as metaphor remains always in the background of our national discussions of race and racial relations. “Legacies of Lynching builds its archive by focusing on extreme moments when the language of lynching flares up in cinematic, journalistic and institutional discourse.” —Interventions “Markovitz’s thesis is provacative and the analysis sophisticated.” —Contemporary Sociology “Markovitz assesses the dynamic nature of America’s collective memory of lynching. His case studies illuminate the on-going dialog between past and present.” —American Studies “Legacies of Lynching provides an important alternative perspective to more conventional studies of mob violence.” —Patterns of Prejudice Jonathan Markovitz is a lecturer in sociology at the University of California, San Diego. 208 pages | 16 halftones | 5-7/8 x 9 | 2004 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments 1. Antilynching and the Struggle for Meaning Conclusion: Not Just Memory |
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