This essay offers a close reading of the 2008 reenactment of the 1946 Moore's Ford Lynching of four African Americans in Walton County, Georgia. Throughout this fieldwork, we were ethnographically positioned as co-performative... more
This essay offers a close reading of the 2008 reenactment of the 1946 Moore's Ford Lynching of four African Americans in Walton County, Georgia. Throughout this fieldwork, we were ethnographically positioned as co-performative witnesses, both “a part of” and “apart from,” mirroring the tensions between the intellectual remove of much rhetorical scholarship and the embodied engagement and understanding of performance studies. A complex and sophisticated repertoire of invention shared by the coalition of activists who planned and staged the performance enabled reenactors to mobilize their bodies to construct the ineffability of traumatic memory, challenge official accounts of the lynching, and advocate hope and healing for the future. Through the “cross-temporal slippage” of reenactment, all in attendance were invited to occupy the subject location of moral witness. A fracture in the coalition along lines of racial privilege/subordination and gender politics revealed the differential reliance upon archival and embodied knowledge, again mirroring the tensions that bind rhetoric and performance.
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This essay examines published reviews of Frank Darabont's 1999 film, The Green Mile, as a lens for reading the legacies of American race trauma upon contemporary sensibilities. Close analysis reveals three communities of memory, each... more
This essay examines published reviews of Frank Darabont's 1999 film, The Green Mile, as a lens for reading the legacies of American race trauma upon contemporary sensibilities. Close analysis reveals three communities of memory, each defined through a distinct relationship to slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy. Through a close analysis of the relationship between each community's readings of the film and preferred meanings anchored in the film's semiotic structure, we locate the key interpretive strategy used by each of these communities: One strategy is structured through melancholia and guilt for the sins of white supremacy; another is structured through mourning and moving beyond victimization; and a third is structured through the “negative sublimity” of transcendent Christian salvation. We then explicate historic and ideological entanglements among these three communities of memory. Points of intersection reveal internal contradictions that call for critical self-reflexive conversation within each community, and resources for communities to live productively with each other in relation to the past.
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... This essay locates the performance of ritual lynching within the white Christian Evangelical worldview that predominated among members of the white supremacist community responsible for lynching African-Americans. ... Ritual Lynching... more
... This essay locates the performance of ritual lynching within the white Christian Evangelical worldview that predominated among members of the white supremacist community responsible for lynching African-Americans. ... Ritual Lynching as Christian Evangelical Performance ...
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In recent years American communltles have been compelled to confront their histories of race violence and race lynching. 2 Situated within the ten sions of remembrance and forgetting, the collective will to confront these pasts is fraught... more
In recent years American communltles have been compelled to confront their histories of race violence and race lynching. 2 Situated within the ten sions of remembrance and forgetting, the collective will to confront these pasts is fraught with challenge, and calls to confront the legacies of white on-black race violence are often met with deep ambivalence. Some fear that commemoration will "produce nothing but anguish, grief, and a righteous, desperate rage that only risks fueling more violence." Others worry that instead of producing "a reconciled future, memories of victimization" will only exacerbate "social division and conflict" (Simon, Rosenberg & Eppert, 2000, p. 1). In this chapter, we examine one call to remembrance through the annual reenactment of the 1946 lynching of four African Americans in Walton County, Georgia. 3 Our research at the Moore's Ford Lynching Reenactment concerns one iteration by a coalition formed from two communities of memory-one white, cosmopolitan, financially secure, feminist, and reli giously and politically progressive, and one black, rural, of modest economic