Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob

by Dora Apel

Outside of the classroom and scholarly publications, lynching has long been a taboo subject. Nice people, it is felt, do not talk about it, and they certainly do not look at images representing the atrocity. In Imagery of Lynching , Dora Apel contests this adopted stance of ignorance. Through a careful and compelling analysis of over one hundred representations of lynching, she shows how the visual documentation of such crimes can be a central vehicle for both constructing and challenging racial hierarchies. She examines how lynching was often orchestrated explicitly for the camera and how these images circulated on postcards, but also how they eventually were appropriated by antilynching forces and artists from the 1930s to the present. She further investigates how photographs were used to construct ideologies of "whiteness" and "blackness," the role that gender played in these visual representations, and how interracial desire became part of the imagery. Offering the fullest and most systematic discussion of the depiction of lynching in diverse visual forms, this book addresses questions about race, class, gender, and dissent in the shaping of American society. Although we may want to avert our gaze, Apel holds it with her sophisticated interpretations of traumatic images and the uses to which they have been put.

Paperback

First published September 3, 2004

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant, devastating and exhaustive study of the means by which lynching became occasions for illustrations and photographs, as ghastly forms of celebration and commemoration. Apel reflects on the ways in which images from past events are defined and resituated by present needs and desires. She considers how the visual documentation of such crimes often functions as a central vehicle for the construction and maintenance of racial hierarchies. Explaining how lynching was often orchestrated explicitly for the camera, Apel shows how these images circulated on postcards, but also were appropriated by anti-lynching forces and artists from the 1930s to the present. She also establishes the role played by gender in these visual representations, specifically the manner in which photographs were used to construct ideologies of "whiteness" and "blackness," and also the ways in which interracial desire became part of the imagery. In the book’s final chapter, Apel considers how these narratives of lynching have been translated in contemporary art in different media, and thus likens this process of recuperation to the memory effects that she studied in her first book.

[Cecelia]

had to read for a class