A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life And Literature

This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America's national lifethe history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynchinga highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecywas in fact a fundamental part of the national consciousness whose cultural logic played a pivotal role in the making of American modernity. To pursue this argument, Goldsby traces lynching's history by taking up select mob murders and studying them together with key literary works. She focuses on three prominent authorsIda B. Wells-Barnett, Stephen Crane, and James Weldon Johnsonand shows how their own encounters with lynching influenced their analyses of it. She also examines a recently assembled archive of evidencelynching photographsto show how photography structured the nation's perception of lynching violence before World War I. Finally, Goldsby considers the way lynching persisted into the twentieth century, discussing the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the ballad-elegies of Gwendolyn Brooks to which his murder gave rise. An empathic and perceptive work, A Spectacular Secret will make an important contribution to the study of American history and literature.

Jacqueline Goldsby is assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.