A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature - Softcover

Goldsby, Jacqueline

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226301389 ISBN 13: 9780226301389

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2006

Synopsis

This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America's national life—the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynching—a highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecy—was in fact a fundamental part of the national consciousness whose cultural logic played a pivotal role in the making of American modernity.

To pursue this argument, Goldsby traces lynching's history by taking up select mob murders and studying them together with key literary works. She focuses on three prominent authors—Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Stephen Crane, and James Weldon Johnson—and shows how their own encounters with lynching influenced their analyses of it. She also examines a recently assembled archive of evidence—lynching photographs—to show how photography structured the nation's perception of lynching violence before World War I. Finally, Goldsby considers the way lynching persisted into the twentieth century, discussing the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the ballad-elegies of Gwendolyn Brooks to which his murder gave rise.

An empathic and perceptive work, A Spectacular Secret will make an important contribution to the study of American history and literature.

About this title

About the Author:

Jacqueline Goldsby is a professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University.

Review:

"An absolutely remarkable work. Goldsby argues that lynching was not a phenomenon that can be explained solely by appeals to psychoanalytic theory, nor can it be seen as a purely regional event confined to the South. Instead, lynching is best understood when historicized, placed firmly in the political, economic, and social contexts of American modernity. This is an extraordinary book that affects the reader on so many different registers - the political, the logical, and the emotional." - Carla L. Peterson, University of Maryland"

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0226301389
• ISBN 13: 9780226301389
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384