Performance in Lynching and Cultural Counter Memories

I went to the Ethnic Studies Research & Working Group that Dr. Stevens invited us to last week. This is a group of predominantly OSU faculty members (and a few graduate students) assisting the featured professor in their in-progress manuscript by offering feedback. Last week the featured professor was Koritha Mitchell’s from the English department. Her manuscript is “Enduring ‘Strange Fruit’: Lynching Drama, African American Citizenship, and US Culture, 1890-1930.” I found this session intriguing because I never knew there were plays about lynching authored by Blacks in the early 1900’s. A lynching drama is a play in which the threat or occurrence of a lynching, past or present has major impact on the dramatic action. Mitchell’s argument is that Black-authored lynching plays were mechanisms through which African Americans endured the height of mob violence still believing in their right to full citinzenship. It was interesting to hear how affect and performance played in not only the plays but also the lynching itself. Mitchell describes the actual lynching as “masterpiece-theater”. The title refers to the white master use of Black bodies to reinforce his master status. It’s theater because these were very public events where pictures were taken, postcards made and pieces of the black body were taken by white spectators as souvenirs. (That’s why many believe the word picnic came from pick-a-nigger). All I could think about throughout this entire session was the effect of affect and its manifestation through performance as it related to the past and the present. There many very different results of affect and performance that came out of these many years of black tortured bodies. Our very own Dr. Stevens has written about how the tramatic past of African-Americans has signaled endeavors to translate and retranslate troubling historical moments like lynching. 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. (It’s classified as “eyeball rape” under Jim Crow law. An offense just as bad as the physical assault and punishable by death).How does this past mental affect African Americans? These memories, as Patricia Clough says, “touch on the psychoanalytically oriented account of trauma in order to welcome bodies haunted by memories of times lost and places left”. The hung bodies of the past still haunt many of us today.
I am reminded of the last presenter at the Comparative Studies conference a couple of weeks ago addressing black hyper-masculinity in hip-hop culture. The star of “The Mack” and many rappers are attempting to (consciously or subconsciously) create counter memories of their emasculated ancestors. Whether it be their ancestors who (once exiting the boat and landing in America) were castrated on the spot, their great-great grandfathers who were tortured in front of their families, their great grandfather who fought against Enlightenment thinking, their grandfather who had to fight off erroneous implications in the Moynihan Report or their disenfranchised brother. 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. Lynching as an instrument of subjugation, symbolized whites’ control of the public sphere and their investment in whiteness. Whiteness is only defined by the stigmatization and exploitation of the Other. Whiteness is and can only be defined in opposition to brown/Black people. 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. They can show how manly they are with the numerous women by their sides that the white man can’t touch anymore. With penis intact, in their videos they flaunt “their women” who they knew were so appealing to the white men of yester year who came into their home to violate their family. Lynching as a performance to emasculate the Black male and hyper masculinization as a way to retrieve that which made them men and a productive citizen. An interesting way in which history (in some weird way) repeats itself. Affect and trauma are power forces. But what seems to be even stronger is the manifestation of traumatic memory. One must be careful as to not allow a tormented past to create a detrimental present.

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