Living with lynching
Subtitle: African American lynching plays, performance, and citizenship, 1890-1930
By: Koritha Mitchell
Series: The new black studies series
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 251
ISBN-13: 9780252036491
Subjects: African Americans in literature; Violence in literature; Lynching in literature; History and criticism; American drama; Citizenship in literature; African American authors; One-act plays, American
Description: "Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynch victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of household being torn from model domestic units by white violence. In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : whose evidence? which account?; title: Making lynching drama and its contributions legible. Scenes and scenarios: reading aright; title: Redefining "black theater"; title: Developing a genre, asserting black citizenship. The black soldier: elevating community conversation; title: The black lawyer: preserving testimony; title: The black mother/wife: negotiating trauma; title: The pimp and coward: offering gendered revisions; title: Conclusion : documenting black performance: key considerations.