Performance in Lynching and Cultural Counter Memories

First off, awesome collection of pictures, Melissa! The visual aids really help.

Some questions:

Black-authored lynching plays were mechanisms through which African Americans endured the height of mob violence still believing in their right to full citinzenship.

Is this to say that this is an empowering way that African-Americans negotiated this difficult time?

The Black hyper masculinity the conference presenter spoke of is their way of redefining Black male identity the best way they feel they can. Unfortunately they don't see how similar their actions are to the whites who created the initial trauma.

Boy, that's a link! So is this also to say that glorified gang violence and misogyny in gangsta' rap and elsewhere reproduces (or is a restored performance of...) lynching?

Good stuff.

Melissa thanks for this... there is so much that you say here that compels me to speak... and then hesitate... and then take a breath... sucking in air between teeth touching though not clenched... like imagining someone else cutting a finger... or remembering myself almost having cut a finger (though, in actuality, I am told, I really did cut the finger and the scar is there to prove it... I can only remember almost having cut the finger). I always pause to mull when trying to teach around, or think around, or act around, these postcards. For years I have been ambivalent about posting them or showing them in class... I worry (and there is not a critique embedded in this Stolte-Sawa) that like low hanging fruit, the seeing of these postcards in sepia tones and frayed edges and imperfections can feel like history; history made identifiable with visual aids, props, like those low hanging bodies (and all the ones that didn't get photographed... the women, the Indians, the Mexicans, the Asians, etc.) were meant to prop up the sense of public spaces still being "White." I worry too about how the photos can feel like something to be read and consumed, those low hanging fruit, and understood like objects at a distance, signs of something past and ugly. So many people see them and think "how could people do that to other people," or "why did those people commit crimes that lead to this over-reaction." The sentiment being, see, I can better know myself as past racial difference now that I have seen what happened then (nothing proves the 'pastness' of it like a photograph... had to be there to take it... which reminds me, someone took those pictures! Someone got people to pose, someone configured the shot to be pleasing, someone made promises about what would be done with the images). Anyway, it's all very very vexing, no?

I am moved too by your suggestion that racial violence and gender violence are both important. Yeah, it makes sense in some ways, because anti-racist activism often discounts gender differences, and anti-sexist activism often imagines all women and all men in the same way without regard to how their racial or class or sexuality comes into the picture (so to speak).

you know, I wonder what would happen if we imagined for a bit what it would mean if the whole loss of black manhood to historical trauma were something like the cutting of my finger (phallic/castration allusion inadvertent but appropriate perhaps). Like the loss of manhood (successful) works to screen the actual loss in this instance, the loss of humanity... As if what African-American historical memory 'remembers' the cutting off of manhood as a way to forget the bludgeoning flat of humanity.

anyway, thank for the very provocative post!

:)

of course stolte-sawa, i know you know, which is partly why I felt comfortable alluding (without critique) to your comment, by way of sharing my own responses to seeing the images.

but ok. so let's get into this piece:

The Images elicit a powerful visceral and emotional response in me that helps me to connect with the "human side" of lynching depicted...

To start (and again, this is not about you Ryan, this is about us, about we who are always in performance), do you imagine any parts of this very complicated statement to be about performance? My inclination has been to think of the images, the eliciting they do, the visceral and emotional responses, and the connecting with the human, to all be about performance and, well, politics. But do I go too far? Do I make the concepts less than useful approaching them as performance (I seem to remember Myk taking up this question very early on -- or perhaps it was jadeforest)? If I am not going too far, than the bodily/affective/cognitive experience you allude to suddenly has a broader context. It's like we can now ask messier questions about the emergence of your experience... oh, maybe we (but I tend to get dizzy when trying this) can push it even further and imagine ourselves as, I don't know, coextensive with the muck out of which we crawl. Ick! Hmm... I am now wondering about thinking about "emotional scarring" differently...

In fact, maybe I need to revisit my response to the images Melissa posted (posted... post cards... re posted)...

warmly

Excellent piece, you deftly handle quite a few heavy topics here.

But it's not just lynching. It's not just the deaths themselves that have been so traumatic. It's memories of children going to school and seeing their neighbor castrated and dangling from a tree. It's the emasculation of the black man by seeing his wife and daughter being raped by the slave master,then years later, the law enforcement and not being about to do anything about it. It's about being that wife or daughter and not knowing how to look at your husband or father after watching him do nothing. Not that he didn't want to, but what good is he to his family stung up on a tree like his neighbor who merely was "caught" looking at a white woman.

Incredibly strong images that have doubtlessly resonated to modern times, if not through a sort of collective memory than at the very least through generations of parents modifying their behaviors based on what their parents experienced. That's the truly insidious effect of racism/hate crimes like these. The after-effects can be extremely long-lasting but it's very hard to draw direct, physical and/or psychological evidence in a way that will appease the "slavery ended 150 years ago" crowd.

Black hyper masculinity is defined not only in opposition to the emasculate man in their affect memory but in opposition to the subservient Black female. It was the white male that could do as he pleased with Black men's wives thus challenging and minimizing Black men's manhood. Today he can now "own" and control the person his fore-fathers couldn't (or at least appear as if he can through the numerous girls strategically placed in their music videos). However the affectionate protection that was in the best interest of females of past has been perverted. Hyper masculine black males are taking back their manhood through the way it was so easily taken from them…through their sexuality.

That's an intriguing reading of black male hyper-masculinity. It does make sense that this behavior would be connected to the powerlessness felt by the black community during slavery, through the Jim Crow era and continuing in many parts of the country today. An urgent need to violently reclaim a sense of agency many today don't even remember losing.

Given the response to Melissa's posting, it's easy to see how timely her essay is. Rather than end a conversation, her contribution this week provokes discussion. And whether we succeed or fail to communicate on Newsvine is something we've been grappling with as students who are required to post here, while, at the same time, dealing with difficult material. Moreover, not only does Melissa's essay engage readers, it's also a great place to examine ideas we've been tossing around in class, including some of the themes of Joseph Roach's book "Cities of the Dead." As Prof. Stevens states in his own posting on Newsvine, "…we might even think of our activities as a kind of remembering, our performance as a site of memory and even history." Roach links very different things, including: Mardi Gras performances of whiteface in New Orleans; British national origin myths in a Dido and Aeneas opera; the tradition of burying the dead outside the city, which he examines in regards to both London and New Orleans; and Roach's attempt to obtain rights to reproduce an Elvis stamp(!). In writing this ambitious book, which includes the author at the center (for someone else dealing with the same material and the same geographic parameters would have come up with something very different), Roach throws his net far and wide. What Melissa captures through her discussion of the performance of the hyper-masculine black male and that performance's relation to lynching, with a focus on origins, illustrates what Prof. Stevens states in the above quote. And she does it by following a single example through time, unlike Roach who makes connections without respect to temporality across the circum-Atlantic region. Both he and Melissa examine dimensions of performance. However Melissa's example, thankfully, is more accessible.

In response to the above reactions: I had the (mis)fortune of seeing the exhibit "Without Sanctuary" at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, post-9/11. That was when I first learned about these images, and experienced them. What was most striking was how visceral they were and how daring the exhibit was. On one level, the exhibit drew audiences like many exhibits are designed to do—by being something like "sensational." But once inside, there was only one response, which didn't allow for the simple passive viewer. Related to this are the issues of presentation and display. The question remains on how to deal with this kind of history, which is why it's so difficult to memorialize Holocaust victims or victims of 9/11. In such instances, imagery becomes difficult. (Maybe this is why some of the best responses to slavery are in literature?) What many people found disturbing for different reasons was a recording of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," which was available to museumgoers through individual headphones set up in a galley. Also noteworthy was that the show, as it was installed at the Warhol museum, had a room within the exhibit off to the side with nothing but couches in it. It was a place my friend and I decided was there just to sit and take a break; for the show was too exhausting emotionally. And now given our discussion of affect, looking back on that room it seems that it was designed to be there for just such excess.

I'd like to add something else to this conversation that I didn't say in class during our ethics discussion. As I mentioned above, I saw "Without Sanctuary" in Pittsburgh at the Warhol Museum. And the one thing that didn't come up in class was that the collection of photographs we were looking at became publicly known first as an exhibition—which is very different than looking at the images as a book in private. So there were a lot of additional issues that had to be dealt with. What I thought was borderline acceptable (although I can't decide about this) were the individual headphones set up in a gallery with Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" playing on them. It seemed to be too much and too easy. All one had to do was feel, not think so much. But then there were other rooms that balanced out the emotion and provoked a more active audience. In one gallery, a timeline was set up showing the milestones of the civil rights movement; and another gallery was set up as a resource center with books by and about important African Americans. Two aspects of the show's installation that I think were most effective include (1) the empty room with couches (which I mention above) and (2) a video monitor with two chairs in front of it. In regards to the empty room, I think that was included because of the surplus of affect the show produced. I don't know if that was by design or happenstance, but it was very effective. And if I recall correctly it was a smaller gallery off a larger gallery, which is where the headphones were playing "Strange Fruit." In terms of the video monitor, there was a TV set up with a video playing of people from Pittsburgh talking about their experiences with racism. I watched that video, which included some emotional testimonials from both blacks and whites, with an older African American woman. We sat relatively close to one another and watched that video, and neither one of us said anything to the other. But I remember that as a really important part of my experience of the exhibition. Also included next to the TV monitor was a video booth where you could record your own testimonial to be included in the video.
I bring all this up because (1) I didn't say it in class and (2) Justin made a really good point by saying that in situations when ethics are an issue form, content and presentation matter. The exhibition's incarnation at the Warhol in Pittsburgh took all three things into consideration. (It'd be interesting to learn if other venues used the same layout.) The Warhol, like many museums I suppose, sometimes thrives on spectacle, especially when you consider its namesake and you read about the celebrities who have visited the museum. But at the same time, it's a space devoted to the work of a gay artist. For the exhibition "Without Sanctuary" to be on display there, there was a lot the director and preparator had to take into consideration. Not only did they consider the museum and its physical space, but also the city.

As i was looking for information on my project i have for class i ran into this page. Altho this has nonthing to do with my page i read this whole page learning more and more by every comment that was made. I agree tc shows alot of things that reminds me of the eirly black days that we all remember, but also it seperates us blacks from others. Its what makes us different, altho id perfer not to see my future kids doing it but at the same time i feel special because we are different. Slaves may have controled out outspoken feelings and other things back in the day, but as the earth gets older, blacks get further and further to where they stand. The question is, will blacks go into the same slow rate direction of sucess or will they really make a big outbreak.