Black Tree Play

Learning From Anti-Lynching Ecologies in The 'Life and Times' of an American Called Pauli Murray

Bibliographic Data

ID3945418
AuthorsVirginia Thomas (0000-0001-8751-8213, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume125
Issue1
Pages70-87
Publication date2020-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0141778920918582
OpenAlexW3044429422
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited22

This article reads the photo album, The 'Life and Times' of an American Called Pauli Murray as an archive of anti-lynching pasts and futures. While scholarly discourses have leveraged Murray's archive for evidence of her 'true' gender and sexual orientation, this article uses the reading practice of 'accompaniment' to reframe investigations of Murray's identity into thinking with and learning from the strategies she archived in the album for living in atmospheres of antiblackness. Working with Christina Sharpe's (2016) concept of 'weathering', I read several photographs in Murray's album as burgeoning ecologies of repair in relation to visual technologies of racial capture, particularly that of lynching photography. Reading passages in which Murray talks about lynching and race as atmospheric from Proud Shoes (1999 [1956]) and Song in a Weary Throat (1987) alongside The 'Life and Times', I read Murray's portraits as rupturing white property relations through turning lynching photography's scripts inside out

Adventure · Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Identity (music) · Portrait · Reading (process) · Sociology · Visual arts · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Race, History, and American Society

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