Living with Lynching

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A01=Koritha Mitchell
African American
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
America
audience
Author_Koritha Mitchell
automatic-update
black
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
Category=DSG
Category=JBSL
Category=JFSL
church
citizenship
community
COP=United States
culture
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
drama
entertainment
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
family
gender
justice
Language_English
literature
lynching
members
mob
PA=Available
patriotism
performance
periodicals
plays
politics
Price_€20 to €50
privacy
PS=Active
rehearse
rejection
school
softlaunch
studies
terrorism
theater
United States
victims
violence

Product details

  • ISBN 9780252078804
  • Weight: 426g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 06 Jul 2012
  • Publisher: University of Illinois Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynching victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of households being torn from model domestic units by white violence.

In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens.

The Left of Black interview with author Koritha Mitchell begins at 14:00.

An interview with Koritha Mitchell at The Ohio Channel.

Koritha Mitchell is an associate professor of English at The Ohio State University.

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