Seeing and Killing:
Lynching Photography and Acts of Violence in the American South.
The photographs in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America occupy an important position in our understanding of racist violence in the United Sates of America. They provide a context in which to discuss the systematic racist conditions that black people endured after emancipation from slavery. Critically though, these photographic postcard images enable us to see the manifest results of racist campaigns across various ideological fronts that were developed to endorse and maintain Aryan supremacist political power. In this essay I examine the historical and ideological conditions that supported the justification of lynching and the production of these photographic postcard images.
The exhibition, Witness: Photographs of Lynchings from the Collection of James Allen, went on display at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in Manhattan, New York in January 2000. Crowds of people waited to visit the small one room gallery in freezing weather for up to three hours at a time. Once inside people would spend hours looking. Eventually the gallery owner had to supply free tickets at a rate of 200 a day to accommodate the crowds. Over 5000 people saw the exhibition before it finally closed. However due to overwhelming public interest it was agreed that exhibition should be transferred to the galleries at the New York Historical Society where it was subsequently developed into a major States wide touring exhibition. At the New York Historical Society over 50,000 people visited the exhibition in the first four months of its display. Later that same year the art publishers Twin Palms published a book based on the Allen’s collection under the title, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America where Around 100 photographs from Allen’s collection were beautifully reproduced. The book is now in its sixth edition.
The exhibition and publication depict how mostly black men and women accused of crimes met ‘justice’ throughout the Southern and Midwestern States of America. The photographs date from between1870 to 1960. Texts published in the book by John Lewis, Hilton Als and in particular Leon F. Litwack provide an insightful sociological, historical and political context within which to read the photographs. These graphic and often harrowing images from America’s recent past, present the viewer with aspects of the stark realities of the culture of lynching in American society. These photographic postcards dramatically reveal the how lynching as a form terror was aimed specifically at America’s southern black communities.
Leon F. Litwack’s informative essay reminds us that ‘between 1882 and 1968 an estimated 4,742 blacks met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs’.(1) He presents a detailed account of how lynching along with other acts of aggression against Americas black people formed part of a regime of violence that occurred on a daily basis. This series of photographic postcards collected by Allen therefore represents an important visual record of a very specific type of violence, which was an excepted part of society in the American South. Allen’s photographic postcards therefore directly address the specific political and cultural environment of the Southern States of America that allowed black people to be openly murdered. Crucially the photographs reveal how these murders also came to function as acts of public spectacle and celebration.
Its clear from a statement made by Allen that the Without Sanctuary project is a direct attempt to engage with a form of historical and social amnesia that surrounds racist violence and in tolerance to difference in America. On being asked why he collected the postcards, Allen responded from the perspective of being a victim and an outsider, he is quoted as saying, ‘I’m a gay man and the discrimination I have known in my life has been from white males. I’m just angry and this is a way to express my anger’ (2). From Allen’s statement we can deduce that a major curatorial objective behind the exhibition was to extract some form of revenge for his own sense of victimisation. It appears Allen’s own persecution by white American Southern men enabled him to identify with this aspect of the black American experience. Allen’s personal agenda seems to have been to expose through the display of lynching photographic postcards, an inherent and violent intolerance of Aryan America society. What Allen may have failed to anticipate was how deeply disturbing the exhibition would be for many black visitors. There were several reports of black people leaving the exhibition shocked, tearful, and bemused. (3)
The Without Sanctuary photographs contain a crushing sense of racist realism. The photographs represent more than the detailed outcomes of the acts of lynching. In this context they function as evidential documents of the actual victims death at the hands of the lynch mobs. The very fact that the majority of the victims in the photographs are named enables both the exhibition and the book to function as a memorial roll call to those men and women. By having names, the victims become more real, the black body in this instant is not a nameless black servant or object of observation, which was common in historical renderings of the black subject. Here they given an identity, in knowing who the victims are the photographs shift from being merely representations of some generic racist historical incident. In this instance each lynching becomes a historic event in its own right. The victims become historical figures and not simply the ‘bearers of someone else’s discourse’. (4)
In relation to issues of identity and identification one pairing of images, plates 31 and 32 within the book is particularly disturbing. The caption information for these photographs reads, ‘The Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana. The additional caption information, (framed photograph with victim’s hair) only applies to plate 32. Plate 31 is a cropped version of plate 32. The photograph shows two lynched black men hanging from a tree. A jovial crowd of white men and women surround the hanged men. One prominent central character in the crowd is pointing to the victims. He is distinctive not only by the fact that he is pointing to the victims but also because he presents a wide-eyed defiant glare directly to the camera. In Plate 32 the photograph is mounted and matted in the way personal photographs are displayed within a domestic environment. The matt has a childlike text written on it that reads ‘Klan 4th Joplin Mo 33’ followed by text that reads ‘Bo: pointn To his niga’. Lying across the photographic mount is a lock of hair from one of the victims depicted in the photograph. The combination of image, text and hair displays an uncanny sense of intimacy connected to the act of lynching and the owners sense of identification with the lynch mod. Significantly through the presence of the victim’s hair, the dead men become trophies. (5)
The text, ‘Bo pointn to his niga’, and the childish handwriting style are important to our understanding of the latent violence contained within this image. This text, with its miss spelt words and varied capitalisation, effectively gives ownership of the black body to ‘Bo’. The text in identifying that ‘Bo’ is pointing to ‘his niga’ clearly reveals Bo’s, underlying desire to dominate the bodies of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, even in death. The image of ‘Bo’ staring directly back at the camera, returning our gaze, can also be read as a performative act that endorses for the camera where power lies. Bo’s gesture is therefore a defiant act to those outside of this frame to challenge his authority or encourage those who receive the image to be complicit in its message. Bo’s sense of power and ownership of the situation is further supported by the participation of the jovial crowd of white onlookers, especially the young people to the left of the photograph who project smiles in full acknowledgement of the photographer, ‘who by his presence and act of rendering the images and supplying postcards as part of a service to the racist white community is implicated along with the crowd in the act of lynching. However passing of time, the changing contexts for presentation of these photographs, and our own subject positions change how we perceive the photographs. The photographer now renders a service to history’.(6) Bo’s defiant pointing in this scene is a final act of violent debasement on the corpses of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. This photograph today has the capacity to call Bo’s actions to account.
Leon F. Litwack provides the central, emotive thesis for the book. His essay titled ‘Hellhounds’, recounts several lynching scenes in detail. Litwack employs a journalistic style of narrative creating a dramatic sense of reportage throughout his essay. This is endorsed by Litwack’s use of references and quotes from actual archival newspaper articles from the time that reported on lynchings in a graphic and often celebratory style. Litwack’s text about the nature and behaviour of a Georgian crowds participation and anticipation of a public lynching is particularly emotive. The repetitious use of the term, ‘most lynching’ gives his text a wider application than that of just describing any one particular lynching scene. For example,
‘On a Sunday afternoon, April 23, 1899, more than two thousand white Georgians, some of them arriving from Atlanta on a special excursion train, assembled near the town of Newman to witness the execution of Sam Hose, a black Georgian. The event assumed a familiar format. Like so many lynchings, this one became a public spectacle. As in most lynchings, the guilt of the victim had not been proven in a court of law. As in most lynchings, no member of the crowd wore a mask, nor did anyone attempt to conceal the names of the perpetrators; indeed, newspaper reporters noted the active participation of some of the regions most prominent citizens. And as in most lynchings, the white press and public expressed its solidarity in the name of white supremacy and ignored any information that contradicted the people’s verdict’ (7).
Litwack’s text emphasises the total disregard for the legal rights of the victims. The overriding desire for the white mob to either participate or spectate, is what surfaces throughout Litwack’s text.
Collectively the photographic postcards brought together in ‘Without Sanctuary’ represent nearly one hundred years of violent, illegal, mob rule. The majority of the images capture the immediate, brutal conditions and environment of a post-lynching scene directly. The photographs focus on the victims hanged bodies. In several photographs, groups of two or three victims have their hands and feet tied or chained together. Photographs show victim’s necks extended and broken. Dead bodies are photographed burnt beyond recognition with body parts having being hacked off. Plate, number 46, has a disturbing sense of the everyday nature of racist violence. This photograph shows the severed and burnt head of Will James, which appears to be located on the corner of the street of a respectable suburban neighbourhood. In the background we see a tidy well kept wooden framed house and garden. The partially burnt head of James is almost unrecognisable even as a head. The caption and text within the photograph read, ‘Half Burned Head of James November 11, 1909, Cairo Illinois.’ The banal depiction of James burnt head displayed on a post juxtaposed with the domestic idealism of the suburban house create a surreal image of the disturbing normality of racist violence in the South.
Once the impact of seeing the photographs of lynched men and women has been absorbed, what begins to dominant is the image of the white spectators. This in turn invites viewers to examine our own position as spectators when viewing these images. Several key questions have been posed about how these photographs function. For example, is it possible ‘to represent victims of lynching without also reproducing the effects of a subjugated body exposed to a voyeuristic gaze. Is it sufficient to shift the context and purpose of these works?’(8) Is it indeed possible to shift the context in which these photographs have been produced away their original purpose? On viewing the white spectators in the Without Sanctuary photographs we can begin to learn much about the nature and history of the totalitarian racial politics that operated in the Southern States of America. The photographs are an invitation to consider how it is that lynching was deemed acceptable in the South for so long.
‘Totalitarian political systems function through the overt exercise and display of punishment for the violation of laws, such as public execution, in modern societies power relations are structured to produce citizens who will actively participate in self-regulating behaviour’. (9)
Lynching was used as a regulatory system of punishment for keeping black people in their designated role as inferior subjects in America society. For white Southern Americas the act of lynching as a public form of spectacle conditioned them to believe that this form of public violence was part the ‘natural’ order of things. Even if State laws existed to protect citizens against lynching, these laws when applied to black Americans would be negated by the cultural imperative to claim Aryan authority above State law. Therefore ‘natural’ Aryan law took precedence over civic law. For a white subject to question the social necessity of lynching was in effect to step out side of the socio-political constructions of ‘normal’ race relations. It was in fact common practice to expose young Southern white children to lynching at an early age as part of their initiation into white supremacist ideology. Plate 57 illustrates this point clearly. Surrounding the lynched figure of Rubin Stacy are children as young as four or five years old. (10).
According to Michel Foucault ‘the disappearance of public executions marks the decline of spectacle; but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body’ (11). What seems to mark America’s Southern States, as being different from other Western societies around the middle of the nineteenth century was that the South maintained an intense obsession to regulate the black body. What lynching photographs show us is that there appears to have been a deep desire within white society to continue to treat the black body, post emancipation as a physical site of punishment. The psychology of this is could be partially located in the humiliation the South endured in loosing the civil war and the role free black men played in that deeply traumatic internal conflict. The Southern desire to torture, degrade, mutilate and display the black body, it could be argued, was effectively locked into a social structure that was bound up in slavery and therefore outside of the conditions of penal reform that were in progress across the West. The treatment of blacks therefore had more in common with sixteenth century European penal law than with law reforms in nineteenth century, post emancipatory, Western societies in which the focus of punishment through inflicting pain on the body was in decline.
According to Foucault, the progression of legal reform in western society
‘from being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. If it is still necessary for the law to reach and manipulate the body of the convict, it will be at a distance, in the proper way, according to strict rules, and with a much ‘higher’ aim. As a result of this new restraint, a whole army of technicians took over from the executioner, the immediate anatomist of pain: warders, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, educationalists; by their very presence near the prisoner, they sing the praises that the law need: they reassure it that the body and pain are not the ultimate objects of its punitive action.’ (12)
However Foucault’s position on punishment proves to be problematic when one adds the dynamic of racial difference across his analysis of how discipline and the spectacle of punishment functioned in the Southern States. Here ‘the economy of suspended rights’ cannot be seen as an appropriately applicable analysis when we take into account that black Americans were being denied active participation in society as a whole. Foucault informs us that during the eighteenth century
‘there are no longer any of those executions in which the condemned man was dragged along on a hurdle (to prevent his head smashing against cobble stones) in which his belly was opened up, his entrails quickly ripped out, so that he had time to see them, with his own eyes, being thrown on the fire; in which he was finally decapitated and his body quartered. The reduction of these “thousand deaths” to strict capital punishment defines a whole new morality concerning the act of punishment.’(13).
Litwack’s account of the lynching of Sam Hose in 1899 seems to contradict Foucault’s position that the West, by the end of the nineteenth century moved away from punishment as a form of public spectacle.
‘ After stripping Hose of his clothes and chaining him to a tree, the self-appointed executioners stacked kerosene-soaked wood high around him. Before saturating Hose with oil and applying a torch, they cut off his ears, fingers, and genitals, and skinned his face. While some in the crowd plunged knives into his flesh, others watched “with unfeigning satisfaction” (as one reporter noted) the contortions of Sam Hose’s body as the flames rose, distorting his features, causing his eyes to bulge out of their sockets, and rupturing his veins. The only sounds that came out from the victims lips, even as his blood sizzled in the fire, were, “Oh, my God! Oh Jesus.” Before Hose’s body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into pieces and his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over these souvenirs.”(14)
In effect, we can’t dislocate the violent nature and legacies of slavery and colonisation when we examine issues relating to discipline and punishment. We have to examine how racial difference impacted on the nature and application of punishment. Therefore when we look at these images of lynched black men and women in the Southern States of America we must view these not just as horrific acts performed as a result of mob violence we have to view these images as being part of a legacy of racism that was developed during colonisation and slavery in America. They should not be read in isolation as simply being part of America’s racist past.
In relation to Foucault we can view white Southern American’s refusal to progress from the spectacle of public execution as a major crisis in the development of post-imperial Southern America. By engaging in lynching the social body of white Southern America literally dragged the black body out of the hands of the recognised progressive legal system and back towards medieval conditions of punishment. Foucault’s analysis of the reduction of a ‘thousand deaths’ is therefore problematic when we discuss racial politics in America and across the colonised world. The history of discipline, punishment, crime and violence against the body needs to be addressed within the context of the boundaries of imperialism and empire, systems that in practise operated under different cultural standards when focused on the black body. Lynching in America is only one manifestation of these historically different cultural standards when we discuss punishment seeing and killing.
Foucault establishes that punishment, as a form of public spectacle was by 1840 in decline and that in western societies most of the legal reforms relating to the barbarity of public execution had been achieved. However Foucault acknowledges that these reforms were not complete and the tendency towards public execution did not completely disappear.
‘The reduction in the use of torture was a tendency that was rooted in the great transformation of the years 1760 –1840 but it did not end there; it can be said that the practice of public execution haunted our penal system for a long time and still haunts it today’ (15)
The lynching photographic postcards in Without Sanctuary form a significant part of America’s haunting. They infect the present as a form of re-memory. The photographs address the present as a form of unresolved trauma. These photographs disturb, because they reveal the close historical proximity of lynching. They form part of living memory and question the underlying foundation of Western civilisation and its relationship to the ‘other’.
The Without Sanctuary project awakens the unresolved past trauma of the American South’s violent suppression of black people which continues to haunt its present. The images create a historical mirror in which the viewer can reflect on the racial politics of the South. What they see in that mirror depends on which aspects of the image they identify with culturally and politically. A possible explanation of why black Americans were so disturbed on viewing the Without Sanctuary exhibition could be because these photographs triggered a sense of trans-generational trauma, through identification with and possibility of being a victim.
Litwack’s description of the mob’s treatment of Sam Hose in 1899 and the fact that these images were produced for commercial exploitation illustrates that the ‘disappearance of torture as a public spectacle’ around 1840 as far as racial politics in America was concerned had not declined. Instead a system of penal apartheid that functioned outside of what could be considered normal legislative systems of power operated in America around the turn of the nineteenth century. The Southern practise of lynching and its subsequent cultural endorsement by Southern moral and legal systems meant that few people were actually charged in connection with lynching. This ensured that this form of public spectacle held a ‘special’ place in American society long before and after 1840.
One photographic postcard, plate numbered 59 and 60 and reproduced across two plates with the photograph on one plate and the reverse message on the other, from Georgia produced in 1902, portrays the remains of a hanging charred torso of an African American man with a crowd of relaxed white men gathered underneath the body. On the reverse side of the postcard a hand written text reads ‘Warning. The answer of the anglo-(unreadable word) race to black brutes who would attack the womanhood of the South’. Another postcard plates numbered 25 and 26, from Robinson, Texas, May 16th, 1916 replicates almost the exact same scene a black charred, decimated, hanged body is shown surrounded by a large group of white men. The message on this postcard reads ‘This is the barbeque we had last night my picture is to the left a cross over it your son Joe.’ The message clearly indicates that the black body was equated with and simply reduced to meat for a barbeque.
This debasing reading of the black body had a basis in theoretical teachings of Polygenesis. Many of the key advocates of Polygenesis were based in the South and were keen to academically challenge the more traditional theories of monogenesis. Monogenesis supported the idea that the family of man had originated, according to the book of Genesis. Polygenesis was developed as a counter theoretical perspective and was used as an important ideological offensive against the growing influence of the American abolitionist movement. The new theories of Polygenesis emerged around 1840 with the publication of Samuel George Morton’s seminal racist text, ‘Crania Americana’. Morton’s theories also had support from European academics. and were hugely influenced by the work of the Scottish natural scientist Robert Knox, especially Knox’s book ‘The Races of Men’. The British born Egyptologist, George Robins Glibbon, was also a key influential figure in the transatlantic Polygenesis movement. Glibbon was in turn crucially influenced by the work of French diplomat and anthropologist, Joseph Arthur Gobineau. Gobineau’s book ‘An Essay on the ‘Inequality of the Human Races’ produced around 1853, was later to become a key text that would to be absorbed into for the formation of German, Nazi theories of racial hygiene.
‘From 1840 onwards these comparative forms of racial description were increasingly augmented by evaluations based on a presupposition of cultural hierarchy. The neutral linguistic account of race associated with James Cowles Pritchard gave way to the culturalism of Renan and Gobineau, which was combined in Knox and others with the new biological emphasis of comparative anatomy. According to Foucault, medical discourse in this period was characterized by the way in which the invisible was made visible, the body turned inside out and opened to scrutiny of the medical gaze. In racial theory, the domains of language and anatomy, previously separate and discrete modes for analysing racial differences, were brought together and articulated through a new emphasis on cranial capacity which was both measured and demonstrated visibly through reproductions of skulls and brains. Difference of capacity was then connected to differences of cultural achievement and degrees of civilisation.(16)
The racialised body was therefore to become a major site of ideological contestation across the various cultural institutions in America and Europe.
‘Race, therefore, like ethnicity, has always been cultural as well as a political, scientific and social construction. The imbrication between them is such as to make them interdependent and in separable. This can be seen particularly clearly in the nineteenth century in the way in which racialised thinking permeated and was diffused throughout the entire academic establishments.’(17)
Key to the discourse of Polygenesis was the fact that Morgon’s scientific theoretical work on race had economic and political ramifications that went to the core of American racial politics.
‘The constitution of the United States proclaimed that, “all men are created equal”: the institution of slavery constituted a flagrant breach of that principle. However, if there were different species of men, created differently, with non-whites classified as the lower species that did not share all the properly human characteristics, then it could be argued that constitutional equality did not apply to them. We thus find a concerted effort gathering pace in the 1840s onwards to establish the doctrine of polygenesis in place of monogenesis.’(18)
The theory of Polygenetics therefore made good business sense. It fundamentally justified slavery. One of the impacts of Polygenesis was that the black subject could be seen as legitimately existing outside of any normal legal framework. This created the political opportunity for the black subject to be socially constructed within a completely different set of social conditions. The ideological framing of the black subject as a different species and a sub human made it possible for white Southern Americans to justify the brutal treatment of the black body and to claim lynching as a necessary form of social control. The work of Southern academics clearly provided the moral platform in which to construct racist violence as a necessary part of the natural world order. Black people were caught in a social, economic and theoretical trap. They were either constructed as uncivilized having never contributed anything meaningful to civilization or constructed as a totally different species, a subhuman not recognised as part of mankind and therefore subservient by the laws of nature to the white race. This meant that the black body could justifiably be subjected to a different regime of discipline, punishment and violence without challenging the ideas of a progressive civilization.
‘This chilling prospect of racial ‘extermination’ was in fact a commonplace topic of discussion among Americans in this period in relation to the fast-disappearing population of native, Americans; anthropologists also discussed the topic in the context of the apparently mysterious tendency for native populations to die out after contact with whites.’(19)
The photographic postcard images of lynched black Americans across the South within the political climate and growing popularity of Polygenetics and Eugenic theory served as important visual messages. Messages which stated that although black African Americans were emancipated in 1865, the social hierarchy that was long established and ideologically endorsed through American institutions was not going to change. These photographs reveal how deeply ingrained this racist ideology had become to the extent that by the early 1900’s lynching was transformed into a major participatory form of entertainment and through photography a site of commercial exchange and celebration.
Today these photographic postcards are like a message from the past. They visualise the historical condition of the racialised body politics in the America South. ‘Violence, repetition and memory create the circumscribed and enframed space of the politically real.’(20) These photographs act as visual fragments revealing a wider narrative in the history of a violent Southern scopic regime. ‘A scopic regime is an ensemble of practises and discourses that establish the truth claims, typicality, and credibility of visual acts and objects and politically correct ways of seeing’ (21). These postcards reflect an established way of seeing, in which the white South projects its power back onto itself through the violent subjugation of the black body. These photographs scratch at the surface of the white fear of a growing black confidence, a confidence that by the early nineteen hundreds was beginning to assert itself both culturally and economically. This new black confidence is clearly evident in the photographs taken by the black America Photographers James VanDerZee who’s studio was based in Harlem, New York and Richard Samuel Roberts who was based in South Carolina. Both photographers produced images that reflected the professional aspirations and achievements of black Americans.
It’s important to note that the photographs in Without Sanctuary still have the capacity to be viewed with a large degree of gratifying voyeuristic racist pleasure, which was of course their original purpose. In the re-presentation of the postcards within a gallery and book context the Without Sanctuary project is also open charges of endorsing this form of racist pornography. Of course we cannot wholly determine an individual’s reception of an image. We can however interrogate the scopic regimes in which these photographs were produced and hope that ultimately the images act as testament to the horror of racist violence in American history. By exposing these images, Allen has provided us with a visual framework in which to read the barbarity of the racist theories proposed by Morgan and his colleagues. Photographic history is loaded with the variant degrees in which photographs are said to reflect aspects of society. In this case we can choose to either turn away from the harsh photographic realism of the lynched subjects, choose not to see them for fear of being offended, traumatised or indeed gratified by their graphic violent realism, or we can recognise that their origins have far deeper roots than the activities of opportunistic racist Southern photographers, selling postcards.
The photographs in Without Sanctuary are loaded with paradoxical connotations that are caught between repulsion and voyeuristic pleasure. ‘Power lies in the totalising, engorged gaze over the politically prone body, and subjugation is encoded as exposure to this penetration’.(22) Each of the photographs in ‘Without Sanctuary’ are densely loaded with racially charged political power. Collectively the photographs and documents carry the burden of representing the physical pain of a peoples struggle to survive. These photographs form part of ‘a testimony that participates in the violence to which it testifies. What we look at is an act of looking, a grotesque hyper-theatrical scene, in which everybody is made to be in several places at once’.(23) therefore in viewing the photographs in Without Sanctuary no one is innocent. We as voyeurs have the capacity to slide between the various perspectives offered in the images. Part of the guilt that these images evoke is that they reveal our capacity to seek pleasure in these photographs. What redeems them is that they also function as conduits that enable the contemporary viewer to have access to some of the stark historical conditions of systematic, institutional, racist violence. If Southern America society in relation to the production of these images is charged with racism, then the only plea it can make in its defence to us as a jury is that of insanity.
End.
References
1) James Allen, Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis , Leon F. Litwack, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America ( Santa Fe, New Mexico, Twin Palms Publishers 2000), p. 12.
2) Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men White Women and the Mob (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London, Rutgers University Press 2004),p. 8.
3) Melvin R Sylvester, ‘Lynchings in America: A History Not Known by Many
www.liu.edu/cwis/CWP/library/african/2000/lynching.htm [accessed 19 July 2007] (para. 3 of 6)
4) David A Bailey and Stuart Hall, ‘The Vertigo of Displacement’, Ten 8 Photo Paperback Vol 2 Number 3, Spring 1992.
5) Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men White Women and the Mob (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London, Rutgers University Press 2004), p. 22.
6) Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men White Women and the Mob (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London, Rutgers University Press 2004),p. 7 and 8.
7) Leon F. Litwack, ‘Hellohounds’, in ‘Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America’ ( Santa Fe, New Mexico, Twin Palms Publishers 2000), p. 8-9.
8) Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men White Women and the Mob (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London, Rutgers University Press 2004),p. 3.
9) Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwirght, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, (New York, Oxford University Press Inc, 2001), p. 96.
10) Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men White Women and the Mob (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London, Rutgers University Press 2004),p.13
11) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, (London, Penguin Books, 1977) p. 11
12) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, (London, Penguin Books, 1977) p. 11
13) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, (London, Penguin Books, 1977) p. 12
14) Leon F. Litwack, ‘Hellohounds’, in ‘Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America’ ( Santa Fe, New Mexico, Twin Palms Publishers 2000), p. 8
15) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, (London, Penguin Books, 1977) p. 15
16) Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, (Abingdon, Routledge, 1995) p. 121
17) Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, (Abingdon, Routledge, 1995) p. 93
18) Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, (Abingdon, Routledge, 1995) p. 125
19) Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, (Abingdon, Routledge, 1995) p. 130
20) Allen Feldman, ‘Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror’,in Violence and Subjectivity, ed by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds (Los Angeles, London, University California Press 2000).p 55.
21) Allen Feldman, ‘Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror’,in Violence and Subjectivity, ed by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds (Los Angeles, London, University California Press 2000).p 49.
22) Allen Feldman, ‘Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror’,in Violence and Subjectivity, ed by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds (Los Angeles, London, University California Press 2000).p 49.
23) Steven Connor, Overlooking,
www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/overlooking/ paragraph 17 of 31. A paper given at Witness: Memory, Representation and the Media in Question, European Summer School in Cultural Studies, Copenhagen, August 25, 2004.