Abstract
The replacement of the crime of lynching with juridical models of criminality has enabled forgetting of its collectivity. Popular discourse about lynching seems to remember it as a hate crime in anti-racist narratives or legal execution in racist narratives. Neither substitution captures the collectivity of the crimes. The juridical language of these substitutions cannot explain the collective appeal for the bloodthirsty crowds of lynchings. Using lynching photography from James Allen's Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, my paper reconstructs the collective nature of lynching as a site for psychoanalytic and cultural analysis. Freud's articulation of the sublimated violence in social groups provides a theoretical framework for my argument.
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Notes
The current version of this essay benefited from the readership of three generous friends – Rachel Lee, Burke Scarborough, and Katie Van Wert – as well as the constant help of my husband. I am indebted to Professor Karen Beckman, for whose graduate seminar on feminism and psychoanalysis I wrote this essay, and Professor Jeffrey Tucker, my endlessly patient dissertation director, advocate, and mentor.
Though I am a southerner, the purpose of my reclamation is not to avoid or elide the deeply entrenched racism of the south. In fact, the sites of my personal history provided me with shocking acts of witness into the racist “mind of the South” delineated by Cash (1991). These acts included the self-testimony of an elementary school principal who believed that corporal punishment was useful in controlling the “other race,” high school teachers who believed in polygenesis, and deeply entrenched white privilege in every southern city I have encountered. Nonetheless, I believe that American racism is national in character and that my experience was determined as much by rural emptiness as rural southernness.
References
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Lightweis-Goff, J. “Blood at the Root”: Lynching, Memory, and Freudian Group Psychology. Psychoanal Cult Soc 12, 288–295 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100129
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100129