Topics in Literature
Topic: The Lynch Doctrine: From 'Rough Justice' to 'Stand Your Ground.
Class Information
Instructor: Gray, Erin
CRN: 40350
Time: TR 4:40-6:00pm
Location: Olson 267
GE Areas: Writing Experience
Description
This interdisciplinary class examines the history, politics, and ?cultural logic? of lynching in the United States. Readings situate lynching within the nation?s turn to a post-slavery economy, the counter-insurgent attack on Southern Reconstruction, the institutionalization of segregation, the reconstruction of race and gender at the turn of the twentieth century, anti-capitalist unrest, the growth of the national press, and the popularization of spectacle culture. Students will learn about anti-lynching defense movements ? particularly those led by Ida B. Wells, the NAACP, the Communist Party, International Labor Defense, and militant Black liberation groups throughout the country ? that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to contest white supremacist and bourgeois law. We?ll consider how lynching persists, in diffuse form and force, in the violence of policing, resurgent white nationalist vigilantism, mass criminalization, military dictatorship, state executions, and the subjective experiences of everyday racialized life in the 21st century.
Because lynching has been notoriously difficult to define since it began appearing rhetorically in the wake of the American Revolutionary War, we will accord special attention to the rhetorical variability of lynching over the last two and a half centuries. This will involve tracking how activists, artists, and politicians have framed and reframed the meaning of lynching in various venues ? in popular "mass" culture, avant-garde works of art, activist cultural works, and political propaganda. Students will gain multi-media literacy skills as they learn to closely read historical, theoretical, photographic, cinematic, literary, artistic, and musical texts in tandem. Students will mobilize these skills toward collaboratively developing an original political pamphlet, or zine, that reflects on lynching?s relationship to present political crises.
Texts
A Red Record, Well
The Massacre of East St. Louis, Du Bois
Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression, Haywood
Lynching in the West, 1850-1935, Gonzales-Day
Cane, Toomer
If We Must Die, McKay
Ballad of Pearl May Lee, Brooks
Going to Meet the Man, Baldwin
Within Our Gates, Micheaux
Fruitvale Station, Coogler
Photography on the color line, Smith
A Red Record, Well
The Massacre of East St. Louis, Du Bois
Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression, Haywood
Lynching in the West, 1850-1935, Gonzales-Day
Cane, Toomer
If We Must Die, McKay
Ballad of Pearl May Lee, Brooks
Going to Meet the Man, Baldwin
Within Our Gates, Micheaux
Fruitvale Station, Coogler
Photography on the color line, Smith