Gender and Lynching: The Politics of Memory [Paperback]

The authors?probe the reasons and circumstances surrounding the death and torture of African American female victims, relying on such methodological approaches as comparative historical work, content and media analysis, as well as literary criticism.Introduction; Evelyn M. Simien Mary Turner, Hidden Memory, and Narrative Possibility; Julie Buckner Armstrong Sisters in Motherhood (?): The Politics of Race and Gender in Lynching Drama; Koritha Mitchell The Female Lynch Victim in Post-Reconstruction African American Literature; Barbara McCaskill A Woman was Lynched the Other Day : Memory, Gender, and the Limits of Traumatic Representation; Jennifer D. Williams The Politics of Sexuality in Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit ; Fumiko Sakashita Gender, Race, and Public Space: Photography and Memory in the Massacre of East Saint Louis and the Crisis Magazine; Anne Rice

By examining the various roles that women, mostly black but some white, played in the history of lynching, the collection does well to expose and emend the gender and racial bias of our visual cognition. - Signs

This volume brings black women to the fore, as victims, martyrs, and heroes, as characters in works of literature and art, as agents, activists, and mythmakers. Gender and Lynching is a fine collection. Taken as a whole, this volume furthers the general literature on black women even beyond the important topic of lynching, while addressing both historical realities and fictionalizations in drama and prose. Lynching was a practice geared to capture the public imagination, the ultimate ugly performance designed to instruct, warn, sexualize, romanticize, and to discipline and frame future behavior. The essays in Evelyn Simien's anthology take a practice almost universally gendered as male - and therefore one in which gender has been almost invisible - and recasts it as primarily gendered. In doing so it invites us to creatively re-imagine the concepts of race, gender, punishmels2