Race, Lynching and the Colonial Death Penalty

Ebury, Katherine

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-52750-1_8

Katherine Ebury³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights ((PSLCHR))

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Abstract

This chapter reflects substantially on how colonial warfare and a racialised death penalty contribute to the psychology of modern literature. In Britain, the domestic logic of the death penalty was often underpinned by a need to maintain law and order across the Empire. Similarly, in the American context, frontier and settler violence was perpetuated in the twentieth century by an interdependence between lynching and capital punishment. Reference to psychoanalytic thinking about race and judicial violence, such as the work of Frederic Wertham, Benjamin Karpman and Frantz Fanon, problematises Freudian reliance on anthropological thinking. The first half of the chapter interprets how 1930s representations of the colonial death penalty, authors such as Greene, Orwell and Christie, exploit the problem of race primarily to illuminate the psychology of white male central characters. The second half of this chapter addresses literary representations of the American death penalty in the first half of the twentieth century, investigating how a history of slavery and lynching shapes how black writers represented capital crime and punishment.

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Notes

1.
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2.
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3.
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4.
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5.
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6.
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7.
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8.
Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, London, Verso, 2019, 306.
9.
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10.
Freud, Totem and Taboo, 1.
11.
For a reflection on how Freud’s Jewish identity inflected his attitudes to race and settler colonialism, see Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European, London: Verso, 2004.
12.
Stephen Frosh, ‘Psychoanalysis, colonialism, racism’, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2013): 141–154.
13.
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14.
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15.
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16.
See, for example, James Scannell, ‘The Method is Unsound: The Aesthetic Dissonance of Colonial Justification in Kipling, Conrad, and Greene’, Style, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1996): 409–432 and Valerie Kennedy, ‘Conradian quest versus dubious adventure: Graham and Barbara Greene in West Africa’, Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2015): 48–65.
17.
Graham Greene, It’s a Battlefield, Kingswood: The Windmill Press, 1952, 2.
18.
Greene, It’s a Battlefield, 16.
19.
Greene, It’s a Battlefield, 4.
20.
Greene, It’s a Battlefield, 1.
21.
Greene, It’s a Battlefield, 146–147.
22.
Greene, It’s a Battlefield, 19.
23.
Greene, It’s a Battlefield, 147.
24.
Greene, It’s a Battlefield, 146.
25.
Greene, It’s a Battlefield, 189.
26.
Greene, It’s a Battlefield, 194–195.
27.
See Lynne Cheney, ‘Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield: A Study in Structural Meaning’, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 16 (1970): 117–131; Robert Pendleton, ‘Arabesques of Influence: The Repressed Conradian Masterplot in the Novels of Graham Greene’, Conradiana, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1993): 83–98; Malika Rebai Maamri, ‘Cosmic Chaos in The Secret Agent and Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield’, Conradiana, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2008): 179–192.
28.
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29.
John Rodden and John Rossi, The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 64.
30.
Gowers et al. ‘Table I Recommendations to Mercy (England and Wales)’ and ‘Table II Recommendations to Mercy (Scotland)’, Royal Commission, paragraphs 31–35, pages 9–10.
31.
Peggy Kamuf, Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty, New York: Fordham University Press, 58.
32.
Orwell, ‘A Hanging’, Shooting an Elephant: and Other Essays, London: Secker and Warburg, 1950, 11.
33.
Orwell, ‘A Hanging’, 11–12.
34.
Orwell, ‘A Hanging’, 15.
35.
Orwell, ‘A Hanging’, 17.
36.
Critics call ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’ variously essays or short stories. John Rodden suggests that ‘the consensus today is that “A Hanging” is “faction”, an autobiography based essay’ (‘“A Hanging” Circa 80’, The MidWest Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 1 (2014): 70–85 (78)).
37.
George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, Shooting an Elephant: and Other Essays, London: Secker and Warburg, 1950, 6.
38.
Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, 1.
39.
Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, 1.
40.
Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, 2.
41.
Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, 10.
42.
See Ranajit Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1997): 482–493 and Barry Hindess, ‘Not at Home in the Empire’, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2001): 363–377 (363).
43.
See Gopal, Insurgent Empire, 244–278 and 279–318.
44.
Anon. ‘Detective Stories’, Times, 2nd January 1940, 3. Isaac Anderson, ‘New Mystery Stories’, New York Times, 25th February 1940, 86.
45.
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46.
Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, New York: Harper Collins, 2011, 36, 286.
47.
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48.
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49.
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50.
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51.
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52.
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53.
Theodor Reik, The Compulsion to Confess, The Compulsion to Confess: On the Psychoanalysis of Crime and Punishment, New York: Grove Press, 1961, 268.
54.
Christie, And Then There Were None, 211.
55.
Christie, And Then There Were None, 248 and 250.
56.
Christie, And Then There Were None, 47.
57.
Christie, And Then There Were None, 67.
58.
Christie, And Then There Were None, 169.
59.
Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None: A Play in Three Acts, London: Samuel French, 1944.
60.
For an overview, see Michael Bell, ‘Primitivism: Modernism as Anthropology’, Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. by Peter Brooker et al., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. For case studies of particular contexts, see Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science and the Irish Revival, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Carole Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919–1935, Westport and London: Praeger, 2004; Gina M. Rossetti, Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Culture, Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006.
61.
Frosh, ‘Psychoanalysis, colonialism, racism’, 145.
62.
Liam Kennedy, Race and Urban Space in American Culture, New York and London: Routledge, 2000, 132.
63.
Eli Zaretsky, ‘Beyond the Blues: Richard Wright, Psychoanalysis, and the Modern Idea of Culture’, The Transnational Unconscious: Essays in the History of Psychoanalysis and Transnationalism, ed. by Joy Damousi and Mariano Ben Plotkin, Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009: 43–70 (47).
64.
Joyce Ann Joyce, ‘Richard Wright’s A Father’s Law and Black Metropolis: Intellectual Growth and Literary Vision’, Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century, ed. by Alice M. Craven and William E. Dow, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011: 129–146 (137).
65.
Clarke, ‘Without Fear or Shame’, 286.
66.
Clarke, ‘Without Fear or Shame’, 289 and 284.
67.
Clarke, ‘Without Fear or Shame’, 287.
68.
Maggie E. Morris Davis, ‘Sound and Silence: The Politics of Reading Early Twentieth-Century Lynching Poetry’, Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1 (2018): 40–60 (52).
69.
Anon. ‘The Case For Abolition’, The Manchester Guardian, 17th November 1938, 14.
70.
Violet van der Elst, On the Gallows, London: Doge Press, 1937. This thread of argument is widespread across her polemic, but see especially 96, 214–223.
71.
Davis, ‘Sound and Silence’, 57.
72.
JanMohamed, Death-Bound-Subject, 19.
73.
JanMohamed, Death-Bound-Subject, 7.
74.
Richard Wright, Native Son, London: Vintage, 2000, 39.
75.
Wright, Native Son, 40.
76.
Wright, Native Son, 121.
77.
Allen and Clubb, Race, Class and the Death Penalty, 23.
78.
James Cutler, Lynch-law: an investigation into the history of lynching in the United States, New York: Longmans, Green, and co., 1905, 214–217.
79.
Allen and Clubb, Race, Class and the Death Penalty, 23.
80.
Sondra Guttman, ‘Who’s Afraid of the Corncob Man? Masculinity, Race, and Labor in the Preface to Sanctuary’, Faulkner Journal Vol. 15, No. 1–2 (1999): 15–34 (25).
81.
Richard Wright, ‘How Bigger Was Born’, Native Son, London: Vintage, 2000: 1–31 (7).
82.
Wright, Native Son, 106.
83.
Cunard, ‘Scottsboro—and other Scottsboros’, Negro: An Anthology, 155–174.
84.
Gopal, Insurgent Empire, 306.
85.
Gopal, Insurgent Empire, 298.
86.
Carrie Williams Clifford, ‘The Black Draftee from Dixie’, Negro, 261; T. Thomas Fortune, ‘That Other Golgotha’, Negro, 261; Cunard, ‘Southern Sheriff’, Negro, 265–266.
87.
Clarke, ‘Without Fear or Shame’, 282–285.
88.
Wright, Native Son, 273.
89.
Wright, Native Son, 333.
90.
Wright, Native Son, 432.
91.
Wright, Native Son, 436.
92.
Wright, Native Son, 415.
93.
Toru Kiuchi and Yoshinobu Hakutani, Richard Wright: A Documented Chronology, 1908–1960, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2013, 79.
94.
Wright, Native Son, 439.
95.
Wright, Native Son, 366–369.
96.
Wright, Native Son, 453.
97.
Wright, Native Son, 453–454.
98.
Zaretsky, ‘Beyond the Blues’, 45
99.
Zaretsky, ‘Beyond the Blues’, 47.
100.
Zaretsky, ‘Beyond the Blues’, 65.
101.
Jay Garcia, Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the Race Question in Twentieth-Century America, Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2012, 60.
102.
Frantz Fanon, ‘The Fact of Blackness’, Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader ed. by Les Back and John Solomos, London: Routledge, 2000: 257–266 (265).
103.
Zaretsky, ‘Beyond the Blues’, 48.

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School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Katherine Ebury

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Ebury, K. (2021). Race, Lynching and the Colonial Death Penalty. In: Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890-1950. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52750-1_8

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52750-1_8
Published: 11 February 2021
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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