Troubling the “Beat Inevitable”
Brooks, Ellison, and the Cultural Logic of Lynching
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272403 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christina Accomando (Cal Poly Humboldt, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 113-135 |
| Publication date | 2017-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlx068 |
| OpenAlex | W2769214430 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
“It’s the cameras that are new,” Ta-Nehisi Coates told an audience at the Union Baptist Church in Baltimore. “It’s not the violence that’s new” (“Ta-Nehisi”).1 Our anxious times—police shootings, Facebook feeds teeming with bloody videos, post-election hate crimes, refugee and immigrant bans, “alt-right” attacks on anti-racist activists—represent something recent and something with deep roots in this country. “The evil of slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude,” argues Equal Justice Initiative director Bryan Stevenson. “It was this narrative of racial difference, this ideology of white supremacy.” While slavery technically ended, that narrative and its underlying ideology persisted, in black codes, convict leasing, Jim Crow, and lynching. Often widely publicized spectacles, lynchings were also followed by silencing and denial, lasting into the present. Civil-rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill argues for truth-telling and community dialogue in her 2007 book, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century. “For truth-telling to have reconciliatory benefits,” Ifill writes, people of different races need to talk with each other and imagine each other’s perspectives. She acknowledges that “race talk can be a messy business, at least initially. The outcomes may seem uncertain. But what is the alternative?” (136). Such “race talk” often takes place in the literature classroom; ideally, we find ways to conduct this “messy business” as productively as possible, with vibrant texts as points of departure, ground rules for class discussion, and at least some shared understanding of what is at stake in these conversations. Teaching the literature of lynching can help us confront contemporary legacies of lynching, justifications of violence, and strategies for resistance.
Art · Convict · Criminology · Denial · Economic Justice · Ideology · Immigration · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation) · White supremacy · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gender Studies · Law · Music History and Culture · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society
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| Highly cited | No |
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