Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body [1 ed.] 9780203842782, 9780415880428

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Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies 1. Video, War and the Diasporic Imagination Dona Kolar-Panov 2. Reporting the Israeli-Arab Conflict How Hegemony Works Tamar Liebes 3. Karaoke Around the World Global Technology, Local Singing Edited by Toru Mitsui and Shuhei Hosokawa 4. News of the World World Cultures Look at Television News Edited by Klaus Bruhn Jensen 5. From Satellite to Single Market New Communication Technology and European Public Service Television Richard Collins 6. The Nationwide Television Studies David Morley and Charlotte Bronsdon 7. The New Communications Landscape Demystifying Media Globalization Edited by Georgette Wang, Jan Servaes, and Anura Goonasekera 8. Media and Migration Constructions of Mobility and Difference Edited by Russel King and Nancy Wood 9. Media Reform Democratizing the Media, Democratizing the State Edited by Monroe E. Price, Beata Rozumilowicz, and Stefaan G. Verhulst

10. Political Communication in a New Era Edited by Gadi Wolfsfeld and Philippe Maarek 11. Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory Edited by Harald Hendrix 12. Autism and Representation Edited by Mark Osteen 13. American Icons The Genesis of a National Visual Language Benedikt Feldges 14. The Practice of Public Art Edited by Cameron Cartiere and Shelly Willis 15. Film and Television After DVD Edited by James Bennett and Tom Brown 16. The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007 Edited by John Potvin 17. Communicating in the Third Space Edited by Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner 18. Deconstruction After 9/11 Martin McQuillan 19. The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero Edited by Angela Ndalianis

20. Mobile Technologies From Telecommunications to Media Edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth 21. Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination The Image between the Visible and the Invisible Edited by Bernd Huppauf and Christoph Wulf 22. Cities, Citizens, and Technologies Urban Life and Postmodernity Paula Geyh 23. Trauma and Media Theories, Histories, and Images Allen Meek 24. Letters, Postcards, Email Technologies of Presence Esther Milne 25. International Journalism and Democracy Civic Engagement Models from Around the World Edited by Angela Romano 26. Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art Performing Migration Edited by Rocío G. Davis, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, and Johanna C. Kardux 27. Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body Cassandra Jackson

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

Cassandra Jackson

New York

London

First published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Cassandra Jackson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jackson, Cassandra, 1972– Violence, visual culture, and the black male body / by Cassandra Jackson. p. cm. — (Routledge research in cultural and media studies ; 27) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. African American men in popular culture. 2. African American men—Violence against. 3. Arts, American. 4. Human body—Social aspects—United States. 5. Visual communication—Social aspects—United States. 6. Violence—Social aspects— United States. I. Title. NX652.A37J33 2011 700'.452996073—dc22 2010011654

ISBN 0-203-84278-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-88042-8 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-84278-2 (ebk)

For Daddy. And for Mama who gave me her stories.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction

xi xiii 1

1

Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds

12

2

Photography and the Disabled Black Subject in the Art of Carrie Mae Weems

30

3

Fantasies of Wounding: Black Male Bodies in Hip Hop

42

4

Branding Black Men: Hank Willis Thomas’s B®anded Series

62

5

The Appropriation of Lynching Photography

77

6

Seeing Without Looking: Lynching in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition

Notes Bibliography Index

102 113 125 133

Figures

1.1

The Scourged Back (1863).

13

1.2

J.C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind.

19

1.3

“Overseer Artayou Carrier whipped me. I was two months in bed sore from the whipping. My master come after I was whipped; he discharged the overseer. The very words of poor Peter, taken as he sat for his picture.” Baton Rouge, Louisiana, April 2, 1863.

23

“Gordon as he entered our lines. Gordon under medical inspection. Gordon in his uniform as a U.S. soldier.”

25

Carrie Mae Weems, Black and Tanned Your Whipped Wind of Change Howled Low Blowing Itself-Ha—Smack Into the Middle of Ellington’s Orchestra Billie Heard it too & Cried Strange Fruit Tears (1995) from the series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995.

31

CD cover photo for Nas (2008) by Nas. Photographer, Meeno Peluce.

43

CD cover photo for Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2003) by 50 Cent. Photographer, Sacha Waldman.

44

3.3

Black Jesus. Photographer, Claude Shade.

47

3.4

CD cover photo of Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood (1998) by DMX. Photographer, Jonathan Mannion.

52

CD back photo of Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood (1998) by DMX. Photographer, Jonathan Mannion.

53

Cover photo by David LaChapelle from Rolling Stone, February 9, 2006.

56

1.4 2.1

3.1 3.2

3.5 3.6

xii Figures 4.1

The Chase MasterCard (2004) by Hank Willis Thomas.

63

4.2

Basketball and Chain (2003) by Hank Willis Thomas.

64

4.3

Scarred Chest (2004) by Hank Willis Thomas.

67

4.4

Hang Time (Circa 1923) (2008) by Hank Willis Thomas.

69

4.5

Priceless #1 by Hank Willis Thomas (2004).

73

5.1

Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock (1986) by Pat Ward Williams.

91

5.2

Heirlooms and Accessories (2002) by Kerry James Marshall.

95

Shawn Michelle Smith, Untitled 1, from the series In the Crowd.

98

Shawn Michelle Smith, Untitled 2, from the series In the Crowd.

100

5.3 5.4

Acknowledgments

This book was written with the support of colleagues, students, friends, and family. I am especially grateful for the generous assistance of Juda Bennett, who read draft after draft, had a baby, and kept on reading. His invaluable critiques made my book a much better one. Much thanks to Holly Haynes, Piper Kendrix Williams, Winnie Glaude, and Lisa Ortiz, all of whom read and listened to me whine about this book whenever I needed them too. My research assistants, JoLynn Graubert and Melissa Hofmann were invaluable to this project. Gabrielle Reed’s dedicated research and thoughtful responses to my work restored my confidence in the project when I needed it most. I thank the College of New Jersey Mentored Undergraduate Experience Program and its director, Janet Morrison for providing research assistance and collegial support. I learned so much about art and visual studies from Cherise Smith that I should have paid her tuition. I could not have written this book without her help and encouragement. Val Smith responded to my work with remarkable thoughtfulness and generosity. Jill Dolan saved my soul by playing tennis with me when I really needed to hit something. Having Frances Smith Foster in my corner has made me a better scholar, writer, and fighter. I got wonderful feedback from my colleagues in the Collegium of African American Research, especially Sabine Broeck who got up at 8:30 in the morning to hear my paper at the 2007 conference in Madrid. Christopher Bell taught me that I was writing about disability, and I didn’t even know it. I miss you, Chris. I am also indebted to the artists who generously agreed to let me reproduce their art in this book: Carrie Mae Weems, Hank Willis Thomas, Kerry James Marshall, Pat Ward Williams, and Shawn Michelle Smith. Much thanks to my wonderful colleagues in the English department at The College of New Jersey. I am grateful to former dean, Susan Albertine and former provost, Beth Paul for finding me the time to work on this book. I also want to thank the office of Academic Grants and Sponsored Research at the College of New Jersey for the faculty research awards and grants that made this project possible. It has been a pleasure to work with Erica Wetter and Liz Levine at Routledge. I am grateful for their insight and their efficiency in moving this project along. Reginald Ross, my adorable husband, shoveled snow, bathed dogs, and foraged for food so that I could write. And, when I complained that I needed to clean the kitchen, he said, “Isn’t writing a more value-add investment for you?” I love you, Spock!

Introduction

As a child, I spent summers traveling by car with my family from Alabama to St. Louis where my Uncle Richard lived. When I asked my mother why Richard with his lilting drawl and constant desire to go fishing had moved to the city, she said, “He was going to be lynched.” As a young man, Richard had an affair with a white woman. When her family found out, they accused him of rape. Though the woman admitted that the affair was consensual, her admission only served to enrage the white townspeople. It was 1956, and Richard was charged with violating anti-miscegenation laws. Outside the courtroom, his family waited, while angry whites openly made threats against him. He was sentenced to thirty days in jail. The sheriff, knowing that he couldn’t protect him from the angry white townspeople, explained to Richard’s mother that it would be best if he got out of town immediately. After the sentencing, the sheriff walked Uncle Richard into the front door of the jail, and out of the back door, where my father was waiting in a running car. They drove straight to St. Louis where Richard started a new life. How many stories of black migration were like this one—not just blacks seeking better lives, but blacks seeking to stay alive? This terror shaped the geography of my family, impressing us with a sense of our vulnerability to violence. The post-segregation era also brought reminders of that vulnerability. In the 1970s and 1980s, while riding in the car with my mother, I would see the Ku Klux Klan holding up signs and passing out pamphlets to stopped cars. When one of them would pass by our car, my mother would roll down her window and say, “I don’t want anything you have to offer.” Oddly, the Klansman would nod politely and move on to the next car. If their faces were covered she would point a slender fi nger downward and say to me, “I know those shoes.” I stared hard at shiny wingtips and dusty loafers, trying to memorize the shapes, colors, and sizes, in case I saw them again on any of my teachers or the principal at my school. My mother’s fi rm opposition was meant to let me know that there was no need to be afraid. But this bizarre pageant of grown men wearing sheets left me with a mixture of panic and hot shame. At night, I dreamed of them coming for my father—never for me, or my mother—just my father. I had

2

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

no need for bogeymen—I had seen the real thing passing out pamphlets on the street. They never came for my father. And yet, I lived with the terror of knowing that they could. In 1981, when I was a small girl, they came for Michael McDonald, a 19-year-old black man living in Mobile, Alabama. He was kidnapped, tortured, killed, and hung from a tree. Even though my mother talked back to these white men, I knew that my father could not say these things. In fact, I have no memory of him passing through these parades as my mother defiantly did. I am not sure why this was, but I am certain that had he said what my mother did, or had he simply been in the car with her while she was mouthing off, those sheeted men would not have tolerated it. My mother explained the dynamic in this way: “Your grandmother once told a white bill collector who had come to her house with a gun, ‘I’ll make you eat that little pearly handled pistol.’ “Where was my grandfather,” I asked. “He was hiding in the backroom,” she said. “Had he even seen her say that to a white man, they would have killed him and her too.” I found this story confusing. On the one hand, it made sense to me that such an affront from a poor black woman, who white men viewed as thoroughly unimportant, would not have been a big deal, whereas a black man doing the same thing would have been taken more seriously. She was not threatening, but he would have posed a more menacing, even if imaginary, figure to an insecure white supremacist. Nevertheless, I also knew that women were not safe. My mother told stories of running from white boys on the way home from the grocery store and dodging drunken white men while babysitting their children. So why could my grandmother insult the white man, while my grandfather couldn’t even be a witness to such an act without getting them both killed? The winding intersections of race, gender, and class were too complicated to comprehend. Yet, I knew that my uncle, my father, my grandfather, these black men were somehow connected to my mother’s safety from white men. And so, when I dreamed of my father being taken, beaten, tortured, and killed, I knew that would be the end of us all. I lived in a culture seared by terror. I recognized that black bodies were vulnerable to violation. I came to understand black manhood in that context. To be a black man was to be profoundly vulnerable. But given the obvious privileging of men over women in the culture, it also meant that black women were vulnerable, perhaps even more so because they were without the one thing that society valued and feared at once: maleness. This book explores the imprint that this terror has left on American culture by focusing on how the imagery of the wounded black man permeates media, including early photography, contemporary art, hip hop, and the internet. My primary focus is on photographic images, which include but are not limited to photographs of disfigured slaves, lynching victims, and bleeding rappers, because they provide a unique opportunity to make visible the prevalence of the wounded black male figure in the culture. I explore the figure of black woundedness as not merely a representation

Introduction

3

of black maleness, but as a locus of overlapping cultural desires, psychic needs, traumatic memories, and commercial interests. Thus, I am interested in the cultural work that these images perform. My intention is to interpret images of black male woundedness in light of Ralph Ellison’s proposal that “we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant who . . . forms the stage and scene upon which and within which the action unfolds.”1 This focus on visual representations allows me to consider the wound as a specular moment, which mediates power relations between seers and the seen. While the prevailing critical view of the relationship between the viewer and the viewed has tended to privilege the former, I submit that the exchange is not so much static as fluid and that the viewed can retain agency. Thus, this book attempts to address both the ways in which the wound has been exploited to patrol and control black masculinity, as well as the ways in which contemporary artists have deployed the wound to disrupt and redress its oppressive implications. I examine the ways in which the display of black bodily disfiguration has served to make black men into the object of the gaze, but I am equally interested in the ways in which contemporary artists have deployed the figure to disrupt this very power paradigm. Despite the subversiveness of these contemporary artworks, the image of the wounded black male body is rooted in the history of black oppression in the U.S. Indeed, lynching photography stands out as the most abundant evidence of the ways in which spectacular visual practices were an essential part of racial control and violence. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the imagery of the wounded black male body was used to manage and maintain complex systems of racial and gendered cultural hierarchies. The astute treatment of lynching photography by scholars, such as Shawn Michelle Smith and Dora Apel, has demonstrated the complex ways in which the practice functioned to shore up myths of racial difference.2 White crowds, in the very act of killing and desecrating black bodies and then photographing and distributing the images, enacted rituals to validate white supremacy. Photographs of lynchings are more than documentary evidence for as Smith argues, “they produce whiteness through an absolute disavowal of blackness,” and thus, “the corpse functions as the negated other that frames, supports, and defines a white supremacist community.”3 At the same time that lynching photography solidified communities of white supremacists, the practice also created and maintained a complex matrix of identity positions that prescribed roles for black women and black men, as well as for white women and white men. As Jacquelyn Dowd Hall points out, the lynching of black men is inseparable from the policing of white women’s bodies and the sexual exploitation of black women’s bodies by white men.4 Thus, while the majority of these images depict black men, lynching photography is invested in policing a range of categories of difference. At the same time that the wounded black male figure represents these mutually defi ning categories, black/white, male/female, the fi gure is

4

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

simultaneously invested in the notion of the normal/abnormal body. In this study, I argue that the meaning of the wounded black male body is compounded by the figure of disability. According to Rosemarie Garland Thomson, bodies that she calls normate/nonnormate are mutually constituting. Thus, she defines the normate as “the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries.”5 The normate “by way of bodily configurations and cultural capital . . . can step into a position of authority and wield the power its grants them.”6 In contrast, the nonnormate body is constructed as deviant, deficient, inferior. The figure of the black wounded man builds on cultural ideas that equate bodily difference with inferiority. The wound serves as the mark of difference. Lurking beyond the wound is the notion of the not wounded, the intact, normal body by which the wounded body is measured insufficient. As viewers make meaning of the imagery of black male woundedness, they navigate complicated entanglements between disability, race, and gender. The wound is closely associated with blackness because it and subsequent disability is also a manifestation of racial oppression. Therefore, the black wound creates an association between bodily integrity and whiteness. At the same time, the wound also serves to feminize the black male body. As Thomson points out, “the non-normate status accorded disability feminizes all disabled figures.”7 Thus, the wound makes visible the liminal space that black men occupy in the culture. Teetering on the boundaries between identity positions—black/white, masculine/feminine, abled/disabled—the figure of the wounded black man is a site where the idea of black maleness and by extension other identity positions are being negotiated. Portrayed as virile, oversexed, and menacing, and at the same time as lacking the political, economic, and intellectual power associated with white men, black men have often been represented as “excessively male [and] insufficiently masculine.”8 The wound not only makes corporeal and visual this liminality but also reinforces the spatial aspect of liminality by inviting the gaze. According to Donna Haraway, “This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation.”9 Feminist critics such as Laura Mulvey have discussed the ways in which women’s bodies have been subjects of the male gaze.10 Because of its specular quality, the wound serves as an invitation to look and interpret. In this way the wound feminizes the subject, making him not merely the object of the gaze, but what Thomson in her discussion of disability calls, “the object of the stare . . . the gaze intensified.”11 In my estimation the stare is essentially erotic. The wound frees the viewer to examine bodies, including bodies previously off limits. The wounded body’s interior, that which we are not supposed to see, is open to observation. In the case of the black male body, a body already considered dangerous, volatile, and forbidden, the wound makes the body available to observation and desire. In her discussion of the wounded body of the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Marianne Noble sums

Introduction

5

up the effect of the wound thus: “Feminizing and emasculating these [black] men frees her [Stowe] to desire them, for as tortured objects of pity, they invite the full force of love, tenderness and longing for intimacy that Stowe could never bestow upon a black man represented as subject.”12 The wound is a means through which black male bodies become desirable objects and, at same time, controllable objects. The power to look is also the power to police and govern that body, imbuing it with an erotics of control. In contrast to archival images, contemporary representations of the wounded black male body suggest that the meaning of the wound is not fixed, and that images of bodily difference can both sustain and disrupt the conquering gaze at once. Cheryl Marie Wade, disabled activists, performer and poet captures this complexity in a poem entitled “I Am Not One of The”: “I am not one of the physically challenged-/I’m a sock in the eye with gnarled fist.”13 Characterizing the disabled body as “a sock in the eye” suggests the ways in which Wade’s body refuses to be the static object but instead strikes back at the viewer’s vision, compromising his/her power to look. This characterization makes clear the visual power of bodily difference to disrupt and challenge the expectations of the observer. This disruptive potential has allowed contemporary African-American artists, such as Carrie Mae Weems and Hank Willis Thomas, to make new meaning of the black male wounded body. Their work recalls the radical potential of the nonnormate body to challenge the cultural status quo. Thomson elucidates this concept thus: “the disabled figure operates in varying degrees as a challenge to the cultural status quo, introducing issues and perspectives with the potential to refigure the social order.”14 The exploration of this potential has not been limited to visual artists. In contemporary popular culture, the representation of the wounded body has straddled the line between the exploitation and liberation of the wounded body. For example, when rapper 50 Cent exposes his own scars created by gunshot wounds, now covered in tattoos of his choosing, he attempts to lay claim to and even capitalize on the meaning of his own disfigured body. What makes these images different from historical images of black male woundedness, other than the obvious, is that the subject uses these images as a way of claiming agency over his own wounded body, literally writing over the wounds impressed on his body with tattoos. Though he offers his body to the audience for perusal, his ability to do so speaks to his ownership over that body. He also plays on the notion of the disabled body as a threat. Thomson points out, “Bodies that are disabled can also seem dangerous because they are perceived as out of control.”15 Proudly donning the wound, looking back, rather than succumbing to the gaze, 50 Cent draws on this danger. Embedded in the conversation about the cultural work of the wound is also the question of how it shapes how black people, men and women, see themselves. To me, these categories, the representation of the black self in the larger culture and black self-conception, remain inseparable, harkening back to W.E.B. DuBois’s theory of double-consciousness, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”16 The figure of

6

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

the wounded black man, I argue, is such a powerful cultural force that it not only informs representation of blacks in the larger culture, but it also figures into black self-representation in complicated ways. For example, in Chapter 3, I argue that many rappers embrace and display their bodies’ literal and figurative wounds, transforming the figure of the wounded black man into a sign of masculine power, a call for political awareness, an emblem of authenticity, and a commercial commodity at once. I also view many of the visual artists discussed in this book as embracing the wounded black male body as a critical signifier of black experience. Despite these powerful configurations of the wounded black male body, the repetition of the figure as the central defi ning force of black experience comes with serious danger. Embracing the figure also means furthering its codification. Indeed, this repetition figures black identities as what Belinda Smaill terms, “injured identities.” While Smaill articulates this concept in relationship to documentary fi lm, the conceptual direction of her work bears important reference to my own. Building on Wendy Brown’s concept of “wounded attachment,” Smaill argues that in exploring sites of pain and powerlessness, we also encounter “a mode of identity that is defi ned through a ‘wounded attachment’ to its own exclusion and subordination; attached to a history and a future of restating identifactory pain as a form of politics.”17 I want to be careful to explain that in my conception, “wounded attachment” does not indicate a desire to be literally wounded, but instead an investment in a history of pain as essential to self-identification. I interpret the repetition of images of black male woundedness particularly in the context of the contemporary moment, as dangerously teetering on the precarious boundary between protest and “wounded attachment.”18 At the Modern Language Association conference in 2003, Hortense Spillers asked a large audience how we might think about African-American identity in terms other than oppression.19 The profoundness of her question was marked by the awe that passed over the audience, who of course, had no answer. In an earlier interview, she clarifies the ideas behind her question: One is not simply put here by forces of oppression or police brutality or the shape of the economy. All of those are very powerful forces that are moving and operative in the world and there’s no reason that I would want to try to deny them. But I would also want to place more emphasis on agency and agentification. 20 Spillers’s statement compels us to challenge the idea that oppression should be the core of black self-identification. Kara Walker has since pressed us further to consider the cultural investment in oppression as the center of black experience: “I think really the whole problem with racism and its continuing legacy in this country is that we simply love it. Who would we be without it and without the ‘struggle’?”21 While Walker’s comments might

Introduction

7

seem flip and outrageous, she hits on a serious question about how both black and white people might not be merely complicit in racism, but instead are deeply invested in these divisions because they are the lens through which we come to understand personal, public, and cultural identity. On the one hand, I view the repetition of violated black male bodies as perhaps indicative of the phenomena that Walker describes, but at the same time, I understand that terror becomes a part of one’s identity in profound ways. I think of the many African-American parents who had to explain to their children what they could and could not say; where they could and could not enter; who they could and could not look in the eye. They did not do these things because they loved it. They did it to prevent their children from becoming the next Emmett Till. Because one’s survival depended on the comprehensive absorption of those skills, these children were fundamentally shaped by a hyper-awareness of how the world saw them. For the postsegregation generation with parents who lived through the Jim Crow era the lingering terror required new admonishments that also profoundly shaped their children’s understanding of themselves in the world. As a child, I heard repeated what is sometimes colloquially referred to as “the first lesson of being black”: “You can’t do what white folks do.” Harsh as it sounds, it didn’t mean that I couldn’t be a doctor or get a Ph.D. It meant that my journey to those goals would have to be different, because no one would ever look at me and assume I was any of these things. It meant that if I cheated, I would not only get caught, but I would be punished more severely. If I faltered, someone would be there to say, I told you so. It meant I am smart, but I am not white, and therefore my road will be different, harder. This advice was not about an investment in a politics of victimization, as much as it was about compelling one’s children to see themselves simultaneously through their own lenses and through the lenses of others. Parents of African-American children were shaping complex identities that needed to navigate a racialized culture. The way in which contemporary African-American artists have both embraced and complicated archival images of wounded black men seems to speak to this complexity of what it means to establish a sense of personal and cultural identity around victimization and survival. Carrie Mae Weems’s art, for example, suggests that terror has been a transformative experience that gave rise to artistic production, such as Duke Ellington’s “Black and Tanned” and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” In contrast, Hank Willis Thomas suggests that the legacy of terror lives on in the form of blackon-black urban violence and the contemporary prison complex. Meanwhile, rappers, such as 50 Cent have both acknowledged their vulnerability to such violence and rejected it at once by presenting their own body’s suffering as a sign of masculine prowess, ghetto authenticity, and spiritual redemption. All of these contemporary representations of the black male body attempt to navigate the complexities of racialized existence. I recognize that to make such extrapolations about the broader culture by focusing on the representation of black men’s bodies may imply that the

8

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

representation of maleness subsumes the experiences of black women. I categorically reject the idea that black female suffering is only significant as it relates to the suffering of black men. My work diverges from scholarship on black masculinity that laments black men’s lack of power over women’s bodies. I share bell hooks’s estimation of such scholarship: To suggest that black men were dehumanized solely as a result of not being patriarchs implies that the subjugation of black women was essential to the black male’s development of a positive self concept, an ideal that only served to support a sexist order. 22 My intention is to expose the ways in which a sexist order as well as a racist one have been promulgated through multitudinous images of wounded black men. This book argues that such images, particularly archival ones, play on this order by situating black men’s bodies as viewable, legible, and thus feminine objects. My intention, however, is not to support patriarchy, but instead to carefully interrogate the cultural assumptions about race and gender that inform such representations. The analysis of the wounded black male body offers insight into the complicated intersections between patriarchy and race. At times, the image of the wounded black man has been displayed in the service of patriarchy. In 1992, the rap group Public Enemy released “Hazy Shade of Criminal” a single CD that had on its cover a photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abe Smith in Marion, Indiana. The photograph shows two tattered bodies in bloody, shredded clothing, hanging from a tree. As with so many lynching photographs the shock of the inhumanity shown to the victims is matched by the eerie calm of a crowd that would otherwise seem unremarkable. They gaze into the camera, the men in ties and hats, the women with bobbed hair and neat dresses. One man with a mustache points at the bodies, his extended arm confirming the connection between this seemingly peaceful crowd and the blood-spattered bodies that hang behind them. The back of the CD reads: The picture on the cover is of two black men in 1930 Indiana getting hanged for bullshit that they didn’t do based on cracker racism, jealousy, envy and greed. In 1992 by no coincidence in the state of Indiana a good friend of mine, Mike Tyson, was hanged the same goddamn way. Some things never change. 23 Mike Tyson was convicted of raping a black woman, Desiree Washington, in 1992. This appropriation of the Beitler photograph not only diminished what Shipp and Smith suffered, without judge or jury, at the hands of a bloodthirsty mob, but also dismissed what Tyson’s victim, Desiree Washington, suffered. Indeed, the statement suggests that by reporting the rape, rather than remaining silent, Washington had become part of the white supremacist crowd. As Mark Anthony Neal has pointed out, black men often hold the race trump card over black women and privilege

Introduction

9

black male victimization at the expense of addressing misogyny. 24 The appropriation of the Beitler photograph ultimately functioned for Public Enemy as the fi nal say so about the importance of racism over sexism. My attention to the figure of the wounded black man aims towards a better understanding of the overlapping boundaries between this and other subject positions. The strange liminal space that the figure occupies makes it a site where ideologies of race, gender, and disability all emerge in unison. In this book, I explore how a variety of visual artists, curators, musicians, and writers have manipulated this figure to explore complex ideas about identity as it relates to American culture. The first two chapters of the book explore the nineteenth-century image of the whip-scarred slave and a contemporary artwork that transforms that image. Chapter 1 historicizes the image of the wounded black man by examining the nineteenth-century cultural context that shaped the most circulated photograph of a slave, The Scourged Back (1863). The photograph pictures a black man who is bare to the waist; his whip-scarred back faces the camera. Produced during the Civil War, The Scourged Back mingles realism associated with photography and sentimentalism connected to abolitionist literature to reveal the violence of slavery. The chapter is particularly concerned with the ways in which these aesthetic impulses contributed to the erotic objectification of the black male subject. By figuring the subject’s body as the catalyst for the viewer’s sensory experience, the image elicits desire for the suffering black male body. Chapter 2, focuses on the ways in which Carrie Mae Weems appropriates the archival image of the whip-scarred slave in her art. To better understand the ideological terrain that Weems confronts, this chapter more carefully outlines the ways in which the photographic representation of disability was ideologically linked to the exploitation of the wounded black male body. I also examine the ways in which Carrie Mae Weems tackles the complexities of reproducing the photograph to explore these exploitive implications, without reinscribing them. Carrie Mae Weems’s work makes us conscious of the figure of the wounded black man as a cultural construction that equates suffering with blackness. The two chapters that follow consider how the image of the wounded black man figures into the contemporary culture of consumption. Chapter 3 examines how the imagery of black male woundedness pervades hip hop culture. I argue that while much of this imagery attempts to recuperate and regenerate the bodies of wounded black men, ultimately it visually rehearses the victimization of black male bodies. Examining images that express the urban violence that many young poor black men face, the chapter argues that the imagery of wounded black male bodies serves as both an act of testimony and conversely as a reinscription of the alterity of the black male body. This chapter demonstrates that such images have not been relegated to the past, but rather they have been regenerated in new contexts. Chapter 4 considers how the artist, Hank Willis Thomas, exposes the oppressive implications of the figure of the wounded black man. Thomas’s art maps a relationship between the figure of the wounded black man as a commodity in the nineteenth-century slave economy and as an item of consumption in

10

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

the present day economy of desire. Though so little critical attention has been paid to the representation of wounded black male subjectivity, contemporary artists, such as Thomas, have led the way by presenting images of black male woundedness as important objects for study. Thomas’s work, along with Carrie Mae Weems’s careful interrogations of the figure of the wounded black man, serve as a model for this book. The fi nal two chapters focus on the visual practices surrounding lynching. Chapter 5 examines the appropriation of lynching photography in contemporary museum exhibitions, an internet exhibit, and fi nally artworks by three artists respectively, Pat Ward Williams, Kerry James Marshall, and Shawn Michelle Smith. The recent reemergence of lynching photographs, largely hidden since the time of their original circulation, has raised pressing questions about whether such photographs can successfully be displayed in service of an anti-racist agenda. In this chapter, I analyze how those who appropriate these images confront the original white supremacist intentions of these photographs of wounded black bodies. I view these works as always in the process of that task, actively in contention with dangerous ideologies that lynching photographs promulgate. For this reason, in the fi nal chapter of this book, I consciously shift away from the repetitive image of the violated black male body to consider how a literary text must also confront the visual practices of lynching. I interpret Charles W. Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) as a book about seeing without looking, or rather exposing the visual practices of lynching without reenacting the exploitation of the black male body. I argue that by withholding the spectacle of the wounded black body, Chesnutt creates a critical juncture in which to expose the visual practices that demand violence against the black male body. Chesnutt’s novel maps solutions to the problematic power dynamics of looking, which I explore throughout this book. By attempting to interrogate the imagery of black male woundedness, this book also risks reiterating it. To resist that effect, I have been selective in choosing images, excluding those that I felt simply reinscribed the imagery of woundedness without illuminating it. I have also chosen to devote a significant portion of the book to visual artists whose works serve as guideposts for how scholars might explore this imagery without replicating its abuses. Nonetheless, my work and theirs encounters risks. Like these artists, I confront these risks by participating in a constructive analysis of the imagery of wounded black men. Though this is a critical study of the representation of the black wounded body, it is important to recognize that the implications of this work extend beyond issues of representation—that they have real consequences for real bodies. One need only look to the examples of Rodney King, Abner Louima, and James Byrd to understand that an investigation of images of tortured, disfigured, and murdered black men has serious bearing on black lives. At the same time, such an investigation reveals more subtle ways in which such imagery shapes our thinking about black men. For example, the fears, and for some wishfulness, about the potential assassination of Barack Obama as

Introduction

11

he rose to the presidency demonstrates how the persistent cultural expectation that black male bodies are vulnerable to violation terrorizes blacks while empowering whites. The New York Times, USA Today, Ebony, and various other publications ran stories that exposed the worries of many that Obama would not survive the election. As one African-American supporter put it, “The closer the possibility of Senator Barack Obama’s becoming the nominee of the Democratic Party for the Presidency of the United States, the more frightened many of us become.”25 One black woman argued more succinctly, “They’re going to kill him!”26 These worries were matched by what appeared to be the wishful predictions of rivals. Hillary Clinton defended her intention to continue to seek the democratic nomination by implying that someone might kill Obama.27 Another presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, joked about Obama diving to escape the end of a rifle.28 I point to these comments about the potential assassination of Obama not to suggest that concerns about Obama’s safety were not justified, but instead to indicate that the alternate fear and desire expressed in them are the legacy of a violent racial past that still shapes us. Though for some whites, Obama’s impending death was greeted as an unfortunate fact, for many African Americans it spoke to the terror that for so long has been a persistent and insidious companion. It served as a reminder to African Americans that if he is not safe, neither are you. This is what it means to live with terror, to have one’s experiences shaped by a merger of fear and dread. The example of Barack Obama gets at the very real implications of the repetition of the figure of black male woundedness discussed here. Paradoxically, this conversation took place at the same time that journalists, politicians, and scholars debated whether Obama’s electability signaled the end of race as a category of oppression. 29 That the conversation about the end of race could coexists with the discourse of assassination illustrates the way in which the expectation that black men’s bodies will be violated often lurks quietly in the cultural imagination, surfacing and disappearing without critical investigation. So much critical attention has been paid to the figure of the hyper-masculine black bogeyman that his equally pervasive flipside, the wounded black man has been omitted from the conversation. Because the figure of the wounded black man is viewed as an inevitable reality, the cultural work of this visual representation remains invisible. More precisely, because violence against black men is more often viewed as purely a fact, the visual representation of black male violated bodies is considered an extension of that fact, rather than as an ongoing complex set of visual practices that shape cultural ideology. In this book, I aim to participate in a conversation about how images shape our views not just of black masculinity, but also of black people and American culture. This is a conversation that the visual artists discussed in this book have already begun. These artists challenge us to consider how the images of wounded black men refract in the broader culture. This book answers that challenge by exploring the ways in which such images shape cultural ideology and ultimately experience.

1

Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds

The Scourged Back depicts a black man, undressed from neck to waist; his back, covered by a gruesome mass of rope-like scars, faces the camera (Figure 1.1). The original photograph was produced by the photography fi rm of McPherson and Oliver of Baton Rouge in 1863. It was then reproduced as a carte de visite by McAllister and Brothers of Philadelphia who titled it The Scourged Back.1 Believed to have been widely circulated in the nineteenth century, the image was reproduced at least one other time in the United States and again in England. The endless array of contemporary reproductions of the image in various media, including the internet, textbooks, documentaries, artworks, and a hip hop CD cover suggests that The Scourged Back resonates profoundly in the current moment as well. 2 This chapter concentrates on the nineteenth-century cultural fields that collaborate with The Scourged Back. Given the profuse contemporary reproduction of this image, however, this investigation also suggests genealogical links between the nineteenth-century and the contemporary moment. Produced during the Civil War, The Scourged Back mingles the realism associated with photography and the sentimentalism of abolitionist literature to reveal the violence of slavery. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the photograph situated the wounded black male body as a catalyst for empathy and activism. The medium of photography with its assumed transparency, however, lent realism to abolitionist claims of abuse. This chapter views the image of the wounded black male body as a site of negotiation between realist and sentimental aesthetics. Ultimately these aesthetics give shape and meaning to the ways in which black male bodies are visualized as both evidence of abuse and as a vehicle through which audiences might share in that pain. Significantly, both aesthetics serve to objectify the subject: While the illusion of realism usurps the voice of the slave by offering his body as readable proof, the image’s sentimentalism offers that same body to viewers, encouraging them to appropriate the subject’s pain. By situating the black male body as the vehicle through which audiences could safely engage in this titillating sensory experience and validating that experience through the illusion of realism, The Scourged Back offers the suffering black male body as an object of white desire.

Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds

13

Figure 1.1 The Scourged Back (1863). Prints and Photographs Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

14

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

SENTIMENTAL TRUTHS When S.K. Towle, a Surgeon in the 30th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, sent the original photograph to W.J. Dale, Surgeon-general of the State of Massachusetts in 1863, he included a letter, which read: I enclose a picture taken by an artist here, from life, of a Negro’s back, exhibiting the scars from an old whipping. Few sensation writers ever depicted worse punishments than this man must have received, though nothing in his appearance indicates any unusual viciousness—but on the contrary, he seems INTELLIGENT and WELL-BEHAVED. [Towle’s emphasis]3 Towle’s remarks offer some indication of the cultural work that The Scourged Back performed. Though he compares the image to the work of sensation writers, he also privileges the image as being more capable of rendering the abuses of slavery because of its visibility. Indeed, Towle presents the photograph as a mirror of life. As Allan Sekula notes, “Photography, according to this belief, reproduces the visible world: the camera is an engine of fact” operating “independently of human practice.”4 And thus, while the image compels this comparison to the work of sensation writers, it also outstrips the literary by virtue of its supposed ability to reflect unmediated fact. The remarks of an editor at the New York Independent paper frame The Scourged Back in similar terms: “It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. Stowe cannot approach, because it tells the story to the eye.”5 Like Towle, the editor places the image in the context of sentimental literature, situating it as a narration comparable to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Yet he contends that the photo is still a more powerful narration than what might arguably be considered the most influential sentimental novel because it tells “the story” visually. Thus, the photograph again eclipses literature by means of its visibility, which is equated with undeniable truth. While it might seem odd that truth should be a measure for fiction, sentimental antislavery fiction often claimed to be true. Augusta Rohrbach points out that by the mid-nineteenth century not only had a literary taste for works that blurred the distinction between fact and fiction emerged, but antislavery fiction often “promise[d] readers truth through accurate reflection of the contemporary moral landscape marred by slavery.”6 Thus, antislavery fiction, like photography, was valued for its ability to convey facts. Still, as Towle’s and the editor’s remarks indicate, photography was often privileged over literature as the more reliable medium because it was believed to be an unadulterated reflection of experience, rather than a conscious work of art. One might think of the role of the photograph then as similar to the authenticating endorsements that enveloped the slave narrative. While these supporting documents insisted on the credibility of the slave narrator, they also questioned that credibility by their very necessity.

Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds

15

The camera both endorses the world of slavery portrayed in anti-slavery literature, while also demonstrating the inadequacy of literature in rendering slavery. These comparisons between The Scourged Back and the work of sentimental anti-slavery fiction also demonstrate the ways in which the image participates in the traditions of sentiment. The Scourged Back engages in what Marianne Noble calls, “sentimental wounding” or the effort to provoke a connection between the slave subject and audience by means of the wounded body.7 Like abolitionist literature, which compelled readers to experience and thus identify with the pain of the slave, The Scourged Back also invites the viewer to experience the bodily anguish of the subject. In the case of The Scourged Back, however, this bodily connection is intensified by the notion of visual truth, or more specifically, by positivist beliefs in the scientific accuracy of photography. Such beliefs could allow The Scourged Back to transform the reader of sentimental fiction into a witness with all the immediacy of visual experience. Indeed, the idea that the camera contained a “unique ability to record as well as reveal visible, or potentially visible physical reality,” would mean that unlike sentimental literature that invites the reader into a fictional world that claims to be true, The Scourged Back would reflect and thus reveal the world of reality, the viewer’s world.8 Thus, the image would facilitate sympathy through bodily connection, while also creating the illusion of unmediated truth that validates that experience. This collision between the sentimental and the real is particularly important in light of the controversies over the role of photography that were taking place when The Scourged Back was produced. During the second half of the nineteenth century, theorists, photographers, and artists vigorously debated whether photography was a realistic medium or an artistic one. Proponents of realism insisted on photography’s value resting in its ability not only to reproduce, but also to expose the natural world. Influenced by philosophies of positivism that valued scientific objectivity, the realists argued for the camera’s ability to render reality without bias. On the other hand, there were those who saw photography as an opportunity to compose images of aesthetic and artistic value, rather than as a mirror of nature. Proponents of artistic photography saw the medium as being capable of representation, rather than merely imitation.9 In view of this debate, one might consider The Scourged Back as an image that perhaps demonstrates both realistic and artistic impulses. In its bold exposure of a body so visibly cruelly tortured, The Scourged Back is presented as evidence of the dreadfulness of slavery. However, I would suggest that the image presents not so much a mirror of life as a realist aesthetic that exploits the seeming transparency of photography. Alternatively, the image’s thoughtful design intended to create sympathy through representation points to the artistic license that prompts the comparisons between this image and the work of sentimental writers. More than a mirror of life, the well-thought-out

16

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

composition is designed to produce a felt experience in its audience. Thus, the image indicates not imitation, but rather interpretation. These two impulses, realistic and artistic, are integral to the power of the image, and they cross-fertilize each other. The sentimental power of the image is bolstered by the illusion of the real, which authenticates any emotive experience elicited in the viewer, while the artistry of the image maintains a kind of invisibility that enhances the image’s realism. The Scourged Back integrates realist and sentimental aesthetics. My use of the term “sentimental aesthetic” here is best understood in light of recent criticism on the relationship between aesthetics and sentimental literature. While critics have often viewed sentimentalism in opposition to aesthetic concerns, others have posed considerable challenges to this assessment. Joanne Dobson, for example, argues that “Historically, blanket condemnations of sentimentalism’s ‘unskilled rhetoric’ and ‘false sentiment’ have misunderstood or trivialized its aesthetic purposes.”10 Elizabeth Maddock Dillon adds that if one views aesthetics as a political and cultural practice, the links between sentimentalism and aesthetics become more apparent. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Karen Sanchez-Eppler, who define sentimental writing as a bodily genre designed to evoke bodily sensation, Dillon deftly asserts that aesthetic discourse is also concerned with bodily sensation, the felt aspects of the aesthetic experience. “Aesthetics,” she argues “aims at producing feeling subjects who insofar as they feel are able to understand their own subjectivity as free—personal, unconditioned, and creative.”11 While aesthetic theory is most often associated with the notion of autonomous subjectivity and sentimentalism is most often associated with connectivity or shared humanity, Dillon argues that sentimentality “has roots in the same concerns with autonomy that defines aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century . . . and . . . participated in defining the terrain of liberal subjectivity.”12 Recognizing sentimentalism’s concerns with both the autonomy of the feeling subject as well as its emphasis on connectivity and shared humanity, Dillon defines sentimentalism as a dialectic between these poles. Thus, in using the term “sentimental aesthetic,” my intention is both to acknowledge the cultural work of the sentimental and its aesthetic values not as divorced from each other, but rather as integrally and inextricably allied and to consider the dialectical complexity that negotiates the relationship between self and other in the sentimental tradition. The Scourged Back evidences this dialectic in that while it aims to establish connectivity between the viewer and the sitter, it also inspires a sense of autonomy in the viewer by reinscribing the social positions of the viewer and the sitter. More precisely, the viewer’s sense of his/her own freedom (intellectual and physical) is created by the enslavement of the sitter. Thus, The Scourged Back reinscribes those social positions of free and slave. These impulses towards autonomy and connectivity function simultaneously, not so much at cross-purposes, but rather integrally. In its attempt to establish connectivity, The Scourged Back demands the exploitation of the

Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds

17

sitter’s body. Indeed, as the image attempts to provoke this bodily intersubjective experience between the subject and the audience, it also strips the subject of any notion of being that doesn’t depend on his bodiliness. Thus, the effort to establish bodily connectivity is always matched by difference, an essential otherness that is created when the body is on display.

INVENTING THE REAL AND SEEING SENTIMENT Ironically, while the image’s power as an authenticating device lies in its assumed ability to mirror without mitigating truth, the composition of The Scourged Back suggests precise and thoughtful staging. Indeed, the realist and artistic impulses of the image are demonstrated in the contradiction between the reported occasion of the photograph, a medical inspection, and the image’s compelling composition.13 While the photograph was reported to have been taken when the man pictured was mustered into service in the Union army, the image bears little resemblance to medical photography of the period. Civil War medical photographs sometimes taken by doctors, but more often by hired photographers were usually made in Army hospitals after a soldier was wounded, not upon entry into the army. Among the purposes for the photographs was medical research. But they were also made for official records and to prove the extent of injury for soldiers applying for disability benefits.14 The photos show the markers of studio photography with typical backdrops, but the men are presented, as Allan Trachtenberg points out, as objects of scientific knowledge. Like The Scourged Back, the images expose wounds, but in stark contrast, some of these photographs display an austere flatness, a curt nudity that indicates their role as medical record. The men seem almost divorced from the wounds of the flesh as they stare unabashedly at the camera. As Trachtenberg puts it, “their detachment from themselves, the objectification of their bodies even in their own eyes, is evident from the absence of embarrassment at dropped trousers to display a scar. ”15 Thus, the purpose of these photos was not the evocation of sentiment, but rather the clinical investigation of the body’s wounds. As Robert I. Goler notes, the vast archive of medical portraiture was available primarily to medical researchers and received little attention from photographers and writers in their interpretations of the war.16 Thus, despite their being part of the public record and some of them having been displayed in the Army Medical Museum, these meticulously archived medical images remained somewhat excluded from public consumption. While this medical archive certainly has national implications, the power of these images lies not in the individual image, but rather in the archive of images that indicate the ghastliness of war. That they were not meant for public consumption only increases their capacity as revelatory images that present what is not meant to be seen, the desecration of soldiers’ bodies.

18 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body In contrast to Civil War medical photography, The Scourged Back exhibits provocative use of lighting, careful positioning, thoughtful lines and contours, and an overall powerful composition, all of which make it a commanding anti-slavery propaganda image. The subject sits with his back facing the camera as light breaks across the mass of keloid scar tissue. His clothing drapes precisely in a semi-circle below his waist, exposing its narrowness and the initial curve of his buttocks. His left arm is positioned at an angle that creates graceful muscular contours, while the sharp angle of the head also presents an elegant profi le, marked by an aquiline nose and prominent jaw line. This meticulous design suggests the ways in which The Scourged Back was intended for a broader audience. The Scourged Back places the sitter’s body on view for anyone who might be able to afford the inexpensive carte de visite reproductions. Designed for public consumption, this single image allegorizes the brutality of a national institution. The larger significance of The Scourged Back lies in the individual image that seeks to propel the subject to iconic status as an emblem of slavery as well as an object of sympathy. The power of this iconography comes from the narrative tension elicited by the juxtaposition of the scarification at the center of the image and recognized standards of beauty represented in the silhouette of the body pictured. The figure’s carefully composed silhouette, presents a conventionally dignified, even aristocratic form. The effect of this silhouette did not go unnoticed. The New York Antislavery Standard noted: “We have seen a Photographic likeness of a Louisiana slave’s back taken five or six months after a terrible scourging, and exhibiting from the shoulders to waist great welts and furrows raised or gouged by the lash, running crosswise and lengthwise. The victim himself presenting a fine countenance and a noble physique [emphasis mine].”17 This response indicates the ways in which the outline of the body conforms to western standards of beauty. More specifically, the subject’s profile bears likeness to nineteenth-century representations of ideal human form. J.C. Nott and George R. Gliddon’s infamous Types of Mankind (1854) best demonstrates these racialized standards. Nott and Gliddon offer three engravings to compare whites, blacks, and animals (Figure 1.2). The white figure is based on a Greek sculpture of Apollo, and bears a long head, thin lips, a pointed chin and a prominent aquiline nose that dominates his profile. In striking contrast, the engraving of “the Negro,” is a caricatured figure with an impossibly flat head, a bulbous curved nose, and exaggerated lips. Beneath this engraving is another engraving of a chimpanzee. Both the Negro and the chimpanzee are covered in cross-hatched lines to denote dark coloring, making them seem similar to each other, and at the same time strikingly dissimilar to the Apollo figure. Significantly, the use of the figure of Apollo, as Kirk Savage argues, invested whiteness with associations of high culture and classical civilization, and represented a standard for white beauty that demonstrated “a lesson in the relationship of physical beauty to intellect and culture.”18

Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds

Figure 1.2 J.C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1854), 458. Courtesy of The College of New Jersey Library.

19

20 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body The sitter represented in The Scourged Back, with his elongated head, keen nose, and sharp chin, all accentuated by his severely angled pose, evinces this standard of beauty and thus the image participates in a kind of racial code switching. Because the body in nineteenth-century culture was often viewed as a readable indicator of interiorities, such as virtue, intelligence, and malignance, the sitter’s body would have operated as cultural shorthand. As Shawn Michelle Smith argues, in nineteenth-century America “the processes whereby identity was envisioned . . . produced a model of subjectivity in which exterior appearance was imagined to reflect interior essence,” and nineteenth-century Americans also used such “visual conceptions of identity to claim a gendered and racialized cultural privilege.”19 Thus, the sitter’s resemblance to common standards of beauty invested with notions of high culture would have signified intelligence and nobility, while his mutilated back would have been equally indicative of his status as a slave. Thus, the profile in the image signifies a claim to racial privilege, while the sitter’s disfigured back powerfully contradicts that interpretation. This juxtaposition elicits the quintessential sentimental antislavery narrative immortalized in the figure of Uncle Tom: the noble slave, degraded by the cruel whip of slavery. The cultural associations of the profi le in the image are more apparent in light of Hiram Powers’s well-known 1847 sculpture, The Greek Slave. Though the sculpture presented a Greek woman enslaved by Turks, abolitionists claimed the statue for their cause by comparing the figure to whiteskinned slave women put up at auction in the United States. 20 Powers’s sculpture placed the face of the slave at a sharp angle to display a prominent profi le that as Savage has argued recalled archetypes of whiteness used by racial theorists of the time. Pointing to the sculptural medium’s obsession with ideal human form, Savage demonstrates that for Powers to “make his slave ideal,” he had to “make it the very exemplar of whiteness.”21 The facial profile and outline of the body in McPherson and Oliver’s photograph performs in similar ways by presenting contours that evoke ideal human form, while also contrasting this form with the bodily mutilation at the center of the image. Unlike “The Greek Slave,” which as Savage points out, focuses on the enslaved body poised on the auction block before it is subjected to the degradations of slavery, The Scourged Back presents the noble body already marked, dishonored by slavery’s lash. This difference also calls attention to the different aims of each medium. While the photograph evokes the ideal human form, indicating its artistic impulses, it also remains wedded to realism, exemplified by the scars on the subject’s back.

WITNESSING THE WOUNDED, OR WOUNDING THE WITNESSES This treatment of the scars invites the viewer to identify with the subject’s pain, as well as appropriate that pain by viscerally translating it from a visual experience to a bodily one in which the observer shifts from

Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds

21

outrage to action. Thus, the image suggests that the body serves not to separate the viewer from the subject, but rather as a means of connecting the viewer and the subject. According to Noble, sentimental abolitionist writers hoped that the effect of the sentimental wound, “a bodily experience of anguish caused by identification with another’s pain,” would spark political transformations by provoking an intuitive understanding of the importance of the antislavery cause. 22 Desiring to pierce what they saw as American indifference to victims of government policies, these writers sought to restore feeling to the cognitive process.23 Abolitionists used The Scourged Back to produce a similar effect. They employed the visual medium and its seeming immediacy, not merely to horrify viewers, but to evoke in them a bodily distress that moves them to support abolitionism actively. Taking into consideration that the means of demonstrating this continuity among bodies in literature was often visual, the potential of The Scourged Back to evoke this sort of bodily transference of pain, no matter how minimal in comparison to the subject’s pain, becomes more apparent. 24 The sitter’s scars as they appear in the image with their three dimensional quality that seems to come off the page, invade the observer’s world in a way that demands a bodily response. Indeed, the presumed truth of the image, its ability to reflect rather than invent reality, also facilitates this bodily effect. It is, however, essentially impossible, as Marianne Noble points out, to bridge the gap between people’s experiences. 25 The Scourged Back certainly fails at this task as well. To witness the wounded is not necessarily to fully understand the subject’s pain. Indeed, the very notion of shared pain risks diminishing the pain of the original victim. The Scourged Back not only fails the impossible task of bridging human experiences, but it also reinscribes the very differences it attempts to diminish. Despite its intent to establish connectivity, The Scourged Back produces a troubling intersection between two commodities: the slave body and photography. The industrialization of the image—its circulation and proliferation as a commodity in a new cultural economy of value and exchange serves to ensure the perpetual enslavement of the subject. It would seem that the sitter escapes to freedom only to return to a new sort of auction block, to be endlessly reproduced and sold. Thus, The Scourged Back begs Saidiya Hartman’s question: “What does this exposure of the suffering body of the bondman yield? Does it not reinforce the materiality, the thingliness of the slave?”26 There is no viewing of his body that does not set into motion some reenactment of the original crime, and therefore, the line between observer and master becomes blurred.27 As Mary Niall Mitchell has noted, The Scourged Back not only forced viewers to see the effects of slavery, but it also transported them to the site of the punishment and placed them in the very same position, behind this man’s back, as the punisher. 28 Indeed, the slope of the subject’s back, invisible to himself but bared for the full inspection of the viewer, demonstrates this equation between viewer and

22

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

master. The very viewing of the image “becomes an imaginary form of what Hegel described as the ‘master-slave relation,’ the intersubjective dialectic between persons in unequal social positions.”29 This reenactment of the master-slave relation depends on the sentimentalism that the image expresses. More specifically, abolitionist sentiment relies on the cyclical reenactment of the scene of punishment and demands it as the only means through which the slave becomes a subject. “The slave,” according to Saidiya Hartman, “was considered a subject only in so far as he was criminalized, wounded body or mortified flesh.”30 The man’s subjectivity then depends on his mutilated body, his status as victim. The viewing of the slave body seems to undermine the humanity of the slave. If the slave’s woundedness invents him/her as subject, the slave then stands outside of the larger American body politic, marked, scarred, embodied by a corporeal identity that excludes him/her from the American citizenry.31 The slave body is repeatedly marked both in life and in the imaginary, as the viewer of the image returns to the scene of the crime to both witness and participate in the act of bodily inscription. In this process of witnessing and wounding, the flesh operates as the primary narrative, announcing the unreliability of the slave’s testimony. The writing on the flesh, the writing of the master/viewer takes center stage. Nineteenth-century scholars and scientists valued the “mute testimony” of photography, its ability to tell without speaking, and to capture the physical signs that indicated interiorities, such as intelligence, mental disability, or criminality.32 This belief in the testimony of photography also suggested the potential untruth and unreliability of narration. Photography, for nineteenthcentury Americans, had the capacity to transform “the narrative status of its subject from fiction to fact.”33 An untitled 1863 carte de visite, which pictures the same man in a similar pose, demonstrates this relationship between photography and narrative (Figure 1.3). The verso of the carte de visite reads: Overseer Artayou Carrier whipped me. I was two months in bed sore from the whipping. My master come after I was whipped; he discharged the overseer. The very words of poor Peter, taken as he sat for his picture.34 The narrative obviously departs from the 1863 Harpers Weekly article, which reported the man’s name as Gordon and claimed that the beating was administered by a master, not an overseer. My point, however, is not so much that the narrative is questionable, which it is, but rather that its very unreliability demonstrates the way the slave’s name and even his testimony is inconsequential in comparison to the image. “The very words of poor Peter” are not so much intended to verify the image, but rather the image is meant to verify the words. Testimony, in this case, is quite literally after the fact, on the reverse of the visual evidence. The carte de visite by its very design privileges the image and thus discredits the narrative.

Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds

23

Figure 1.3 “Overseer Artayou Carrier whipped me. I was two months in bed sore from the whipping. My master come after I was whipped; he discharged the overseer. The very words of poor Peter, taken as he sat for his picture.” Baton Rouge, Louisiana, April 2, 1863. Courtesy of The National Archives at College Park.

24

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

While the contrast between the noble form and mutilation in The Scourged Back evokes a narrative tension that recalls sentimental antislavery fiction, the carte de visite, by privileging the visual, gives the final narrative power to the viewer. The viewer must read, interpret, and ultimately narrate, all based on the signs of the body. Indeed, the scars themselves demand a narrative backtracking in search of a cause for this effect. As Dennis Patrick Slattery notes, “Scars and wounds are coterminous entities. When the wound becomes a scar, there is always present the afterthought of the original violation.”35 The scars demand the question: who did this and why? But the image does not speak. Instead it allows the viewer to narrate the image, to speculate on the motivations for the abuse. The narratives on the reverse of both photographs acknowledge this process by attempting to shape it through narrative. Indeed, the narrative on the reverse of the untitled carte de visite attempts to control this process of interpretation by blaming the overseer and excusing the master. Similarly, Towle’s comments on the reverse of The Scourged Back point to this process as well. His remark that Gordon is not vicious, but rather “intelligent and well-behaved,” attempts to thwart the interpretation of Gordon’s scarred back as evidence of a ferocious, brutish slave.36 Thus, by attempting to dissuade his audience from one reading and endorse his own interpretation, Towle highlights the interpretative process that the image elicits. Indeed, his words demonstrate the ways in which the image could just as easily be interpreted in support of pro-slavery sentiment. His attempt to shape interpretations through language in the very same paragraph in which he also acknowledges the limitations of sentimental writers in rendering slavery suggests the unwieldiness of this interpretive process. The Scourged Back unveils and brings closer the body of the slave to be read, interpreted, and ultimately narrated by the viewer/master.

EROTICIZING THE WOUND The eroticism of the image exacerbates this elision between viewer and master. The Scourged Back fetishizes a wounded, racialized, and sexually vulnerable body. The image suggests not only the viewer’s power over the sitter’s body, but also the bodiliness of the sitter, the sameness between blackness, embodiment, and raw sexuality. On the most obvious level, the sitter’s state of undress, the intimate exposure of his back, which even he cannot see, courses with tabooed eroticism. To consider his nudity in light of the layers of clothing and props that engulfed bodies portrayed in the portraiture of the time, highlights both the extraordinariness of the presentation of male nudity as well as the prurience of the image. If such clothing, settings, and props indicated or rather invented the social milieu through which to understand the sitter’s place in society, the subject’s nakedness seems to place him outside of society. This status also leaves the sitter without a “fixed masculine identity, a clear place in the world of men,” making the image open to erotic desire and fantasy.37 As Savage has pointed out, such liminal spaces were often eroticized because

Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds

25

they were removed from social convention.38 In addition, the composition of the image, the sumptuous turns in the figure, and the graceful outline that emerges encourage a sensual experience for the viewer. Even the rope-like scars in their three-dimensionality compel a tactile experience. Moreover, the angle of the sitter’s left arm, the slope of the right shoulder, as well as the sumptuous hollow created by the space between the arm and the torso, encourage the viewer’s eye to caress the body, tracing its outline and entering its voids— penetrating the body with the eye. The sentimentalism of the image also contributes to its erotic effect. As Noble demonstrates, the portrayal of the sentimental wound had the unexpected effect of eroticizing the reading experience. More specifically, the effort to provoke bodily connectedness produced “fantasies of wounding . . . most fully eroticized” in the representation of “suffering black bodies,” such as that of Uncle Tom.39 As it attempts to share that subject’s pain, The Scourged Back also elicits desire for the suffering black male body, unveiling it in a way that both validates and is validated by the power inequities between the viewer and the seen. If as Noble contends, “eroticism is a desire for the ‘other,’ a longing to heal the wounds of an internalized otherness that situates separation from ‘the all’ [her emphasis] at the core of identity” making “a black man . . . the perfect figure of desire for the white woman,” then the sitter’s suffering body becomes the essential figure of white desire, freeing the white audience to not only appropriate his pain, but to claim his suffering body for their own fantasies of wounding.40

Figure 1.4 “Gordon as he entered our lines. Gordon under medical inspection. Gordon in his uniform as a U.S. soldier.” Harper’s Weekly, 1863 July 4, p. 429. Courtesy of The Library of Congress.

26

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

The Harper’s Weekly July 4, 1863 article that includes an engraving of The Scourged Back lays bare the eroticism of the image, while also exposing the ways in which the sitter’s compromised masculinity engenders that eroticism (Figure 1.4). The engraving of the sitter’s back stands in the center of two other images, dwarfi ng them in size. Beneath it is the title “Gordon Under Medical Inspection.” On the left is an engraving entitled “Gordon as he entered our lines,” while on the right is an image designated as “Gordon in His Uniform as a U.S. Soldier.” These two outer images serve as bookends for the centerpiece image, and yet as before-and-after photos they might have stood on their own. The fi rst image situates Gordon as the “typical Negro” of the article’s title. Shoeless, ragged, with a torn cap astride his head, he sits with his legs casually crossed, and his hands comfortably resting in his lap, suggesting his passivity despite the subtle discontent that emanates from his distant frown. His eyes look slightly askance, but with faint disgrace, unlike the pride or thoughtfulness seen in the sideways glances of many portraits. In the fi nal image, Gordon wears the union uniform, and his posture suggests movement and readiness. Standing with legs parted, his hand actively gripping the muzzle of his gun, his face bears a subtle grin as he stares directly and boldly at the onlooker. Together these images perform a narrative of masculine becoming. They might just as easily be embossed with Frederick Douglass’s words: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”41 Gordon transforms before the audience’s eyes from “typical negro” to rugged soldier. This comparison between the slave and the soldier was at the time, according to Savage, becoming familiar in emancipation rhetoric.42 When the Union army began arming former slaves, the social construction of black masculinity shifted dramatically. As Jim Cullen points out, black men who had formerly held the status of property, upon entering the battlefield, confi rmed their status as men in the most conventional sense. Cullen notes that while war had always been viewed as an experience through which boys became men, this was especially true for African-American soldiers in the Civil War. One soldier described the transformation thus, “Put a United States uniform on his back and see the chattel is a man.”43 The very notion of such transformations posed challenges to the institution of slavery. As Confederate General Howard Cobb pointed out, “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”44 Savage notes that such beforeand-after images, including the Harper’s Weekly image of Gordon, made this transformation from slave to soldier perceptible on the body by distinguishing between the disheveled, bent slave and the orderly, upright soldier. As Savage puts it, “in one simple change of outfit, he [the slave] stepped out of one entrenched tradition of popular representation—the ragged, feeble, pathetic ‘darky’ familiar from minstrelsy and caricature— and into a brave new world of civic display.”45

Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds

27

While I agree with Savage’s interpretation of the implications of the before-and-after transformation, the Harper’s engraving both participates in this notion of transformation that he describes while also departing from it. More specifically, Gordon’s before-and-after is presented as a triptych, rather than a diptych; there are two before pictures, and one after, and one of the before pictures stands larger than the other two images. The fi rst and fi nal images of the triptych as before-and-after photos produce the effect of transformation without the center image. That is, if the point of the images is to illustrate Gordon’s transformation into a soldier, the center image of the scarred back is unnecessary. It is not the fi nal image of the soldier that stands large in triptych, but rather the exposed scarred back that looms large over the other two images. The larger engraving of Gordon’s naked back performs in two ways: First, it serves to authenticate Gordon, engendering his subjectivity. More specifically, the stamp of truth lies on Gordon’s body, the observable proof that he was indeed an abused slave. This status as victim, even in the context of these other two images, is what generates and authenticates Gordon’s status as subject. Second, the central image also undermines the narrative of masculinity embedded in the transition between the fi rst and last image. The wounded slave, not the heroic soldier, dominates the triptych. Therefore, the representation of Gordon’s vulnerability undermines his masculinity. Indeed, the subject’s masculinity exists in a strange liminal space, negotiated between the image of the wounded back and the brave soldier. Because of the placement and size of “Gordon under Medical Inspection,” the before-and-after effect is compromised by the inclination to return one’s eye to the central image. The dominant image maintains the representation of Gordon as a specimen to be examined and interpreted, unveiling the body that exists beneath the uniform. In effect, the central figure unravels the image of Gordon the soldier, by showing us the soldier in his drawers. The Gordon of the triptych remains one who is rescued from the perils of slavery, rather than the soldier who saves others. Thus, the narrative of masculinity morphs into a sort of a vulgar striptease, in which a public self is stripped away to expose the supposed real or true self that is made available only when the flesh is on view. The article that appears with these engravings illuminates the way in which Gordon’s victimization compromises the image of him as a soldier. The text briefly recounts Gordon’s escape from a master who administered this beating on Christmas day. While the article is subtitled “A Typical Negro,” it points to Gordon’s “unusual intelligence and energy” demonstrated in his escape in which he used onions to throw off bloodhounds. The article’s only reference to Gordon as a freeman and a soldier, however, is a mention of him serving as a guide to Union troops in Louisiana and a brief account of his having been taken prisoner by Confederate soldiers who beat him mercilessly and left him for dead,

28 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body before he once again escaped to Union lines. The article portrays Gordon not so much as the Union soldier, but as the brutally abused slave. Indeed, both the engravings and the article are dominated by the image of Gordon’s mutilated back. Already eclipsed by the image, the narrative follows the lead of the engraving, re-tracing the scars, rather than investigating Gordon’s emergence as a freeman. The narrative reproduces the suffering body of the male slave, making it available for the erotic fantasy. The remainder of the article also makes evident the erotic implications of The Scourged Back. Interestingly, the account of Gordon makes up only about a third of the article. The remaining two-thirds is devoted to an extract from an article published in the New York Times, June 14, 1863. The extract reports the torture of slaves on a plantation located in the area of Louisiana from which Gordon comes. It describes the torture of various slaves, floggings, flayings, and burnings in lurid and salacious detail. The erotic impulses at work in the article are not even thinly veiled. In one account the mistress, Mrs. Gillespie, has male slaves summoned to her bedroom to receive punishment: “It was a very common thing to see a favorite slave carried by force to the bedroom . . . of Madame for punishment. She would order him to undress, and with her own hands apply the lash until she became exhausted.”46 Mrs. Gillespie also terrorizes the female slaves with sexualized violence. She examines the breast of a woman who she has ordered to wean her child. When the examination reveals that the woman has continued breastfeeding, the mistress administers an hours-long beating with both a whip and a handsaw, while the woman is held down by two female slaves. Finally, Mrs. Gillespie sends for hot tongs and attempts to “grasp the woman’s nipples with the heated implement.” The article goes on to intimate that Mrs. Gillespie burns a woman slave on “the most tender part of her body [Emphasis his].”47 Lest the reader fail to understand this reference to the woman’s genitals, the article follows with an account of Mrs. Gillespie burning another female slave on her thighs, abdomen, and “other parts until they were baked stiff.”48 This lascivious treatment of pain, attraction to the gruesome, and fascination with the obscene demonstrates the sensational, pornographic scene within which Gordon’s naked back is integrated. These ghastly accounts illustrate what David Reynolds has argued: “slavery was—horribly enough— exploited for its sensationalism by some reformers and editors who wished to provide arousing, masochistic fantasies to an American public accustomed to having its reform well spiced with violence and sex.”49 But they also demonstrate the way in which the mass media as Kevin Rozario argues “played a crucial role in reshaping American ways of seeing, feeling, and responding to suffering by treating violence and pain as pleasure-producing commodities.”50 These descriptions go beyond the erotic, boldly crossing the threshold of the pornographic. Indeed, these accounts meet Peter Wagner’s defi nition of pornography, “the written or visual presentation in a

Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds

29

realistic form of any genital or sexual behavior with a deliberate violation of existing and widely accepted moral and social taboo.”51 While the article claims to expose the ill treatment of slaves, the repetition of violent sexual encounters also functions to eroticize pain, treating it as a thrilling and even alluring excess. 52 Gordon’s back becomes the springboard from which the article dives into titillating descriptions of torture. The text, then, clarifies the more prurient implications of Gordon’s exposed back, the short distance between sentiment, sensationalism, and sexual exploitation. Indeed, the article’s repetition of sexualized violence of masters towards slaves sets the scene for the reenactment of the torture of Gordon’s body, inviting the reader to not only witness, but also participate in the act. *

*

*

What is most troubling and yet intriguing about The Scourged Back and its subsequent reproductions is how little we know of this man who posed as its subject. The very notion of optical realism has made his identity and his testimony seem superfluous. The tyranny of the photograph reduces the subject to “the hieroglyphics of the flesh,” a body to be read and written upon.53 His body then is synthesized within a highly determined artistic medium through which truth, sentiment, and erotic desire are invented. This is not to deny the abuse of the body of the man pictured or his experiences, but rather to consider the unveiling of his body and the proliferation of this image in light of Susan Sontag’s argument that “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”54 His body is initiated into the complicated power dynamics of The Scourged Back, which despite its seeming purpose to expose slavery’s evils, also participates in its own trade in the body. The desire to produce sentimental feeling overwhelms the possibility of self, privileging the feelings of the viewer over those of the viewed. The pain of the subject exists only as it is interpreted by the viewer or manifest in the viewer in the moment of transferred anguish. Thus, the man pictured exists only as he is invented by the observer.

2

Photography and the Disabled Black Subject in the Art of Carrie Mae Weems

In recent years, a number of contemporary African-American artists, including Michael Harris, Robert Pruitt, and Hank Willis Thomas, have attempted to confront the oppressive implications of The Scourged Back (Figure 1.1) and the untitled photograph of the same man (Figure 1.3) by incorporating these photographs into their own art. In this chapter, I focus on how photographer and artist Carrie Mae Weems integrates the 1863 untitled image of the wounded black man into a print, Black and Tanned (1995; Figure 2.1). Her use of the photograph leads viewers towards conceptual engagement with slavery and its contemporary implications. Her works function, to use Brian Massumi’s term, as a “a shock to thought,” or rather what Jill Bennett calls “a jolt that does not so much reveal truth as thrust us involuntarily into a mode of critical inquiry.”1 Weems’s art does not attempt to render slavery’s truth, but instead it propels viewers towards critical explorations of the legacies of slavery. Through the appropriation of this photograph, the artist encounters the problems of putting the wounded black male body on display. In Chapter 1, I discuss the ways in which this image was exploited to at once provoke identification and detachment, repulsion and desire towards the black male body. In this chapter, I more carefully outline the ways in which the photographic representation of disability was ideologically linked to the exploitation of the black male body. I also examine the ways in which Carrie Mae Weems tackles the complexities of reproducing the photograph to explore these exploitive implications, without reinscribing them. “Disability,” as Lennard Davis argues, “is a specular moment,” and thus the visual experience of encountering the disabled body enacts, “the power of the gaze to control, limit, and patrol the disabled person.”2 At the same time the viewing of disability is always narrative, or as Davis puts it: “A person became deaf, became blind, was born blind, became quadriplegic.”3 Therefore, disability is often reduced to a “chronotype, a time-sequenced narrative,” which is itself a means of controlling the meaning of disability.4 Indeed, as Davis contends, “by narrativizing an impairment, one tends to

Art of Carrie Mae Weems 31

Figure 2.1 Carrie Mae Weems, Black and Tanned Your Whipped Wind of Change Howled Low Blowing Itself-Ha—Smack Into the Middle of Ellington’s Orchestra Billie Heard it too & Cried Strange Fruit Tears (1995) from the series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995. Chromogenic color print overlaid with text sandblasted in glass. 18 ¾'' diameter, overall 23 ½'' x 19 ½''. Framed 26 ¾'' x 22 7 8 ''. Courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery.

sentimentalize it and link it to the bourgeois sensibility of individualism and the drama of an individual story.”5 In the case of the black wounded body, these issues of the power of the gaze and the reductiveness of narrative are magnified. Because the black body is never individual, but instead is always the representative of the collective other, the image of the disabled black body extends beyond the

32

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

singular to become emblematic. What is being monitored and storied is not a single body, but a collective body. Thus, the meaning of disability in this case is indelibly entangled in the meaning of blackness, both its ideological meaning and the ways in which it manifest materially as a violated body. The narrative of what happened is reduced to: He is a slave; slaves are beaten; beatings equal slavery. The story then not only compresses the individual into a chronological narrative explanation, but it compresses the history of slavery into a single defining narrative. Indeed, this view is what explains the photographic reproduction of the whip-scarred slave. The photograph functions to sum up the meaning of slavery and blackness at once. To address this issue, Weems confronts the problems of the photographic medium itself, and more precisely its tendency to exploit the disabled black subject. Weems’s manipulation of the photograph attempts to expose and address the problems of putting the wounded body of the slave on display by shifting our attention from the body as a discrete object, to the body and the photograph as sites of complex ideological struggle. As Davis points out, “the body generally . . . has been conceptualized as a simple object when it is in fact a complex focus for competing power structures.”6 Similarly, photography has often been viewed as transparent truth, rather than a sophisticated mode of representation. By exposing the socio-historical forces that shape the photograph itself, Weems shifts the viewer’s attention from the disabled body to the larger trajectories of competing power structures that shape the image. Weems’s way of resisting the problems of the medium is through the interjection of the figure of trauma into her work. Black and Tanned collapses time frames, rejecting chronological histories for a palimpsest mode of expression that recalls both the idea of traumatic memory as well as that of testimony. As it collapses the distant past, the not so distant past, and the present, it evokes the primary mechanism of trauma, its invasive recurring memories that know no distinctions of time. The evocation of traumatic memory invests Weems’s art with multitemporal modes of representation, and calls critical attention to linear narratives, or rather the limits of historiography. Summoning the effect of trauma becomes a means to disavow the photograph’s depiction of the wounded black body as a static, explicable, historical object that encapsulates slavery and blackness. Black and Tanned acknowledges the way in which the trauma of slavery remains outside of the domain of linear narratives, while nonetheless theorizing visual testimonies that bear witness to the collective trauma of slavery.

ABOLITIONISM AND THE DISABLED BLACK SUBJECT The 1863 photograph makes meaning by building on cultural ideas about both blackness and disability. Just as this representation of the wounded black male figure reinscribed the notion of black inferiority/white

Art of Carrie Mae Weems 33 superiority, it was equally invested in the idea of the normate/nonnormate bodies. According to Rosemarie Garland Thomson who coins these terms to describe the predominant representation of disability in the culture, the normate “by way of bodily configurations and cultural capital . . . can step into a position of authority and wield the power its grants them.”7 This figure is “outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries.”8 Thus, the nonnormate body or disabled body is constructed as deviant, deficient, inferior. In the 1863 photograph, nonnormate and black become intertwined, as the marked body itself becomes a sign of blackness. More precisely, because bodily difference in this instance is also a manifestation of racial oppression, the nonnormate body and blackness merge to form a narrative of black subjugation. While the nonnormate body requires explanation, the blackness of this body is the explanation: this body was mutilated because it is black. At the same time, we understand that this black body is only the subject of a photograph because it has been mutilated. The photograph positions the black disabled body as a readable, legible source of knowledge and gives the authority to interpret this body to viewer. This notion that the external self could function as a narrative of self is perhaps best understood in light of nineteenth-century sentimental literature, which as Karen Sanchez-Eppler has argued, depended on the notion of the readability of bodies. According to Sanchez-Eppler, in these texts “the self is externally displayed, and the body provides a reliable sign of who one is.”9 Moreover, this concept of interpreting the body also extended beyond mere interpretation to the idea of empathic experiences through which viewers could feel the suffering of the subject. Marianne Noble calls this concept “sentimental wounding” (which I discuss at length in Chapter 1).10 This practice encourages what Bertolt Brecht terms “crude empathy,” a sentiment produced by the assimilation of another’s experiences as one’s own.11 Significantly, this empathic experience depended on disability. In the abolitionist context, the display of black disability was intended to spark temporary feelings of bodily vulnerability in a white ablebodied audience, and at the same time the narrative offered that audience the authority to intervene in disability through activism, a process that ultimately confi rmed their own superior status as white normate bodies. While the representation of black disability invites the viewer to appropriate the bodily experience of the subject, it also reinscribes otherness by demanding the exploitation of the black disabled body. Thus, the 1863 photograph encounters the dangers of the empathic impulse, at once appropriative and disaffecting. Abolitionist sentiment here relies on the mutilated body. At the same time, black subjectivity depends on the figure of disability. This notion of the empathic experience of black disability also fuels the eroticism of the image. As Thomson points out, “the non-normate status accorded disability feminizes all disabled figures.”12 Indeed, the specular nature of the wound makes the subject into the object of the gaze. The

34

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

wound makes this body available to surveillance and desire. The power to look is also the power to regulate and oversee that body, inundating it with an erotics of control.

CONFRONTING PHOTOGRAPHY By appropriating the photograph, Weems confronts an image that silences the slave and privileges the viewer’s ability to read, interpret, and even feel the experiences of the disabled slave body. At the same time, she confronts the power of the photographic medium to defi ne, convey, and transfer ownership of black experience. Despite the exploitive implications of the 1863 photograph, Weems’s adaptation of the wounded black male body suggests that the meaning of the wound is not fi xed, and that images of bodily difference can both sustain and disrupt the conquering gaze at once. Cast in red tone, Black and Tanned repeats the original untitled image of the slave facing left with his back turned to the camera. But Weems’s large chromogenic color print of the image also offers striking contrasts to the tiny original carte de visite. The print is cast in red and includes dark shadows that fall on the body. While the viewer can still see the man’s body and make out the scar tissue, the red and black cast blurs the details of the body. The face for example is darkened so much that its edges are as black as a silhouette cutout. The image is also framed and surrounded by a circular black mat. Finally the lower half of the image is covered in text, which is sandblasted onto the glass enclosure. It reads: BLACK AND TANNED / YOUR WHIPPED WIND / OF CHANGE HOWLED LOW / BLOWING ITSELF-HA—SMACK INTO THE MIDDLE OF / ELLINGTON’S ORCHESTRA / BILLIE HEARD IT TOO & / CRIED STRANGE FRUIT TEARS Black and Tanned exposes the ubiquitous role of photography in the creation of cultural memory and the demarcation of the black subject through formal techniques that make visible the photographic process. The mat with its circular opening calls our attention to the camera lens, placing the viewer behind the camera. Speaking of this effect, Weems points out that she “wanted to have that sense of looking through the photographic lens [because] when we’re looking at the images we are looking at the ways in which Anglo-America, white America, saw itself in relationship to the black subject.”13 Thus, Weems not only evokes the presence of the camera, but by placing the viewer in the place of the photographer she calls critical attention to the ways in which the camera was implicated in the dehumanization of black people. Interestingly, the place of the photographer, the viewer, and that of the abuser are all one in the same, an elision that

Art of Carrie Mae Weems 35 compounds the tension between past and present, while also clarifying the way in which the photograph extends beyond such boundaries. Though Weems started her career as a documentary photographer, she soon became concerned with the power implications of the genre, especially its tendency to afford viewers a sense of mastery over subjects, including disempowered black subjects.14 Weems’s continued interest in and contention with documentary photography is evident in her work. As Thomas Piché points out, “she plays with the idea of documentary photography, subverting, even while appropriating, the authority of the genre.”15 Cherise Smith adds that Weems’s use of historical documentary photography in her work serves to reclaim “the dignity and pride that whites attempted to wrest—through stereotyping and mistreatment—from individuals of African descent.”16 Weems’s 1995 exhibit From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, the larger exhibit in which Black and Tanned was included, demonstrates this way in which she grapples not only with documentary photography, but also with portraiture and anthropological photography, as expressive and sometimes oppressive forms. The exhibit was commissioned as a response to the J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibit “Hidden Witness: African Americans in Early Photography,” an exhibition of rare photographs of African Americans taken between the 1840s and the 1860s. Upon an invitation to explore the Getty Museum’s photography collection, Weems selected photographs of black men and women from the collection (and others as well), re-photographed them, toned the prints in red, then matted and framed them. The overall exhibit as Thelma Golden has argued, “created an alternative history that simultaneously embraced and rejected what the museum’s photographs represented. Instead of simply exhibiting one of her own extant pieces, she . . . critically read the museum’s show through her own new series of works.”17 From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995) operates as a critical intervention into the history of photography, exploring the relationship between photography and black subjectivity. Beginning with what could be viewed as an anthropological photograph of a West African woman cast in blue tone, followed by the well-known typological Agassiz daguerreotypes of nude South Carolina slaves cast in red tone, the series implicates photography in the pseudo-science of racial classification.18 Lest her viewers miss this point, the text on the glass enclosures of the four Agassiz daguerreotypes reads successively “YOU BECAME A SCIENTIFIC PROFILE / A NEGROID TYPE / AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL DEBATE / & A PHOTOGRAPHIC SUBJECT.” Thus, by clarifying this equation between the black subject and the racial type, the text announces the way in which photography was actively engaged in establishing and maintaining a racialized socio-political landscape. The images also initiate a critical exploration of photography’s capacity to shape and diminish black subjectivity. Significantly, this exploration

36

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

includes photographs dating beyond 1840s–1860s, the time frame of the “Hidden Witness” exhibit, and extending through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, the series bridges time periods, shifting away from a sense of chronology to invest in a more multisynchronous form of expression. This treatment of time not only resists the view of the photograph as an unmediated purveyor of historical knowledge, but it also envelops it in a kind of temporal cloudiness that speaks to its place as part of the larger cultural memory. Extending beyond fi xed periods of time, the series suggests the ways in which the photographs themselves cannot be contained by temporal boundaries. Black and Tanned also intervenes in this process through its treatment of the body. More specifically, Weems’s work experiments with ways of taking the body back from the exploitative mechanisms of photography. The mats serve a dual function. At the same time that they call our attention to the camera, the mats control and limit the gaze, concealing parts of the head, lower back, and legs. Weems’s print controls the eye of the viewer, limiting the gaze by presenting and yet withholding the subject’s body at once to challenge the power implications of the original photograph. Imparting both somberness and dignity, the mat quietly and protectively encloses the image, withdrawing it from the viewer. In addition, the darkening of the face insists on the collective significance of the image. While the print is treated with the intimacy of a family photograph, embracing the subject in the circle, it also presents the subject as broadly symbolic of AfricanAmerican experiences. Indeed, if as Smith has argued, the red tone suggests blood, then Weems’s choice to cast the prints in the series in red creates a symbolic bodily connection between them.19

TRAUMA AND TESTIMONY AS INTERVENTION As she confronts the oppressive implications of photography through the very same medium, Weems risks reinscribing those implications. In this way, she encounters a problem similar to that encountered by authors of neo-slave narratives who work within the context of a medium that has been implicated in the formation of racial hierarchy. These writers contend with the ways in which literacy itself “was so thoroughly implicated in the definitions of humanity, reason, and culture that bolstered the institution of slavery.”20 In the preface to her novel Dessa Rose (1986), Sherley Anne Williams declares that black people have been “betrayed” by literature and writing.21 Thus, she and other writers employ strategies that, as Madhu Dubey points out, attempt to “disavow the literate and literary mode that forms each author’s chosen medium of expression.”22 For Toni Morrison this has meant that her writing endeavors to be “not . . . merely literary” but instead, contain an ability to speak to “an illiterate or preliterate reader.”23 According to Dubey, Morrison’s fiction attempts to be an “anti-literature”

Art of Carrie Mae Weems 37 that draws not so much on the formal conventions of the novel as on the vernacular traditions of African-American culture.24 Indeed, Morrison has maintained that her writing aims “to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed perhaps in music.”25 The incorporation of the vernacular serves to both disavow the literary and to facilitate multitemporal spaces that can more fully express the experiences of slavery. Dubey asserts, “The overlapping dimensions of the oral thus achieve a perfect identification between the generations, obliterating the breaks and discontinuities entailed by the history of slavery and restoring an immediate full presence.”26 Like these writers of the neoslave narrative, Weems engages in critical practices that acknowledge the problems of the medium while also trying to make meaning through that medium. The similarities between the problems of representation that these literary and visual artists encounter is evidenced in the fact that members of both groups use strategies that privilege the vernacular to reject linear histories in favor of these “overlapping dimensions.” Piché has described Weems’s incorporation of texts into her work as a “visual analog” to the speakerly text, a written text that privileges the oral. “In effect,” he writes, “Weems’s photographs are double voiced, standing as visual images with multivalent meaning but functioning as well as semantic entities that give visual form to the rhetorical strategies found in the text.”27 The visual strategies of Weems’s work are closely aligned with these rhetorical strategies. Just as the authors access the preliterate as a rejection of the literary, the artist explores traumatic memory—a non-artistic experience of the visual—as a critique of photography, this supposed medium of objective truth. Black and Tanned conveys trauma by registering the effect of the flashback. The strange clarity and yet graininess of the photograph, unlike the tactile effect of the original, serves to distance the image, situating it in the past, while the clarity of the image as it emerges from the red tone establishes its presence. Piché notes that: “[Weems] . . . likes a rolliflex lens because it gives clarity to the photographic subject but yields a slightly soft focus that implies a sense of past time—something a little old, but still contemporary.”28 This effect maintains a constant tension between past and present, while it also registers the effect of the flashback because at its center is this visual echo, surfacing in clarity and withdrawing into the graininess. This effect initiates and enunciates the encounter with the traumatic event referenced by the original photograph. Yet the elusiveness of the photograph—familiar, yet fading, clear, yet veiled, like a memory— suggests its unreliability as a record of the event. Thus, the image validates the visual experience of traumatic memory, while also challenging any notion of unmediated historicity. Trauma in this instance then is not about the individual subjective experience, but instead, a site of critical encounter that theorizes the visuality of cultural memory. Weems’s representation of the visuality of traumatic experience reveals both the inadequacy of the nineteenth-century photograph’s display of the

38 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body wounded body in conveying the experiences of slavery and blackness, as well as the way in which our understanding of slavery and black subjectivity is shaped by the photograph. Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg state the relationship between trauma and the visual thus: The formulation of trauma as discourse is predicated upon metaphors of visuality and image as unavoidable carrier of the unrepresentable. From primal scene to flashback to screen memory to the dream, much of the language deployed to speak trauma’s character is emphatically if not exclusively, visual. It may even be argued that the very form taken by trauma as a phenomenon is only, however, asymptotically or not, understood as or when pictured.29 Weems’s work taps into this idea of the visuality of trauma, and by doing so her art challenges the idea of the photograph itself as a readable historical object. Her work acknowledges the photograph as having been integrated into the psychovisual, as itself a construction shaped by and shaping cultural memory. Morrison’s Beloved (1987) illuminates the ways in which the representation of the visual nature of traumatic experience operates as a strategy that disempowers linear histories. When Sethe narrates the concept of “rememory” for Denver, the novel signals a connection between the visual and the oral as strategies that resist official histories: What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened . . . Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. 30 Sethe describes the experience of “rememory” as an intense encounter with living pictures that float independent of their owners, irrespective of the passing of time. In this way, Morrison captures not only the visuality of memory, but also the very nature of trauma for as Bruce Simon explains, “Trauma is about the literal return . . . of a painful or catastrophic event.”31 This concept of “rememory,” also demonstrates the distance between experience and history, or rather the failure of history to elucidate the experience of slavery. Thus, the vernacular and the psycho-visual in the novel function as ways of resisting the authority of sanctioned histories by expressing these overlapping time frames and floating pictures that capture the thorny workings of memory. The representation of traumatic memory in Weems’s art also uses the psycho-visual as a strategy that resists the linear narration of the disabled

Art of Carrie Mae Weems 39 body. More specifically, by evoking the 1863 photograph that seems at once present and distant, Black and Tanned privileges this visual experience of memory over the photograph as historical object. This effect functions in multiple and sometimes competing ways. By rejecting the photograph as historical artifact, the artwork calls attention to the problems of the photographic practice, the ways in which photography has been used to craft blackness, to delimit slavery, and shape black subjectivity. The artwork acknowledges the inescapable power of photography, its ability to construct and shape collective memory, for as Marianne Hirsch points out, memory is made up of representation. 32 Furthermore, by centering on the photographed body, it recognizes the centrality of the body in this construction of memory, while also challenging the notion of the body as a sufficient source of knowledge. By calling attention to photographic practice this effect reminds us that the photographed body is constructed through visual means. Thus, while her art interrogates the medium, it also acknowledges it as a ubiquitous force that gives shape and form to slavery, blackness, and memory—a force that even her own work cannot escape. The text imposed on the glass enclosure also dramatically reconfigures the original image, transforming trauma into a testimonial act. By placing the manipulated 1863 photograph in the context of African-American artistic production, more specifically the music of Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, Weems integrates the body of the subject into a narrative of collective African-American transformation that testifies to the translation of such horrors, such trauma, into the birth of jazz. Bridging slavery, lynching, and jazz, the text combined with the image dismisses chronology in favor of testimony. The two songs referenced, “Strange Fruit,” Holiday’s affecting account of lynching, and “Black and Tan Fantasy,” Ellington’s sweeping epic of African-American experience, suggest that art as testimony is also the goal of Black and Tanned. That the text reads “your whipped wind of change” rather than “your whipped back” places emphasis on transformation, rather than on the moment of violence. The text resists the reenactment of the violation by projecting the image into a future engendered by the experiences that the image represents. This effect is compounded by the ways in which the text uses orality to signal the testimonial mode. More specifically, the text privileges orality and the vernacular by focusing on auditory experiences. The words “WHIPPED WIND” “HOWLED LOW,” “HA-SMACK” AND “BILLIE HEARD IT TOO,” all center on auditory experience, whether through alliteration, onomatopoeia, or the narration of something heard. Furthermore, this emphasis on the testimonial is amplified by the way in which the written words function as part of the visual experience, preventing the tendency to read the body. Instead, the eyes must pass over the image, reading the words from left to right, privileging the act of testimony over the interpretation of the body. Significantly, the text is sandblasted into the glass enclosure, a process that suggests force and yet

40 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body is based on a natural process of erosion. It is as if the violence referenced by the image, the violent act of writing on the body, can only be interrupted by a violent act of revision. In this way the sandblasted text enunciates her intervention, while the practice of sandblasting itself echoes the words “whipped wind of change.” Weems’s translation of the disfigured form of the subject into a collective source of inspiration and invention operates as an act of testimony. The testimonial mode is particularly apt here because as Anne Cubilié and Carl Good point out, testimony is not a fi xed or formulaic process, but instead allows for multidimensional, multigenerational modes of representation. Mapping cartographies of experience, across time and space, Black and Tanned bears witness to the past and its effects that reverberate well into the twentieth century. If as trauma studies suggests “trauma signals a breakdown in the historical conditions through which subjects know and narrate their experience,” requiring “a more figurative testimonial agency to world it back into existence,” one might think of Black and Tanned as fi lling the gaps between history and experience, chronology and consciousness.33 Weems’s art demonstrates how the testimonial mode offers ways of “bearing witness to the unrepresentable.”34 Weems’s representation of trauma is not about equating black subjectivity with black victimization. Instead, Black and Tanned demonstrates how the idea of traumatic memory affords ways of challenging such ideologies, while also acknowledging the presence of the past. As Bruce Simon notes, part of the usefulness of theorizing slavery as a trauma is that the very notion of trauma allows for ways of figuring the sufferer as a survivor of trauma. Black and Tanned maps broad notions of survival, not merely that of the individual, but cultural, collective, artistic, and testimonial survivals. By evoking the idea of traumatic memory, the artist demonstrates that slavery or the trauma of slavery cannot be represented by a single disfigured body, but instead “is about . . . the recurrence and the survival of a painful catastrophic event or experience.”35 At the same time, the notion of traumatic memory affords ways of challenging a political landscape that dismisses the impact of slavery on the present because trauma poses serious challenges to those who want to dismiss slavery’s impact on the present.36 Indeed, the very notion of traumatic memory demonstrates how the past remains in tension with the present. 37 For Weems, trauma and testimony function as critical tools that grapple with the oppressive implications of photography. While this confrontation runs the risk of reinscribing violence as well as the hazard of asserting dominion over the photographic subject, she carefully navigates these risks—calling our attention to them as she circumvents them. Taking the familiar 1863 photograph, recontextualizing and defamiliarizing it, Weems places it in dissonant, painful tension with the present. As she does so, she wrenches a consciousness of and discomfort with our own participation in the mechanisms of photography, the power of our spectatorship, and the

Art of Carrie Mae Weems 41 expectation of black victimization that informs our way of seeing. Weems also seeks ways of bearing witness, giving shape and meaning to pasts that historiography has failed to record, that chronologies cannot contain, and that language has sometimes betrayed. Thus, like jazz and blues rhythms that bend and crack the meaning of sound, Weems’s art reshapes our vision to bear witness and to give testimony to the gaps and fissures of history.

3

Fantasies of Wounding Black Male Bodies in Hip Hop

“I haven’t shown my scars on television to sell records. I haven’t let journalists feel the hole in my gum because it sells records . . . When you look at how my body healed itself, I want you to see the bodies of those who never healed.”1 50 Cent, From Pieces to Weight (2004)

In his memoir, From Pieces to Weight, the rapper Curtis Jackson a.k.a. 50 Cent defends his choice to show his wounds to the media. 2 Shot nine times at close range in 2000, Jackson has become a symbol of hip hop’s tangles with violence. At the same time his miraculous and bewildering survival has elevated him to folk hero status usually reserved for deceased rappers. Situating himself, not as a tattle tale, but rather as a ghetto bard who bellows the truth of urban violence on behalf of all those who have been silenced by it, Jackson carefully attempts to differentiate the media’s exploitation of his gunshot wounded body with his own media displays of his wounds: “I let you know that I survived nine bullets, because it’s the truth,” he writes, “but it’s been turned into a gimmick.”3 Acknowledging the power of that gimmick, he nonetheless disputes its ability to contain his experience, or that of other young black men. Demanding his own humanity, he reclaims the bodily pain of this experience, pain that as he points out has been excised from the media representations of his wounded body: It hurt. Bad. I mean it hurt hurt—really bad . . . It may not seem that bad because it’s been packaged into a phrase that you come across in every story about me—‘the bullet-riddled rapper who was shot nine times’—but it doesn’t hold the weight, the pain, or the hope of my experience. It just can’t.4 His resistance to the media spectacle of his wounded body acknowledges a long history of spectacle violence against black bodies, since the age of slavery. As Elizabeth Alexander sums up, “Black bodies in pain for public consumption have been an American spectacle for centuries.”5 Jackson’s determination to control the meaning of his own scars calls attention to the ways in

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43

Figure 3.1 CD cover photo for Nas (2008) by Nas. Photographer, Meeno Peluce. Courtesy of Universal Music Group.

which his body functions as a site of ideological contest. Historically, whites have had the privilege of interpreting those scars, and thus since the time of the auction block, black scars have been viewed as signs of the moral degeneracy and viciousness of the victim, rather than of the victimizer. Indeed the ‘bad-ass nigger’ who is impervious to police batons and bullets continues to hover over the American culture—the familiar phantom, so powerful that just summoning him has successfully served as a justification for violence against black men, from lynching to police brutality. Jackson’s refusal to be subsumed by this myth, reminds us of its cultural power, recalling L.A. police officers’ accounts of Rodney King’s “superhuman” strength that convinced an all white jury that the 1992 videotaped beating of King was necessitated by the astonishing vigor and force of King.6 Attempting to steal his own body back from the myth, Jackson insists that his body does register pain, and that he registers the emotional weight of that experience.

44

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

Figure 3.2 CD cover photo for Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2003) by 50 Cent. Photographer, Sacha Waldman. Courtesy of Universal Music Group.

Despite his powerful resistance to the myth, Jackson’s own insistence that he has not shared his scars to sell records, acknowledges the very fact that such scars do sell records. Indeed, his fi rst commercial album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2003), which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and sold over 800,000 copies in just four days, pictured the buff, bare-chested rapper behind bullet-shattered glass, the bullet hole circling a cross that hangs from his chest (Figure 3.2). His body appears fragmented, shattered like the glass that covers it, but despite this effect he stands tall. Light and shadows dance on his oiled torso, enhancing his musculature. He wears a stocking cap on his head and glaring white underwear that circles just below his natural waist. Staring into the camera, he dons an expression that is both menacing and interrogatory. Not insignificantly, the viewer is positioned as the shooter who wields the gun, and thus assumes a safe position of mastery over the subject. The positioning of the bullet hole suggests that the viewer has hit the target dead on, while the cross that hangs from his chest indicates the possibility of the subject’s resurrection. Thus, the

Fantasies of Wounding

45

cover art dramatically reenacts cycles of violence and resurrection. While the image may be read as a kind of testimony, metonymically representing, in Jackson’s words “the bodies of those that never healed,” it also actively markets a fantasy of wounding, in which the viewer is encouraged to play the role of the shooter.7 This chapter is concerned with the complex cultural work of images of black male woundedness in the contemporary moment. From Kanye West’s appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone as a bleeding crucified Jesus (Figure 3.6), to Nasir “Nas” Jones album cover for Nas (Figure 3.1) which pictures the artist with a whip-scarred back, images of black male woundedness have become pervasive in hip hop culture. Many of these images bear remarkable resemblance to the nineteenth-century images of a whip-scarred slave discussed in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 (see Figure 1.1 and Figure 1.4). The recurrence of this image of black male woundedness in recent years suggests the ways in which the past and the contemporary moment are scopically linked. This chapter focuses on the cultural work that these contemporary images perform, with an eye towards the geneaological strands that link the contemporary ideological landscape to that of the nineteenth century. Such images are not merely about the photographer, or the musician, as much as they are expressions of a broad range of a cultural desires, psychic needs, and commercial interests that contract with the creators of the image. Therefore, rather than view them as static signs, I interpret them as sites of contested meaning. They function as both expressions of the crisis of black men and as tangible commodities in the visual economy of hip hop. More precisely, while these images give visual expression to the urban violence that so many young poor black men face, they also demonstrate the ways in which this experience of urban violence has itself become a commodity, a demonstration of ghetto authenticity that has market value. Reading these expressions of urban violence in light of Christine Harold and Michael DeLuca’s point that the same body can “[speak] to different audiences in different ways,” this chapter argues that the meaning of these bodily spectacles depends on the audience.8 While images of black male woundedness may be viewed as acts of testimony that make visible the suffering of young black urban men, they can just as easily be interpreted as visualizations of the alterity of black bodies. For audiences who see their own bodies as essentially different from those pictured, the image of the wounded black man confi rms not only the equation between blackness and suffering, but also the equation between whiteness and bodily integrity. These images operate as an intriguing fl ipside of the myth of the hyper-masculine black male, serving to contain and ultimately make palatable his supposed hyper-maleness by objectifying and eroticizing black male bodies. While so much criticism of hip hop has focused on the exploitation of black women’s bodies, this chapter calls attention to hip hop’s equally exploitative imagery of the black male body.

46

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

DRESSING WOUNDS, UNDRESSING HIP HOP Hip hop has become so associated with machismo that to consider images of woundedness as anything less than a continuation of that ethos seems anomalous. Indeed, the figure of the gun-shot-wounded rapper is often interpreted as an illustration of the victim’s fearlessness, the defi nitive indication of his ability to successfully sustain and mete out violent aggression. While I do not doubt this interpretation, the wound is also one of the few expressions of vulnerability in hip hop, and as such it demands further investigation. For some rappers, the figure of the wound functions as a recognition of both bodily and psychic pain, as well as a sign of the social inequities that perpetuate such bodily and psychic vulnerability. Cornell “Nelly” Hayes’ use of the bandage worn on his face is perhaps the best example of this subtle political current in mainstream hip hop. Hayes has worn a bandage on his face in countless media and stage appearances to represent his brother, Lavell “City Spud” Webb, who was incarcerated. According to Hayes the bandage signifies, “the scar of Spud’s absence.”9 Indeed, the bandage has become Hayes’ signature, sparking a torrent of media curiosity. The bandage symbolizes a social wound; it functions to keep in view the bodies of young black men perishing in America’s prisons. Significantly, Hayes uses his public body to make palpable the invisible lives of those black men who are incarcerated. For Hayes, the figure of the wound functions to lift the veil from America’s penal system. The wound has been just one way in which hip hop culture has articulated civil inequities. It is useful to think about the rhetorical power of the wound in light of other visual forms of memorial in hip hop culture, the obvious one being the assumption of a prison aesthetic among rap musicians and among black youth. Rappers’ popularized the look of low slung pants and exposed underwear, a style believed to have stemmed from the ban on belts in prison. Such visual reminders of prison culture have served as a bodily memorial of those languishing in America’s prisons, while also acknowledging the vulnerability of those who, though they are not incarcerated, are living in a culture that seems to have fated them to one day lose their freedom as well. Thus, though the assumption of the prison aesthetic on the street is sometimes touted as a celebration of prison culture, it is also a powerful visual method of mourning the living, who have already been written off by many as dead. The fi gure of the wound is an extension of this folk aesthetic in which individual bodies project the invisible lives of many poor urban black people. For example, when Jackson announces that he wants to make himself into the “the poster child” for the perils of young black men living amidst rampant urban violence, he figures his own wounded body as a visual evocation of a people’s wounds.10

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47

Figure 3.3 Black Jesus. Photographer, Claude Shade. Art directors Fred & Farid Agency, producer Max Fallon. Courtesy of Pony.

Still, to read the figure of the wound, or the prison aesthetic, as no more than part of a folk aesthetic is to consider hip hop as a pure folk form, rather than a commodity driven by commercial markets. For example, when the low slung pants and underwear bear designer labels, it becomes apparent that the aesthetic has contracted with commercial desire and market forces that shape meaning. Similarly, the forces of commercialism also brand the figure of the wound. Commercial advertising provides many

48 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body examples. A 2007 Pony sneaker ad pictures a gold Pony sneaker next to the pierced bleeding feet of a black man who dangles from above (Figure 3.3). Building on Christian mythology, the photograph, rather than raising consciousness about the social crisis of urban youth, exploits this crisis to sell a sneaker. Recalling crucifi xion, the image suggests that the body, sacrificed on the altar of white supremacy, requires the gold pony sneaker to shelter its wounded feet. That the sneaker is gold recalls the “streets of pure gold” that represent the new heaven of the millennium described in the book of Revelation. Thus, eternal salvation is to be had through the purchase of a gold Pony sneaker. Significantly, the dangling feet are cropped so that the rest of the body is not seen. Thus, the form is not so much a man, as dangling body parts, specifically wounded body parts that signify black maleness. This cropping and the lighting against the black backdrop fi x the eye on the outermost bleeding foot, while the wound itself only emphasizes the otherwise perfection of form. Feminist critics have long pointed to the ways in which pornographic images of women illustrate similar fragmentation to indulge the sadistic impulses of men’s visual desire. Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien liken such fragmentation to “strip-tease, where the exposure of successive parts distances the object, making it untouchable, so as to tantalize and arouse the desire that fi nds its denouement in the unveiling of woman’s sex.”11 Pony’s black Jesus, with his feet and calves helplessly attached to an invisible cross, without the benefit of hands that might resist or eyes that might dare to look back, is nothing short of this sort of “striptease.” Not only does it surrender the black male body, one piece at a time, but it pretends to sanctify the desecration of the body by offering it as a kind of sacrament for the consumer. The Pony sneaker ad draws on impulses already present in hip hop’s treatment of the wound. To return to the cover art for Jackson’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ CD, the prominence of the bullet hole is matched by the muscular beauty of the figuratively wounded body. His body is slick with oil, enhancing his muscles. He wears a belt and shoulder holster that bears a logo very similar to the famous Gucci logo, but instead of small “G’s,” the pattern is made of small “50s.” Though he wears a belt, his bright white underwear is on view. That his body is covered in his own logo that echoes the Gucci logo is not only a nod to commercialism, but it also signifies the transformation of the self into the product. He has become his own logo—his own brand—for as Jeff Chang points out, in the music industry and hip hop in particular “your body is your brand.”12 Rather than presenting Jackson as the poster child for urban violence, this image suggests the ways in which the very idea of that poster child is being actively marketed as a site of desire. More precisely, the rapper/poster child for urban violence is the product. By combining the violence, represented by the bullet hole and the shattered fragmentation of his body with the calculated eroticism of the nude torso and exposed underwear, the image fetishizes the wounded body.

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49

The emergence of the buff, but wounded black male body is part and parcel of the transformation of hip hop from a small insular community of young artists to a global corporate commodity. When small independent labels were bought by large corporate conglomerates, the shift precipitated a dramatic transformation in the visual representation of black bodies in hip hop.13 The primary image of black male rappers changed from bodies smothered in branded clothing and jewelry, to brawny shirtless bodies that were often themselves branded with signature tattoos. Now the bare breast of L.L. Kool J., Tupac, JaRule, DMX and many more have become as familiar a symbol of hip hop culture as Run DMC’s Adidas sweat suits and stringless sneakers were in the mid 1980s. The disrobing of hip hop is equally evident in the transformation of the predominant image of women rappers from the androgynous MC Lyte to what are now known as the sex kitten rappers, such as Foxy Brown, Lil’ Kim, and Trina. Indeed, the trend has become so pervasive that it is easy to forget that hip hop once had clothes. With the commodifi cation of hip hop came an emphasis on a nearly nude, eroticized, fetishized black bodies. This is not to suggest that hip hop was devoid of sexual content before, or that hip hop is the only site of such images, but rather that the representation of black bodies and black sexuality in hip hop has been profoundly shaped by the forces of mass market desire. According to Scott Poulson Bryant, though the fi rst rapper to represent himself as sex symbol was L.L. Kool J. in the early 1990s, it was fashion designer Calvin Klein’s 1990s ad campaign which featured the white rapper Marky Mark, now known as Mark Wahlberg, that initiated the representation of black male bodies as sites of desire in hip hop.14 Featuring the young shirtless rapper in skintight white underwear, the images used black and white photography that enhanced the creases of Wahlberg’s muscular body. Signifi cantly, though the campaign referenced hip hop and thus capitalized on the fear of and desire for the black male body, such bodies were noticeably absent from the campaign. As Poulson-Bryant points out, Klein’s campaign “wanted the ‘edge’ of rap music . . . but not the color of it.”15 Still, it set the stage for a new visual economy of hip hop in which half-nude black male bodies would operate as a primary form of currency. Poulson-Bryant argues that the Klein campaign forced rappers “to understand that sex does indeed sell.”16 The success of the campaign also demonstrated to those in the hip hop industry (not just rappers) the commercial value of the eroticized black male body in the culture, something that had already registered on so many other stages, not insignifi cantly in the world of art photography where Robert Mapplethorpe’s black nudes of the 1980s emerged. Klein’s campaign exhibited a successful blending of commercialism, hip hop, and homoeroticism that would become part of the visual economy of hip hop.

50 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body That the visual materials used to market hip hop have increasingly capitalized on homoerotic imagery is evidence of the complex cultural desires and market forces that inform the visual culture of hip hop. Hip hop’s parade of male nude torsos, with their defi ned mid-ventral lines becoming chevrons that guide the eye to visually-absent but symbolically-present genitals, clarifi es the erotic impulses of hip hop. In reading these images as homoerotic, I subscribe to Allen Ellenzweig’s argument that “the male gaze upon other men . . . is intrinsic to the medium [of photography].”17 In Hip Hop Beyond Beats and Rhymes, director Byron Hurt argues that homophobia and homoeroticism are often coupled in hip hop in that the very rappers that espouse anti-gay lyrics are often the same men who are featured in homoerotic photographs on the covers of hip hop magazines. Given that so much rap music fi xates on a homosocial culture, men in competition with men, it should be no surprise that homoeroticism and homophobia coexist in hip hop as they often do in homosocial environments. That said, the hip hop industry has capitalized on this homoeroticism by marketing the figure of the sexualized thug; This startling blend of intimidation and titillation plays on “the dialectics of white fear and fascination,” which Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien identify in gay pornography that depicts black subjects.18 Perhaps no cultural phenomenon captures this dialectic more than gangsta rap, the most commercially successful genre of hip hop. Through its emulation of prison culture, gangsta rap has successfully married the fi gure of the thug with the eroticized, objectifi ed black male body. Adopting the fashion of the prison aesthetic, gangsta rap, though it certainly did not invent this fantasy of fear and longing has certainly taken advantage of it by exploring the sexuality of the gangsta. The infamous image of an angry young Tupac Shakur, giving the fi nger to the camera, the creases of his chest trailing downward to his exposed underwear, and the gun that symbolizes his genitals, captures exactly this dichotomy. Beauty and the threat of violence combine to produce a prurient experience that exploits the simultaneous cultural anxiety about and attraction to the black male body.

COURTING THE GAZE The image of the wounded black man is the ultimate visual representation of this “dialectic of fear and fantasy” that Mercer and Julien outline. More precisely, the wound is both the critical sign of the fearsome and deadly street hood prone to violent engagement, and defi nitive proof of the corporeal vulnerability of that very same body. Thus, the wounded figure offers an ongoing narrative of violent encounter that dramatizes the perceived threat, while at the same time managing that threat in a way that confi rms the masculine power of the viewer. The figure of the wounded black man

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51

exemplifies what Mercer and Julien have described in gay porn as “‘colonial fantasy’ . . . a rigid set of racial roles and identities which rehearse scenarios of desire in a way that traces the cultural legacies of slavery, empire and imperialism.”19 They argue that “colonial fantasy” presents a scenario in which “the threatening phobic object is ‘contained’” and “thus the white male viewer is returned to his safe place of identification and mastery . . . but at the same time has been able to indulge in that commonplace white fi xation with the black male sexuality.”20 The wound functions to contain and objectify the threatening black male body, simultaneously figuring the threat, while diffusing it. This dialectic recalls bell hooks’ argument that “though white fear of black sexuality is often cited as an ingredient of white racism, the contemporary cannibalization of sexualized black male bodies in mainstream popular culture suggests that white folks have found a way to conquer their fear.”21 The wound reduces the black man to an object already mastered by the white gaze, rendering “the black masculine ‘menace’ feminine through a process of patriarchal objectification.”22 Images of black male woundedness court the racialized and sexualized look of the white male gaze. To clarify this notion of the look, I point to Frantz Fanon’s description of being subjected to “the look” of white racism as “an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood.”23 It is critical to note that this conflation of blackness with the wound is initiated by “the look,” the white male gaze through which the bodies of black men become erotic objects. As Daniel Y. Kim points out in his analysis of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, “to be captured by this ‘look’ is not simply to be wounded; it is also to have one’s being reduced to the wound that black identity is.”24 Establishing a link between racism and “the look,” Fanon emphasizes not only the erotic pleasure of looking, but the racialist power paradigms that govern “the look.” Thus, Kim argues that Fanon locates “the look” of racism as something akin to the “look” that would signify sexual difference. According to Kim, Fanon asserts the claim that “white men look at black men in much the same way that men look at women—as bodies whose alterity is signaled by the wound of castration they bear.”25 Images of black male woundedness visualize and thus perpetuate, this “confl ating of identity with injury,” functioning to essentialize the wound as a sign of black maleness. The effectiveness of this ideology is evidenced in the fact that one cannot imagine a proliferation of images of wounded white men in contemporary popular culture. Thus, the wound is governed by “a stable matrix of bodily signs” that determine which bodies are exposed to suffering. 26 Moreover, the wound in these contemporary images of black men furthers this objectification by fi xating on the bodies’ difference, ultimately confi rming the bodily integrity of the white male viewer, as well as his power to exercise the “the look.” More precisely, these images invite “the look,” ultimately reifying the racialist power paradigms that govern it.

52 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

Figure 3.4 CD cover photo of Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood (1998) by DMX. Photographer, Jonathan Mannion. Courtesy of Universal Music Group.

The cover art for Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood by DMX aka Earl Simmons might be called a visual expression of Fanon’s “hemorrhage” (Figure 3.4). Gazing into the camera with an expression somewhere between malicious desire and the bewilderment of trauma, Simmons drips with red paint, in imitation of blood. His hands extend towards the camera in a gesture of appeal or perhaps intimidation, while a gritty substance that covers his chest gives the appearance of skin peeling from his body. On the reverse, he stands with his bloody back facing the camera (Figure 3.5). Underneath the streaming red fluid is a crude tattoo of a dog and the words “One Love Boomer.” The cover image gives the appearance of a body that is self-amputating its own skin, marking itself with its own slippery internal fluids. The back cover photo of the scrawl on his back indicates violence, the ways in which experience has viciously marked his body. A similar image appears in Earl: The Autobiography of DMX, but in this case Simmons head is bowed over prayerful hands. Adjacent is a photograph, which might be read as an visual homage to Fanon’s Black

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Skin, White Masks. In the photo, Simmons wears what appears to be white stage paint covering the area around his eyes and chin, with his own black skin prominently exposed on his head and around his mouth. Coupled in this way, the image of masking stresses the ways that the bloody image performs an unmasking in which the body appears to be turned inside out, a fleshly, epidermal strip tease. The subject then is not just partially nude but rather is stripped of his skin, an object of dissection. Unlike the presentation of women in film, which Laura Mulvey argues is not so much about the depiction of the subject’s sexuality as it is about the expression of power over the object of representation, these images of DMX are expressions of the mythic sexuality of black men and the viewer’s ability to master that sexuality as well. 27 That the subject’s posture can be read as intimidating or entreating at once, speaks to this complexity of myth and desire that materializes in the image. The use of bodily fragmentation in so many of these images of wounded black men recalls what Hazel Carby has termed “the dissecting gaze of the lynch mob.”28 As numerous critics have pointed out, the worship of the black male body and the desecration of it have always been ideologically linked. Significantly, the site of that veneration and violence has often been the black

Figure 3.5 CD back photo of Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood (1998) by DMX. Photographer, Jonathan Mannion. Courtesy of Universal Music Group.

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phallus, for as Poulson-Bryant puts it in his exploration of the myth of the big black penis, “we were hung from trees for being well hung.”29 Lynching was not only a visual performance that confirmed white supremacy, but it was a performance that consisted of many rituals of dissection, from the parsing of the body as souvenirs, to the photographs of the body that allowed individuals to own a piece of the desecrated body. As Harvey Young points out, “lynching souvenirs . . . not only fix the black body within a historical moment but also transform it into a captive object to be owned, displayed, and quite possibly traded.”30 He adds, “What makes them [lynching souvenirs] so interesting is that they, much like the contemporary mass-produced, stereotypical commercial images of the black body, sought to commodify the body at a time when it was gaining new liberties in the present.”31 Young’s comparison suggests the ways in which both lynching imagery and contemporary images of African Americans participate in visual rituals of dissection. Such rituals allow spectators to take possession of the mythologized black male body with its mythic sexual power, and in so doing confirm their own power. This comparison between contemporary photographs of wounded black men and lynching rituals, is not intended to diminish the acts of terror that have plagued African Americans, but rather to call attention to the shared ideological framework that links these types of images. I will concede that Jackson’s aestheticized fragmented body that appears to be shattered by a bullet might seem like a far cry from the tortured and burned men and women who were further violated by the camera. Yet, the many gruesome internet images that posters claim are pictures of Tupac Shakur’s autopsy make this comparison seem plausible and necessary. From this literal dissection of a black male body supposedly that of Shakur, to the parsing out of the image of his body, his wealth of posthumously published music, and even replicas of his tattoos, Shakur has been and continues to be subjected to the “dissecting gaze” of the mob. Marketers have successfully made it possible for everyone to have a piece of Shakur, but more importantly they have also made it commonplace to buy a piece of him without any thought to the ideological implications of these visuals. Digitally manipulated images of a 1993 photograph that pictures Tupac Shakur, his naked tattooed back facing the camera, are all over the web. The images include diagrams that specify the language included in each tattoo. Thus, his body is written upon twice, once by the tattoo artist, and again through digital manipulations that outline the pieces of his body like the diagrams that distinguish the edible parts of a pig. The mimicking of his signature tattoo, “Thug Life” has been yet another visual means of owning a piece of Tupac, symbolically making a souvenir of his dead body.

THE PERSISTENCE OF UNCLE TOM The relentless images of a crucified Tupac not only capture this treatment of his body, but they also mark the increasing appearance of the crucified black male body in hip hop. In the video for the song “Smile,” a collaboration

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between Brad Jordan (Scarface) and Shakur released after Shakur’s death, a Shakur-look-a-like dangles from electrical wires, his arms extended to simulate crucifi xion. Similarly, Shakur’s Don Killumati: The Seven Day Theory CD, released only months after his death in 1996, includes a drawing of a bleeding Shakur hanging from the cross on the cover. Though the untimely death of Shakur precipitated these representations of his body as crucified, the parade of visual representations of crucified rappers, including Nasir Jones (“Nas”) Andre Nikatina (Dre Dog), and Kanye West, indicates the ways in which the image is not so much about a single death as about the larger cultural resonance of the myth (Figure 3.6). These images trace not only the biblical account of Jesus, but also the master-narrative of American literature about slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851). Thus hip hop crucifi xions channel familiar American narratives through which these issues of race and nationhood have been refracted historically. Like their literary predecessor, hip hop crucifi xions teeter between dramatizing the persecution of young black men and reenacting and exploiting the scene of persecution in ways that serve to objectify and fetishize the black male body. This seesaw of racialized representation bears disturbing parallels to Stowe’s novel. The biggest selling novel of its time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin also relied on a black Jesus figure to dramatize the abuses of slavery. Stowe’s concocted black male hero, however, depended on stereotypes of the natural docility and intellectual inferiority of the Negro. Peace-loving, sensual, but simple, Uncle Tom is driven by his absolute acceptance of Christianity. Thus, though he often bows to the will of his masters, he acknowledges his ultimate master as Jesus Christ, and like him dies at the hands of his abusers for the souls of others. Though the novel concentrates on pitting the practice of bondage against the principals of Christianity, the novel is not without some slippage, in its attempt to contain the sexual implications of its own plot. As Hortense Spillers eloquently argues, a discourse of sexual desire for black men, however suppressed, creeps into the book, igniting tensions between the overt Christianity of the novel and the covert discourses of sexual longing. 32 Significantly, the object of this longing is a black man’s body, which eventually erupts into a fully realized erotic object when he is wounded by his abusers, and ultimately beaten to death. According to Marianne Noble, Stowe “transforms the religious ecstasy associated with Tom’s brutalized body into a more carnal fantasy of erotic desire.”33 Noble argues that by “fetishizing the wound,” Stowe feminizes a black man, freeing herself, a nineteenthcentury white woman, to desire black men, in the only way permissible, by making them into “tortured objects of pity.”34 Despite obvious temporal differences between Stowe’s novel and hip hop imagery, the similarities in their use of erotically charged religious imagery compels certain comparisons. Undoubtedly, one could argue that these black men have learned to view their own bodies as inseparable from the master script, in which violence is the only means through

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Figure 3.6 Cover photo by David LaChapelle from Rolling Stone, February 9, 2006 © Rolling Stone LLC 2006. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

which black men become subjects. My concern though is not merely with whether these images are influenced by this master narrative, but moreover with how the cultural desires that shape both the book and the contemporary images are genealogically linked. The fact that these images are productions, not merely of hip hop artists, but rather of the hip hop industry, suggests that just like Stowe’s bestselling novel, these contemporary images of wounded black men satisfy certain broader cultural desires as well. If “stereotypes of black men are always organized around the needs, demands, and desires of white men,”35 the larger question is not

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whether rappers have absorbed these ideologies (undoubtedly they have), but rather what are these desires and how do they give shape and meaning to the visual culture of hip hop? These images of crucifi xion present racialized fantasies of wounding, in which erotic, sadistic impulses are masked by religious imagery at the same time that they are intensified by it. That is, the reenactment of religious imagery, while it may serve to conceal the carnal impulses of the image, also taps into the quiet eroticism of the passion of Christ. Indeed, Ellenzweig refers to the pose of crucifi xion as having become “almost a cliché for sexual ardor.”36 Moreover, these ecstatic expressions of violence allow for vicarious wounding, in which the viewer who assumes a sense of mastery over this body exerts the power of the gaze as an expression of sexual dominance. Here, I read the gaze as not only an expression of power as Foucault asserts, but also in keeping with Mulvey’s ideas as an assertion of heterosexual, masculine, sexual power over feminized bodies. 37 Thus, the image of the crucified black male, I argue, empowers and satisfies the white male gaze, which Fanon describes as “the look.” The meaning of the spectacle always depends on who is viewing it and the power relations between the viewer and the viewed. For example, the very same lynching when viewed voluntarily by whites has a different meaning when witnessed by blacks. The very same scene of lynching could confi rm the bodily integrity and supremacy of that white audience, while terrorizing blacks by affi rming their vulnerability to violence. Similarly, these contemporary images of suffering black male bodies can potentially confi rm the integrity of the viewer’s white body, by seemingly giving them power over that body. Indeed, the less the viewer identifies with the vulnerability of that body, the more likely the viewer is to presume power over that body. Nasir “Nas” Jones’s video “Hate Me Now” (1999) is one of the most fully realized of the hip hop crucifi xions. Despite the opening text that explains that the video is not a depiction of Christ’s life or death, it depicts the rapper carrying a wooden cross through an angry crowd of people in biblical dress. Shifting between this scene and shots of Nas and Sean Combs a.k.a. Puff Daddy decked out in furs at a strip club, the video concludes with a bleeding Nas hanging from a cross, as the jeering mob points spears at his body. When the video was originally released it also included shots of Combs on the cross, which were later excised at Combs’s request. 38 The video is a striking composite of sexual, religious, and commodity fetishisms. Lest the religious sentiment in the video be viewed as a mockery of Christianity, the opening text explains “Nas believes in the Lord Jesus Christ.” The defensiveness of the text suggests that the audience shares in these beliefs, and might be prone to view the video as sacrilege. This declaration of the rapper’s religious beliefs attempts to establish a religious union between Jones and his audience. Indeed, the juxtaposition between close-ups of Jones’s face and body and the wide lens scenes of angry mobs, compels empathy for the singular suffering figure. But rather

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than inspiring and transforming religious ecstasy into carnal fantasy, as Noble argues about Stowe’s novel, the video’s fast shifting scenes fuse religion, carnality, and the desire for commodity goods into a complex amalgam. The stripped down wounded body of Jones morphs into a body dressed in designer clothes and expensive jewelry and back again. While one image is intended to inspire empathy, the other is meant to inspire envy. Both images, however, are scopically linked through the presence of spectacle. Moreover, though the combination of the crucifi xion and the strip club might seem disparate, both scenes are erotically charged. Shifting from the bodies of strippers to the bodies of rappers, the video explores a “triangulated eroticism,” in which the audience watches the rappers watching the strippers, just before the rappers themselves become the objects of desire. Thus, the black men are the “vicarious agents and objects of . . . desire” at once. 39 While themes of resurrection and redemption that emerge in such images might be interpreted as optimistic projections of spiritual and cultural renewal, it is notable that redemption is to be had at the expense of black male bodies. In the video, “Hate me Now,” as he carries the cross to his death, Jones delivers the line, “this is what I was made for.” The black body in this video and in Stowe’s novel is not only expendable, but its suffering and death are necessary parts of the larger cycle of redemption and renewal. Significantly, this ideological continuity between nineteenth-century abolitionism and contemporary hip hop also extends to music often referred to as alternative hip hop, a term used to signify hip hop music that is thematically distinct from the mainstream, commercially popular gangsta and high-roller styles of hip hop. The back cover art of the Let’s Get Free (2000) CD by Dead Prez, a group known for lyrics that promote socialism and afrocentrism, integrates an abolitionist photograph of a slave. The untitled photograph, which I discuss in detail in the previous chapter, pictures a black man with his whip-scarred back facing the camera (Figure 1.3). The photograph has been digitally enhanced, such that the body is cast in copper tone. The image is in the foreground, while the background consists of a drawing of African slaves awaiting transport. This back cover art suggests the necessity of the spectacle of the wounded black man. With his face turned away from the camera and blurred by digital effects, he is anonymous, a symbol of black male suffering. The web of keloid scars, enhanced by lighting and digital effects, dominates the image and the man, while the viewer is the given the opportunity to assess these scars—to read their meaning. Though the album’s lyrics are overtly concerned with the best means of educating listeners in the problems of capitalism and a racially biased U.S. government, the CD art exhibits the familiar intersection between the black body and commodity fetishisms witnessed in mainstream hip hop. Indeed, the use of the nineteenth-century photograph reinscribes the very sadistic eroticism that the original image

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embodies. In addition, just as the original image was sold as a commodity, offering a striking intersection between the slave body as commodity and the photograph as commodity, Dead Prez’s CD cover re-commodifies this body by integrating it into a musical CD distributed by a major corporate entity, Columbia Records. The imagery of black woundedness in Dead Prez’s work is not confi ned to the inclusion of nineteenth-century photography on their CD cover, but rather they integrate their own bodies into this imagery in their video “They Schools,” a diatribe about racism in the public school system, especially in regard to the teaching of history. The video includes startling scenes that feature the rappers topless with nooses around their necks. As they rap to the camera, their heads hang limply from ropes. They are surrounded by other topless, swaying black men, some hanging from nooses, others moving to the music. While the nooses speak to the problems of the educational system, both its historical omissions of events, such as lynching, and the choke hold that such education has put on black youth, it is crucial to note that black redemption here rests not merely on correcting history, but on visually reenacting its abuses, and reinscribing its crimes against black male bodies.

VISUALIZING PAIN My own criticism of images of black male woundedness raises the perpetual question of how one represents pain without reinscribing and ultimately substantiating the abuse of the body. Is it ever possible to make visible physical and emotional pain, and control its meaning in the way Jackson admittedly is attempting to do in his memoir? One might argue that this is what Mamie Till did when she prevented the hasty burial of the maimed body of her son, Emmett Till, and insisted on an open casket that would allow the world to see what had been done to her son. Mamie Till’s decision politicized his death by revealing a body that “could not be beautified, nor could the broader political context surrounding his murder be ignored.”40 There is much that distinguishes the photographs of Till’s brutalized body from the contemporary images of the hip hop wounds. Foremost among these differences is beauty; the images of the hip hop wounded, though they function to express a kind of grief and loss, are often beautified in photographs, demonstrating the ways in which the images produce a tangled mixture of death and desire. As Susan Sontag argues, “the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that even when the medium is meant to convey distress, it all too often ends up neutralizing it.”41 The recent scandals about steroid use in the hip hop community also reveal the ways in which these aestheticizing tendencies extend beyond photography as a medium and speak to the ways in which aestheticization of black male bodies has become a crucial part of hip hop spectacle. In January

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of 2008 the New York Times reported that Curtis Jackson, Wyclef Jean, Timbaland and others had been implicated in a steroids investigation.42 Responding to the scandal, hip hop historian Jeff Chang remarked, “The spectacle of hip hop now is so much greater than it’s ever been.”43 Despite the visibility of individual hip hop stars, the transformation of their bodies from ordinary musculature to a form associated with body building has garnered little notice until now. It is as if these superhuman bodies have become so common that they have become normalized—the expectation, rather than the aberration. Indeed, these bodily transformations enact the myth of the superhuman black man. In hip hop this superhuman image continues to be the bearer of the wound, and rappers continue to try to control the meaning of that wound. Indeed, Jackson, in yet another autobiographical gesture attempts to defi ne the significance of the wound in the video “Many Men” (2003). Playing himself, Jackson reenacts the violent attempt on his life. As he steps out of a store in Queens, gunmen open fi re. The impact of gunshots propels his body on to the wall behind him, before he falls in slow motion to the ground, where his assailant shoots him again and again at close range. The video reenacts not only the murder attempt, but also Jackson’s painful recovery, the police investigation, and a revenge plot directed at the shooter. Though Jackson’s choice to reenact an attempt on his life as popular entertainment might be seen as puzzling, he attempts to give meaning to his wounded body through the song’s lyrics, a schizophrenic mixture of burning hostility and profound grief. Amidst explosive bravado and ardent threats, Jackson creates a space in which to acknowledge his own bodily and psychological pain as intrinsically connected: “Death gotta be easy, ’cause life is hard / It’ll leave you physically, mentally, and emotionally scarred.” The lyrics, like his memoir, attempt to prevent his audience from viewing the repetitive spectacle of his body being wounded again and again as nothing more than an entertainment spectacle. Indeed, Jackson’s lyrics figure this reiteration as something akin to acts of repetition that drive traumatic memory: “In my nightmares, niggas keep pulling techs on me.” As with victims of trauma, he points out that the event returns to him. Finally, he extends the meaning of his own personal trauma to signify a collective traumatic memory: “This is for my niggas on the block, twisting trees and cigars / For the niggas on lock, doing life behind bars.” In addition, the mournful refrain of the song, its woeful moan that harkens back to negro spirituals echoes this suggestion of the traumatic experiences of a broader segment of people. Jackson’s attempt to control the meaning of the wound is undercut by scenes that blatantly fetishize his body. Spliced with scenes in which Jackson stands in a dark room alone, naked from the waist up, the video fi xates on his body, which is heavily oiled, enhancing the darkness of his skin and the muscles that ripple across his torso. The video includes seven shots in which Jackson’s back is to the camera, exposing a veritable hieroglyphic

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of tattoos that decorate scars from gunshot wounds on his back. Like the body of the nameless slave in the nineteenth-century photograph included on the Dead Prez CD, Jackson’s beautiful, but wounded back is the site of erotic desire. These shots of Jackson’s body interrupt any folk aesthetic that emerges here, reminding the viewer that the music video, a form that is intended to be viewed again and again, integrates the murder attempt into a never-ending cycle of aestheticized violence as an entertainment commodity.44 These images of wounded black men form another chapter in the long narrative through which black men are invented and reinvented. Thelma Golden calls the African-American male “one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth-century . . . invented because black masculinity represents an amalgam of fears and projections in the American psyche which rarely conveys or contains the trope of truth about the black male’s existence.”45 These images of wounding certainly demonstrate the impossibility of identifying anything called truth amidst piles and piles of compelling fictions. Indeed, the imagery of black male woundedness is a representation of a representation, an idea refracting in so many lenses that a specific genealogy of the image is impossible. That said, the repetition of the image, its quiet yet pervasive reiteration of the terror and titillation associated with black male sexuality, illuminates more about the dark corners of the American psyche than it can ever tell us about black maleness.

4

Branding Black Men Hank Willis Thomas’s B®anded Series

Hank Willis Thomas’s B®anded series interrogates the representation of the black male body in advertising culture. Many of the images in the series mimic popular ad campaigns that fetishize black male bodies, but with one major difference: B®anded interjects images of black male woundedness into the ad space. For Thomas, the figure of the wound signifies a history of gendered and racialized social formations through which black maleness is invented. The wound allows Thomas to convey two related ideas: First, it establishes a genealogical link between the exploitation of the black male body in the past, particularly under slavery, and the contemporary exploitation of the black male body in the world of advertising. For Thomas, the black male body is not merely an agent of the product, but rather is the product itself. Indeed, as the play on words of the series’ title indicates, Thomas links the commercial branding of the black male body in contemporary advertising campaigns to the fire branding of slaves, a violent practice used to identify black bodies as property. Second, by inserting the wounded body, Thomas disrupts the very magic that makes ad campaigns work, their historylessness, or as Thomas puts it, their “ability to naturalize the myth by erasing or downplaying parts of history, creating the appearance that things have always been this way.”1 The erasure of history creates a nether land in which blackness is exceedingly visible as an aesthetic object, while the forces of oppression that have shaped the idea of blackness have been carefully hidden. B®anded makes these machinations plain by visualizing that history in the form of the wound. The Chase MasterCard (2004; Figure 4.1) offers an example of Thomas’s insertion of the wound into the contemporary commercial ad space. Cast in blue, the print mimics an actual MasterCard, complete with the familiar logo and the slogan, “Chase / The Right Relationship is Everything.” In the background is the 1863 photograph of a whip-scarred slave. While the photograph appears to be imprisoned behind the logo and text, it is also the largest image, and thus dominates the print. Significantly, the logo that appears to write over the body mimics the writing of the scars. The photograph is also reversed so that the subject faces right, echoing the slogan, “The Right Relationship . . .” In addition, along the left side of the print is a series of schematic drawings of masks, shackles, and slave collars that form a border. These drawings closely resemble those included in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenthcentury abolitionist broadsides, such as Injured Humanity (1797) by Alexander Anderson.2 On the right side of the print above the MasterCard logo, is the

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Figure 4.1 The Chase MasterCard (2004) by Hank Willis Thomas. Lightjet Print 1 ½'' x 3''. Made in collaboration with Ryan Alexiev. Courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

schematic of a slave ship with its contents of closely packed slaves intricately diagramed. The print also includes the name of the artist as the holder of the card, and the phrase “Member since 1619,” the year that the first Africans arrived in Jamestown aboard a Dutch ship. Thomas’s use of this image of the wounded slave exhibits sharp irony as the seemingly incongruous elements, the symbol of contemporary commerce and the wounded body of the slave meet. The print forces us to question why these elements should seem so incongruous. Both are signs of commerce: one is property, the other is the means to purchase property. By embossing the credit card with the body of the wounded slave, Thomas suggests that the slave trade serves as the foundation for today’s global economy. The combination of the credit card, something that many viewers might be carrying with them as they view this work, and the body of the slave, makes the familiar unfamiliar and disquiets the audience’s sense of themselves as consumers. The Chase MasterCard seems to beg the questions: consumers of what or rather of whom? And, master of whom? At the same time, by imprinting his own name on the card, Thomas implicates himself in this economy as well. In this way, he suggests that the violent implications of capitalist history are pervasive. By investing the card with history via the figure of the wound, Thomas forces viewers to recognize not only their participation in the contemporary economy of exchange and desire, but also their role as inheritors of this legacy of trade in people as merchandise. For Thomas, the wounded black male body functions as the sign of that which is ordinarily beyond the frame of the advertisement. Thus, he directs viewers to what the advertising world does not want viewers to see: history.

64 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body

Figure 4.2 Basketball and Chain (2003) by Hank Willis Thomas. Lightjet print. Courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

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SPORTS AND BRANDING BLACK MEN Driving home this concept of the black male body as a commodity in contemporary culture, Thomas focuses much of the Br@nded series on the representation of the black male body in the marketing campaigns of the NBA and Nike. In Basketball and Chain (2003; Figure 4.2), for example, the dangling feet of black man hang from above, adorned in Nike shoes. Around one ankle is a gold shackle that tethers him to the basketball. The ball appears to be holding his body down, or rather preventing it from flying away. The photograph recalls Nike’s spokesperson, Michael Jordan, whose athletic ability was often likened to an ability to literally fly. As the feet dangle, the viewer is also forced to ask where exactly this body dangles from, particularly because other pieces in the series, such as Hangtime (Circa 1923; 2008) picture athletic bodies positioned as if they are about dunk the basketball, while they are simultaneously being hung from trees. The hanging body in Basketball and Chain also interjects the specter of lynching. By combining the chains of slavery with the figure of lynching, Thomas maps the trajectory of the black male body from the antebellum period of captivity to the postbellum era of lynching. Hence, Thomas takes a body often revered in advertising, that of the black male athlete, and makes visible the ways in which that body still bears the history of violence against black men. Thomas’s MFA thesis, “Swoosh: Looking Black at Nike, Moses, and Jordan in the ’80s”, illuminates his representation of the black male athlete in his art. The thesis examines the representation of the black male body in Nike ads in particular. In his artist statement, Thomas points out that the majority of the people featured in Nike ads are African-American men and that Nike has created a relationship between their corporate logo and the black male body.3 Thomas contends that these ads demonstrate the “fetishization and commodification of black male professional athletes” during the 1980s.4 Thomas asserts that by mythologizing black male athletes, Nike’s ad campaigns constructed a myth of Nike as a “liberator” of young black men.5 For Thomas, what is particularly insidious about branding is the way in which the brand and self-identity construction become entangled, creating what he calls a state of “branded consciousness.”6 In his thesis statement, Thomas uses his own personal biography to demonstrate the interconstruction of self-identity and brand identity. He explains that he received his first pair of Nike shoes at age five, around the same time he learned that he was black. While he asked his mother what “Nike” meant, he did not inquire about the meaning of blackness. He points out that he did not understand this connection then, but later he would.7 Thomas’s description of his own first encounter with the commercial brand not only demonstrates its pervasiveness, but it also highlights a formative intersection between self-recognition and brand recognition. The interest in the brand or rather commercial desire becomes a substitute for self-exploration or identity. Thus, in this case

66 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body identity is shaped not by cultural history, but by the mythology of the brand. Building on Roland Barthes argument that “Myth functions to resist the fragmentation of cultural memory by allowing us to take for granted all that is happening around us in everyday life,” Thomas contends that this process has dire consequences for young black men who because of their identification with the brand, are ultimately subsumed by it until they accept the view of their own bodies as branded products.8 Thomas’s First Round Draft Pick (2004) illustrates this acceptance of the black male body as a product. The print repeats an engraving of a slave kneeling above the phrase “Am I not a man and a brother?” four times. Chains dangle from shackles that bind his wrists and feet. The image is based on an 1870s engraving, which was eventually adopted as the seal of the American antislavery movement.9 Despite or perhaps because of its antislavery intentions, the seal reiterated, more so than it challenged notions of black inferiority by representing black men as pleading supplicants in chains. In Thomas’s version, the chains that bind the body are noticeably made of gold. In addition, while the area above the fi rst image is blank, the others have speech bubbles above them, which read successively: “I know I ain’ts da’ only one up fa’ draft dis’ yea / But . . . Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!!! Please let me git picked in da foist round!!! / And please, please lemme keep ma’ chains!” By appropriating this symbol, Thomas compares the contradictions inherent in the seal, to those of the NBA. Just as the image of the kneeling slave visualizes the quest for freedom and the promotion of black inferiority at once, Thomas suggests that NBA aspirants are similarly positioned in that their success depends on submitting to the will of the organization that trades on their bodies. To Thomas, these men have subscribed to the idea of themselves as products to be selected and sold by the NBA. Given the millions that contemporary black athletes make, Thomas’s representation of them as chained, branded, wounded figures, might seem ridiculous or at least hyperbolic. Indeed, black athletes have come to embody the potential success of African Americans in the U.S., in part because of the visibility of their success. Still, as William C. Rhoden points out “Black athletic culture, like the rest of African-American culture evolved under the pressure of oppression.”10 The intertwined histories of sport and the institution of slavery in the U.S. illuminate the historical resonance of Thomas’s work. Slavery was the beginning of black participation in competitive sports in the U.S. As early as the eighteenth century it was common for slave owners to put slaves in athletic competitions. Such competitions, which might include races, or boxing matches, were viewed as entertainment for slave owners and often included wagers. Athletics in the context of slavery also bore the same disturbing contradictions that mark contemporary athletics. As Rhoden points out, while “sports became a way for the aristocracy to extend its power,” for slaves’ sports was a way to challenge the power structures of slavery.11 Rhoden argues that, “In play the slave could become master; the powerless could become powerful—a

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Figure 4.3 Scarred Chest (2004) by Hank Willis Thomas. Lightjet print. Courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

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victory wasn’t simply a victory, but often a moral triumph over Pharaoh, a step towards the Promised Land.”12 Sport continues to present a peculiar catch twenty-two for contemporary black athletes as well.13 While it has sometimes been a conspicuous form of black achievement, even the very talented often fail to achieve the dream. Of course, one might argue that this is the case with all means of achievement, and yet as the film Hoop Dreams (1994) demonstrates, impoverished young black men are particularly vulnerable to exploitation by educational institutions. This phenomenon is what we do not see in the Nike advertisement: the children who are misled by the promise of riches, and who eventually become men with few resources at their disposal. In Basketball and Chain, Thomas captures the bitter irony of sport as both a means of achievement and a damning enslavement as the chains of gold tether the body to the weighted basketball. In other pieces, such as “NBA Trade” (2004), Thomas bluntly equates the NBA with trade in human flesh. The piece is a replica of an 1853 ad by a slave trader.14 The sign reads “$1200 to 1250 Dollars! For Negroes!!” Below in smaller print the ad explains that the trader is looking to purchase “a large lot of Negroes for the New Orleans Market,” and is willing to pay “more for likely Negroes than any other trader in Kentucky.” But Thomas’s version makes a major departure from the original by adding a famous NBA graphic of a man dribbling a basketball. Rather than inserting the wounded black male body, as he does in pieces like The Chase MasterCard and Basketball and Chain, Thomas allows the figure of the victimized black slave to emerge in the text, and links it to the commercialism of professional sports. Thus, Thomas collapses the athlete and the slave, placing the exploitive potential of the NBA dream in the larger historical context of racial oppression.

MICHAEL JORDAN AND THE WOUNDS OF MASS PRODUCTION While the B®anded series explores the NBA as an extension of the plantation, it also investigates the role that both graphic symbols and photography play in the sale of black male body. For Thomas, photography is not merely the agent of that commercialism, it is also the agent of the wound. Huey Copeland argues that Thomas’s work “draws attention to the photographic ‘take’ as itself a kind of violence, an epistemological, political, and cultural framing which produces race and imagines identity through a rhetoric of transparency.”15 Scarred Chest (Figure 4.3), for example, presents the wounds of the brand, and the wounds of the photographic take at once. The photograph is a color image of the torso of a black man. His chest is covered in small Nike swooshes, which appear to be branded on the skin. The photo is also closely cropped so that the

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Figure 4.4 Hang Time (Circa 1923) (2008) by Hank Willis Thomas. Inkjet on Canvas 30'' x 40''. Courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

70 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body chest and abdomen are all that is visible. Indeed the edges of the photograph appear to violently cut off the head and the genitals. Scarred Chest recalls Christian Metz’s theory that “Photography is a cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no return.”16 Metz argues that all photographs participate in the process of cutting off a piece of time and space from the world.17 He adds that such cutting fi gures castration, which produces an “off-frame effect . . . an irreversible base absence.”18 Thomas’s Scarred Chest with its violent cropping calls our attention to the off-frame. As the photograph figures castration, Thomas implicates photography itself in a long history of sexualized ritual violence against black men. Thus, Scarred Chest equates the wounds of racial violence with the wounds of the mass produced image. Thomas continues this investigation of the mass produced image with his treatment of a Nike logo referred to as Jumpman. This Nike graphic pictures a silhouette of the fully extended, flying body of Michael Jordan, the fi rst black athlete whose image saturated advertising culture in the 1980s and 1990s.19 For Nike’s Air Jordan brand, they replaced the famous Nike Swoosh with the Jumpman logo. Thomas’s Hang Time (Circa 1923; 2008) (Figure 4.4) problematizes the Jumpman graphic by combining it with the figure of the wounded black man. The inkjet print presents a graphic image of a large tree and the small body of a Jumpman-like figure hanging from a rope that extends from the tree. The image explodes with shock factor as Thomas defamilarizes the familiar through the insertion violence. The viewer is immediately struck by the scale of the images: the smallness of the body and the largeness of the tree. This juxtaposition suggests the smallness of the individual black man in comparison to the extensive history of racial violence. At the same time, the smallness of the body seems to refer to the smallness of Nike’s Jumpman logos, which shrank the large and imposing body of Jordan to a tiny two-dimensional graphic. By reframing this image in the context of a lynching, Thomas suggests how this graphic served a similar purpose in managing cultural fears about black men by shrinking them into tiny logos that anyone can wear. In his thesis, Thomas notes that the Jumpman logo might be read as an “amplified and commodified” version of “the intimidating fist salute of the Black Power Movement.”20 Hang Time is concerned with how these symbols of black manhood can be domesticated, mass produced, and commercialized in a way that allows everyone to own a piece of them. Thomas’s treatment of the Jumpman fi gure attempts to reinsert the history of racial oppression into Nike’s deliberate erasure of race from ads that pictured or referenced Jordan. While Air Jordan ads fetishized the sinewy turns of Jordan’s black body in photographs, Jordan’s blackness was simultaneously being erased in the popular imagination. David L. Andrews captures this strange dichotomy between the blackness of Jordan’s body and his cultural racelessness when he notes that, .

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As a cultural construct, Jordan’s mediated racial identity is neither stable, essential, nor consistent; it is dynamic, complex and contradictory. Thus it is perhaps more accurate to refer to the facts of Michael Jordan’s blackness, and to assert his status as a floating racial signifier who, in Derridean terms, is constantly under erasure. 21 Norman K. Denzin describes this phenomena more succinctly: “The universal human nature he [Jordan] announces . . . erases race.”22 Hence, the mythical Jordan that emerged from the ad space was beyond racial specificity. Though they made Jordan’s physical blackness exceedingly visible, Nike ads veiled the constructs of blackness. More precisely, they erased history and replaced it with a myth of human transcendence. As Goldman and Papson point out, Nike used the “the image of Jordan in flight” to convey “the theme of human transcendence,” which they then melded with the slogan “Just do it.”23 Jordan’s own assessment perhaps captures the method of these ads best: “what Phil [his agent] and Nike have done is turn me into a dream.”24 Nike transformed Jordan into an otherworldly mythical figure who surpassed the categories of race. As both Denzin and Sarah Banet-Weiser point out, however, the flipside of this representation of Jordan was always the reinscription of its opposite, the stereotypical black man prone to violence.25 Denzin argues that Michael Jordan’s image “strategically downplayed his African American identity, by engaging binary oppositions between Jordan and the dominant discursive formations of African American Otherness.”26 Banet-Weiser adds that this representation of a benign Michael Jordan has since been pitted against the violent representations of Latrell Sprewell and others. To sum up, this treatment of Jordan’s body both domesticated the black male body at the same time that it played on certain cultural fears about that body. Hang Time (Circa 1923) sets out to expose these contradictions by inserting this fl ipside of the Nike mythology into the ad space. Thomas’s use of lynching draws a parallel between two mass produced images: the logo and the lynching photograph, which pictured black men’s debased bodies to reiterate the values of white supremacy. This comparison indicates that like the lynching photograph, the logo also serves to assuage fears of black manhood by appropriating the black male body, shrinking it into object to be bought and sold.

THE WOUNDS OF GRIEF For Thomas, the insertion of the wounded black man into the ad space is not merely theoretical conjecture about the connection between the past and present. Instead, Thomas’s work probes these connections in search of the origins of contemporary urban violence. Thomas’s representation of this intersection between the public brand and the intimacy of the black male body traces a connection between commercialism and the private

72 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body wounds of loss. More precisely, Thomas’s art asserts a causal relationship between commercialism and black death. Many of Thomas’s works, such as Hang Time, Branded Head, and Branded Chest, recall the killing of black youth over Nike’s Air Jordan shoes. Retailing at over $100 in the mid-1980s, Air Jordans were the first sneakers to demonstrate that retailers could sell products to urban youth at an unusually high price point. Soon after their release, the media began reporting the fi rst sneaker crimes. 27 In what became an infamous case, fifteen-year-old Michael Eugene Thomas was strangled by a 17-year-old boy who stole his shoes and left his body in a wooded area in Maryland. 28 The story exploded in the media, and Jordan and Spike Lee, a spokesperson for Nike and director of many of the Nike commercials, were denounced by the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick for endorsing Nike: “While Spike Lee watches Michael Jordan (or at least his shoes) dunk all over the world, parents around the country are watching their kids get mugged or even killed over the same sneakers Lee and Jordan are promoting.”29 Similar crimes in which black youth were targeted for brand name items, such as Reebok sneakers, an array of Starter jackets, and gold jewelry, continued. Whether or not these crimes were as rampant as the media attention would suggest is still up for question. But that such crimes did take place is not in question. In fact, as recently as 2005, a 17-year-old Long Island boy was reportedly mugged for his Air Jordans.30 Thomas’s representation of the wounded black male body in commercial ads evokes these contemporary acts of violence against young black men at the hands of other young black men. Though Thomas’s work explores such violence intellectually, carefully connecting it to the past, it is equally concerned with the current moment. In fact, this concern infuses Thomas’s work with urgency that prevents it from becoming a mere clever intellectual exercise in connecting the dots between the past and the present. Instead, Thomas’s work demands that audiences confront their own investment in this contemporary moment in which black men are so frequently the victims of violent crime. Thomas’s encounter with violent crime inspires much of his work. In 2000, Thomas’s cousin and roommate, Songha T. Willis was killed in a robbery outside of a Philadelphia nightclub. According to police officials, “the victims were giving up money, jewelry, and without any provocation for reasons that escape me, these individuals executed these people.”31 Thomas cites the murder of his cousin as the impetus for his life as an artist: In 2000, I turned to photography to explore my inconsolable loss and grief when my cousin, roommate and best friend, Songha was senselessly killed. It was then that the word “art” began to mean something different to me. It offered a little bit of hope for answers or at least, better questions.32

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Figure 4.5 Priceless #1 by Hank Willis Thomas (2004). Lightjet Print. Courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

Thomas’s B®anded series includes a color photograph of Willis’s funeral, entitled Priceless #1 (2004). Mourners dressed in dark winter clothing look down at the gravesite, which is off frame. Four women sit in front, while a slightly out of focus crowd of mourners hover in the rear with their heads bowed. One woman weeps, while another appears to hide her face from the camera with a scarf. Another rests her head on a standing man who leans slightly towards her. The bottom left corner of the photograph features the MasterCard emblem. Embossed on the photograph is a list of items that have somehow contributed to this event and their prices: 3-piece suit: $250/ new socks: $2/ gold chain: $400/ 9mm Pistol: $79/ Bullet: ¢60/ Picking the perfect casket for your son: priceless.” Priceless #1 mimics a series of MasterCard ads, commonly referred to as the priceless series. The ads depict joyful MasterCard owners at an event, a special date, a wedding, an anniversary, or birthday celebration. Meanwhile, a narrating voice calmly lists the price of items large and small that are part of the special day. Finally the voice expresses the intangible emotional satisfaction of the event and exclaims: “Priceless.” The ads glorify the buying power of the MasterCard, demonstrating that its value goes beyond ordinary things and instead translates into boundless bliss. In answer to

74 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body the saying that money cannot buy happiness, these ads seem to quip, “No it can’t, but a MasterCard can.” Replacing the familiar wedding celebrations and opera dates of the ads with a funeral, Thomas’s version is a sobering condemnation of commercialism. The image is haunting in its detail as the textures of winter, velvet, fur, wool, and leather envelope the mourners whose eyes direct us to the gravesite of a 27-year-old man who was gunned down for jewelry. The list of items embossed on the photograph, the bullet that killed Willis, the gold chain that he was killed for, and the three-piece suit that clothed his mortally wounded body, functions as narrative. Significantly, Thomas reserves initial upper-case letters for the words “Pistol” “Bullet” and “Picking,” magnifying the way in which violence provides the turning points in this narrative. The MasterCard logo and slogan takes the symbol of commercial desire and makes the real cost of that desire plain: the death of those whose gravesites remain forever off frame. The image is all the more solemn for its use of a photograph of a family member’s funeral. By intertwining the public space of the ad with the intimacy of grief, Thomas insists that not only are the commercial and personal indelibly linked, but that in a consumer culture, the pain of our intimate lives and our worst failures as a culture are always connected to the commercial sphere. This infusion of the personal penetrates the photograph’s intellectual work, transforming what might seem like thoughtful disclosures about the relationship between violence and commercialism into painful revelations about the price of a life and more specifically, the price of a black man’s life. Priceless #1 is the soul of the B®anded series because it conveys the enduring emotional consequences of violence that inspires so much of Thomas’s work.33 This intersection between the personal and the public, particularly as it relates to grief and loss also characterizes Thomas’s Winter in America, a short fi lm and a series of photographs that depict the murder of Willis. A collaboration with Kambui Olujimi, both the fi lm and series of photographs, use small dolls that Willis and Thomas played with as children, to play the parts of the murderers and the victims on that winter night outside of a club in Philadelphia. According to Thomas, he and Willis not only played with these GI Joe dolls, but they enacted violent scenes like the one shown in the film. Culling from an interview of an eyewitness and notes taken by the victim’s mother during the trial, Thomas offers an eerie reenactment in which the plastic dolls (through a stop animation technique) commit a robbery and an execution-style murder. According to Thomas, he wanted, among other things, to convey “the breeding of a culture of violent thoughts for young boys.”34 As the plastic toys spill blood in the snow, the fi lm impresses the viewer with the way in which Willis’s destiny was predicted in play. Like the B®anded series, Winter in America begins with the figure of the wound in the form of the fi rebrand. As the film opens, a small billboard that depicts Thomas’s Branded Head, a photograph of a black man’s head

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with a Nike swoosh branded onto his scalp, appears alongside the Nike slogan, “Just Do It.” Also similar to the B®anded series, the fi lm interrupts the mythical quality of the ad space by inserting the wound. The relevance of the Nike ad becomes vividly clear as the killers stand over the prostrate body of the victim before they kill him. Frantically, one asks what he should do with him. His companion answers, “Just bang him,” and then he repeats the Nike slogan, “Just do it” right before the shooter unloads the weapon into victim’s head. This documentary of Willis’s death serves to dislocate the Nike slogan, “Just do it,” from the ad campaign and relocate it in the context of a robbery and murder. Significantly, Thomas accomplishes this, not through actors, but through commercial products that he turns against commercialism. The dolls are among the fi rst commercial products that we are taught to desire as children. As their jerky movements and plastic mouths that speak without moving act out this haunting scenario, a causal relationship between commercialism and violence seems inevitable. Both Winter in America and the B®anded series express the profound bonds that link public and private. In Winter in America, the tender intimacy of the dolls combines with the public display of the fi lm. In both the fi lm and the still image, Priceless #1, the fragility of grief encounters the public space of the ad. Troubling the boundaries between public and private is central to Thomas’s treatment of the wounded black male body. Indeed, Thomas’s work reminds us that the wounding of the black male body has always been a public and private event at once. Perhaps the most powerful evidence of this in Thomas’s work is his use of the figure of lynching. Lynchings in the U.S. were more often than not public events. Photographs of lynchings and the very practice of photographing lynchings reveal the ways in which lynching rituals revolved around public spectacle. At the same time these events still had a great deal of private meaning, particularly for the families and black community members whose private loss was compounded by the public spectacle of death and their own vulnerability to the mob. By inserting this history of lynching, Thomas engages this notion of violence against black men as a public event with profound personal consequences. Thomas’s integration of many of the photographs included in the B®anded series into public art displays speaks to this link between the public and private impact of the wounded black male body. As part of “Jamaica Flux” (2004), an exhibition at the Jamaica Center for Art and Learning in Queens New York, Basketball and Chain and Branded Head were displayed on a phone booth outside of a movie theater. A photograph of the installation shows busy crowds passing by on a rainy day in Queens. Above the exhibit is a real Nike billboard. Thus, Branded Head is fully integrated into the streets of New York City as passersby continue on their way. Despite the quiet integration of Thomas’s art into the contemporary urban space, the display conveys urgency as Thomas brings his art from the gallery walls to the streets. This choice to bring the work into the public

76 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body urban space also expresses impatience with the secluded world of art and its ability to reach the masses. Though the photographs of passersby seem to suggest that some may not have consciously seen, let alone processed the work, those who take a second glance, are likely to experience some shock at the exposure of the wounded black male body, bearing a fi rebrand, chains, or a lynch rope. At the same time, the matter of fact display of this work in such ordinary spaces reiterates the ways in which the wounded black male body has always been a public spectacle. In the end, Thomas’s work is about bearing witness, making the wounds of capitalism visible. What saves Thomas’s work from being nothing more than reinscription of the violence is that it is steeped in his own searing grief, which forms the soul of the B®anded series. Thomas’s explanation for the inspiration for Priceless #1 clarifies the ways in which his interrogation of commercialism is a connected to this grief: I remember standing in the funeral home with my family, trying to figure out which would pay better homage to my cousin’s life: the $2,000 casket that would be thrown in the dirt or the $5,000 casket that would be thrown in the dirt. It was an impossible decision. My cousin was killed over a petty commodity and here we were being marketed to and going into debt during the grieving process. $10,000 for a funeral? He owed that much in college loans he couldn’t even repay.35 Thomas illustrates how marketing never stops. Even the grieving process is shaped by marketing commercial goods. This willingness to depict the pain and grief of this family crisis as yet another occasion for some to sell products makes Thomas’s work powerful and makes his perspective irrefutable.

5

The Appropriation of Lynching Photography

From 1882 to 1981, approximately 4,800 African Americans were lynched.1 White men and women who were otherwise law abiding citizens committed these bloodthirsty murders to reinforce white supremacist ideology. Perhaps nothing represented a challenge to white supremacy more than the idea of black male sexual desire for white women, and therefore trumped up charges of rape were often cited as the justification for lawless brutality against black men. At public lynchings, crowds participated in many ritual acts of violence, including torture, dismemberment, and the collection of body parts as souvenirs. In addition, photographers, both amateur and professional, took photographs of these events and sold reproductions, sometimes in the form of postcards. Like the body parts that served as mementos, these images inhabit a peculiar mixture of public and private spaces, from dime-store windows and newspapers to sock drawers and family albums. These photographs were not merely records of the event, but rather as Amy Louise Wood notes, they were part of the lynching ritual itself.2 The photographs served as evidence of white supremacy, and as part of a shared communal experience of that identity.3 At the same time, such images terrorized blacks to whom, the tortured bodies served as possibilities for the self—examples of what might happen if any white person accused them of trespassing on the steadfast rules of Jim Crow. Though lynchings were public spectacles, the increasing appropriation of lynching photography by anti-lynching activists led participants to more carefully guard the transmission of lynching photographs.4 Since the time in which they were taken, the vast majority of these photographs have been hidden, repressed along with America’s long history of racial violence. Only since 2000, have these images become available to the public once again, through “Without Sanctuary” (2000–Present), a simultaneous traveling exhibit and online exhibit of lynching photographs owned by collectors James Allen and John Littlefield. The exhibit has attracted crowds, buzzing with a mixture of eagerness and anxiety. Not surprisingly, “Without Sanctuary” has also incited fierce controversy about the point of such a gruesome display.5 The reemergence of these photographs in the public space has left viewers with a crisis of vision. We are faced with both a

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fascination with and simultaneous repulsion towards the photographs, the crowds, the violence, and our own spectatorship. We marvel at the force of the atrocity, while also asking ourselves, how can we bear to look at this? In this chapter, I explore how curators, web designers, and artists confront this crisis of vision. The chapter maps a cross section of appropriations of lynching photography, including museum/gallery exhibits, an internet exhibit, and contemporary artworks by Pat Ward Williams, Kerry James Marshall, and Shawn Michelle Smith, respectively. The central question driving this chapter is: can anyone successfully reinvent the lynching photograph in ways that expose the history and culture of lynching, without reenacting racialized spectacle violence? I recognize that there is no single answer to the question of how to appropriate lynching photography, but rather a myriad of answers that lead to new questions. Therefore, I have chosen to chart a winding dialogue that touches on a variety of appropriations, exploring how they attempt to display lynching photography in an antiracist context. I argue that lynching photography is unwieldy, overtly resistant to this sort of appropriation. At the same time, I read these appropriations as careful attempts to teach audiences how to look and how not to look at these images. Each reiteration attempts to control our vision in order to reclaim the lynching photograph from the lens of the oppressor. The complex emotional terrain of lynching photographs, their relentless assault on black subjectivity and human dignity, complicates this endeavor. Each contemporary iteration of lynching photography is a dynamic process of contention between the white supremacist ideology that the lynching photograph enacts and the antiracist agenda of the contemporary exhibit or artwork.

“WITNESS”: THE EXHIBITION OF LYNCHING PHOTOGRAPHY From the beginning, the display of Allen and Littlefield’s collection of lynching photographs was marked by two contradictory impulses: An overwhelming desire from the public to see the long hidden images, and serious reluctance on the part of venues to show these images. The fi rst exhibit titled “Witness” took place at the Roth Horowitz Gallery, a 25' x 25' venue, in New York City in 2000. Overwhelmed by thousands of visitors, the gallery had to institute a policy of 200 free tickets per day to manage the crowds. Obviously, such a small gallery was an unlikely place to have such a popular exhibit. Before the show opened, one of the owners, Andrew Roth, reportedly said, “I hope we don’t have crowds in here.”6 But while the collectors had sought larger venues, including the International Center of Photography, all of these sites refused to display the photographs. Even the owners of the Roth Horowitz Gallery did not approach the responsibility of hosting such an exhibit without anxiety: “Nothing in

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this show is for sale,” said Roth. “I’m not making this exhibit for profit. We know that we open ourselves up to that kind of criticism. And if worst comes to worst, I will close it.”7 While it is impossible to fully understand what drew such remarkable crowds to “Witness,” the refusal of many venues to host the exhibit indicates that museum directors and curators were unsure of whether such images should ever be displayed. The Roth Horowitz gallery responded to these concerns by formulating an exhibit that focused on exploding the secrecy surrounding lynching. The curators decided to use very little context, and instead plainly show the sixty tattered images, without frames, mattes, or extensive captions. In a display that Anthony Lee describes as “modest, even reticent,” the curators trusted that the display of the images in the gallery could adequately reformulate them in an antiracist context.8 “Witness” as its title suggests focused not so much on how we see, but on the issue of whether we see the images at all. Roth’s endorsement of the exhibit reflects this idea: “I feel strongly about it being seen. This is a show about humanity.”9 His comment suggests that showing the photographs was an expression of the humanity of the victims. To better understand this point of view, one should consider that historically the distribution of these images was largely under the control of white supremacists. This explains why lynching as a practice in the U.S. has been public knowledge and privileged information at once, an enigma Patricia Williams describes as “one of the more complicated public secrets of our nation’s past.”10 Given this context, showing these images outside of their original ideological framework challenges the power of that white supremacist community to determine the meaning of these photographs. This is why African-American publications, such as the Crisis, chose to publish such images. They wanted to expose white supremacy to critical interrogation and public condemnation.11 But was displacing the images, showing them in a gallery in New York’s posh upper eastside, enough to intervene in their original meaning? I argue that the answer to this question is no. Unlike African-American print publications that countered lynching photographs with the subjectivity of black editors, writers, and readers, “Witness” did not provide such a powerful counterpoint to this grisly display of lynching photographs. Indeed, displaying the images at a small private gallery, which many associate with exclusivity and privilege seemed to reiterate the very power dynamics that fueled slavery—people with privilege and access viewing black bodies. Obviously, given the numbers that the exhibit attracted, audiences were likely more diverse than the usual audience for a small gallery. Nonetheless, historical hierarchies are still apparent. Moreover, in numerous ways the exhibit itself seemed to mirror the very acts of violent looking that it sought to expose. As Lee points out, both the crowds in attendance at the lynchings and the crowds at the gallery were there because of the spectacle of the lynched body.12 Without personal information about the identities of the victims, audiences were left to view the remains through the lens of

80 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body the victimizer. The victims remained bodies hanging on the wall, defi ned entirely by the state of the corpse. In some ways, the exhibit’s reserve, its lack of contextual information, suggested that the question of how to look at these images was impossible for the curators to answer. Instead, the exhibit left the grave responsibility of answering this question to those who sought to see this exhibit. The exhibit’s ability to appropriate lynching photographs rested with the audience, many of whom were likely ill-prepared to confront the racist implications of these photographs. Likely, some were baffled by what they saw. As James Polchin has pointed out, for many the show, “raised not only the difficult question of how to look, but the much more mysterious question: What are we looking at? . . . If we are witnesses, what are we witnesses to?”13 Because the exhibit left so much power to the viewer, it forged the link between visitors to the exhibit and the crowds pictured in the photographs. Audiences were also confronted by a thick emotional landscape, navigating feelings of identification, loss, repulsion, shame, and grief without direction. Ultimately, the photographs maintained their power, for as Polchin points out, “While the gallery may defi ne them as historical records of social realities their more racist intentions keep cutting at us, silencing us in the very mystery of the image itself.”14 “Witness” then demonstrates the ways in which the appropriation of the lynching photograph is a complex process of contention. The attempt to appropriate these lynching photographs would continue in 2001 at the New York Historical Society (NYHS). NYHS picked up the exhibit just seven weeks after its closing at the Roth Horowitz gallery. This exhibit was entitled “Without Sanctuary” and included 65 photos from the collection of Allen and Littlefield. The exhibit also included materials on anti-lynching activities in New York from the historical society’s collection. Curators added captions that supplied supplementary information on the photographs. The exhibit included computer workstations where patrons could look up additional information about lynching. NYHS also contextualized the exhibit with a series of public forums conducted by historians. In addition, the historical society partnered with Facing History and Ourselves, an international educational organization, to prepare personnel to deal with their feelings about the exhibit and to support them in helping patrons. Using a context heavy approach, NYHS presented the images as a way of initiating both awareness of lynching as a national crisis and as a part of New York’s history. The emphasis on contextual information at NYHS spoke to the goals of a historical society, but at the same time it also demonstrated the importance of offering countervailing views to the original photographs. To make sure that the images were encountered in an anti-racist context, curators surrounded the postcard-size images with walls of texts, and included information on anti-lynching campaigns. Despite this more expansive context, the computer workstations suggested that this information was not enough.

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By including these stations, curators situated this exhibit as the beginning of an exploration of America’s long history of racial violence, rather than the fi nal statement on lynching. The work stations acknowledged the limitations of the exhibit and encouraged viewers to explore further on their own. While the NYHS exhibit succeeded in establishing an antiracist context to combat the original intention of lynching photography, the exhibit could not absorb the byproduct of its own act of appropriation, the emotional and spiritual impact of the images. The exhibit seemed to both acknowledge patrons’ emotional reactions and at the same time redirect that emotional energy towards an intellectual investigation of the history of lynching. Patrons were left to confront their emotional and spiritual desires on their own. Indeed the title, “Without Sanctuary,” acknowledges the spiritual desire that the exhibit provoked as well as the ways in which that yearning for the sacred ultimately went unfulfi lled. More precisely, the word “sanctuary,” suggests not just a safe place for the victims, but also a hallowed place where visitors and love ones might bear witness to the victims’ humanity and mourn their deaths. The extensive historical information that the exhibit provided could not satisfy that desire for a sacred place.15 This was not so much a failure of “Without Sanctuary,” as a careful choice to accept the limitations of this appropriation. The lingering emotional terrain speaks to the complexities of appropriation, the ways in which such complex interactions between the original images and this new context is a process of encounters and discoveries, rather than a singular act. This crisis of spiritual and emotional desire that the NYHS exhibit encountered suggests the difficulty of controlling the meaning of the lynching photograph, and the ways in which despite intervention, it still wounds us. The “Without Sanctuary” exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2001 built on the informational tactics used by the NYHS exhibit by expanding the contextual portion of the display. This exhibit was also the largest number of lynching photographs, one-hundred images from the Allen and Littlefield collection. The framed photographs hung on neutral walls in the main gallery. Curators threaded a rich display of historical and cultural information throughout the exhibit, including information on the anti-lynching activities of the local black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, a timeline of the struggle for African-American civil rights, and a wall essay that illuminated the life of anti-lynching activist, Ida B. Wells. Another wall featured the lyrics of Billie Holiday’s chilling song about lynching “Strange Fruit.” In addition to a wide range of historical materials, the Warhol exhibit included art, activities, and performances designed to enhance community involvement in the exhibit. Parts of the exhibit displayed silk screens from Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, which depicts a lynching, as well as a Civil Rights activists being attacked by police dogs in Birmingham, Alabama. Visitors were invited to participate in the exhibit by expressing their thoughts in a curtained video

82 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body booth. Outside the booth, video of visitors’ experiences played as part of the exhibit. Patrons could also express their thoughts by writing in comment books or by participating in daily public dialogues. Visitors were encouraged to fill out self-addressed postcards with a list of personal resolutions to promote tolerance. These postcards were displayed as part of the exhibit, and at its conclusion, they were mailed to their authors. Finally, the exhibit was supplemented by performances of dance troupes, gospel choirs, drummers, and poets. The incorporation of art and African-American artists suggests that curators understood that historical context alone was not enough to transform the meaning of these photographs and that art would be essential to combating the white supremacist agenda that the original photographs promote. These performances inserted a much-needed black subjectivity into this exhibit that revolved around photographs of objectified black bodies. While the musicians added elements of reverence and spirituality, the dancers offered a powerful counter vision of dynamic black bodies generating art. The poetry reading presented a contemplative lens through which to consider these photographs and created ways of seeing through language rather than through looking. The poetry also combated the power of the images to silence viewers. The Warhol exhibit also put some onus on patrons to counteract the original images as well. The comment book, daily dialogues, video diary booth, and “Postcards for Tolerance” all offered structures through which patrons could create a counter frame for the images. The postcards, in particular, equipped visitors to introduce their own constructive ideas not only into the exhibit, but into the very mail system that once dispatched lynching postcards. In addition, by inviting patrons to record their reactions in a comment booth and then playing those reactions as part of the exhibit, the Warhol museum asked patrons to shape the meaning of the exhibit by becoming a part of it. Patrons could confront the still images of violence with moving images of their reactions of dismay, disgust, and disgrace. Still, the precariousness of these video diaries meant that they could not consistently serve as part of the antiracist framework of the exhibit. In fact, at times patrons shifted the meaning of the exhibit in ways that were counterproductive to the exhibit’s agenda. One young white woman used the booth as an opportunity to confess that she called a friend “nigger.” While her video response suggests that the exhibit sparked introspection about her own role in racist practices, it also served as an opportunistic attempt to relieve the personal guilt that sometimes accompanies white supremacy. Despite this elaborate framework, the Warhol’s display of one-hundred gruesome pictures of lynching worked against this context, which attempted to provide an informative, compassionate, respectful experience for patrons. Indeed, the elaborate context of performances and discussion betrayed anxiety about the vast repetition of such images. The inclusion of the Warhol silk screens of lynching from the Death and Disaster series, was one

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way in which the exhibit broached the dangers of repeating images of death and violence. As Scott Durham points out, Warhol’s Death and Disaster series is concerned not so much with the grisly details of these images of fatalities as with the “troubling corrosive effects produced by their serial form.”16 Though the exhibit raised this issue, the large number of lynching photos replicated this problem, rather than addressing it. Nonetheless, the museum’s attempt to engage this problem of replication was particularly poignant given that it took place during the mass reproduction of images of 9/11. Opening just eleven days after the events of 9/11, the exhibit occurred at a moment that was saturated with video of crashing planes, falling towers, and traumatized victims. As Polchin has pointed out, such footage “deepened long-held beliefs that the image and the experience of an event are analogous.”17 While the historical specificity that the exhibit attempted to maintain resisted this equation between the event and seeing an image of it, the video testimonials that were incorporated into the exhibit seem to suggest otherwise. More precisely, by inserting these contemporary testimonials, the exhibit participated in a similar kind of conflation between experiencing the event and seeing an image of it. How patrons interpreted the exhibit also depended on what parts of the exhibit they experienced. Given that the performances did not take place daily, some patrons would have encountered the photographs without the benefit of these artistic performances as a counter. Thus, for some the exhibit created a longing for some transformative experience that could make them understand why they should look. David Griffith writes of his experience of this exhibit: Standing in a gallery of the Warhol Museum I was repulsed by the original photos but felt nothing for Warhol’s. And it wasn’t just me. All around me, school children who had been bussed in from the suburbs to take in the show glanced at Warhol’s, then quickly at the originals, then back at Warhol’s, and then moved on to the gift shop . . . If the photos weren’t being seen as evidence of the human capacity for atrocity, then what the hell is the purpose of such an exhibit? I cringed at the idea that they would go back to their classrooms and spend the rest of the day saying isn’t it awful what those people did to those other people [his emphasis].18 Griffith’s description of his reaction and that of the school children seems to suggest that the exhibit was not able to transform the images, but rather induced a stultifying combination of repulsion, bafflement, and disassociation. His reaction implies that the exhibit lacked the ability to offer something more than a historical account, to provide guidance for patrons in need of more careful inspired reflection about humanity. This desire to transform these images into a meaningful statement about the whole of humanity also points to the ways in which the contention

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between the images and the context at the Warhol exhibit was complicated by the events of 9/11. The exhibit attracted many viewers who despite the exhibit’s careful recovery of specific cultural and social histories, insisted on viewing the exhibit as a sign of something broader about human experience. One reviewer of the exhibit, Mary Thomas, insisted, That one may see and discuss parallels to the immediate tragedy in our country—or to other historic events like the Holocaust—doesn’t diminish the specific suffering of African Americans. It does show how complex and ingrained in the human psyche the capacity to go horrendously haywire is.19 This view of the exhibit seems not only to discard the historical specificity, but to dismiss the individual victims as well, in favor of a universalist philosophy. At the same time, this reaction reminds us that with any exhibit the context provided by the curators is not the only context, and that the world outside of the museum or gallery also shapes how we encounter and interpret the materials inside. The timing of the exhibit made this need to view it in light of the violence and devastation of 9/11 inevitable. Dora Apel’s response to Thomas’s statement, however, captures what is at stake in making this sort of conflation: Certainly one can argue that issues of race hatred and fear manifest themselves in crucially deadly ways around the world today, but to suggest that this larger context overrides the historically specific racial politics of lynching, despite initial caveats calling for the examination of these “odious social rituals,” is, precisely, to miss the point and to vitiate the lessons that can be learned by studying the historic specificity of practice in the U.S., a practice which is, indeed, not a black problem but an American problem. 20 Rather than deepening the experience of the lynching photos, viewing lynching in relationship to the events of 9/11 shifted attention away from throbbing pain of our racial past. Just as the Warhol exhibit had to contend with events outside of the museum, the fourth major exhibit of Allen’s lynching photographs faced the burdens of presenting such an exhibit in the South where so many lynchings occurred. Allen had long wanted to show the photographs in the South, but he struggled to fi nd a venue willing to exhibit the images. Finally, after a two-year-long community discussion, “Without Sanctuary” was displayed as a collaboration between the Martin Luther King Center and Emory University in Atlanta. The King Center exhibit presented a wealth of historical information, including a wide array of anti-lynching materials displayed in multiple glass cases. Among these materials were works by various Harlem Renaissance writers, such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.

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The exhibit also included materials produced by an array of anti-lynching organizations, including the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching founded by Jesse Daniels Ames. The exhibit presented materials as varied as anti-lynching resources produced by communist and socialist organizations and a CD cover for the Public Enemy’s single, “Hazy Shade of Criminal,” which displays a lynching photograph. By presenting an extraordinarily thick description of anti-lynching activity, the exhibit as Apel argues, “provided countervailing voices of interracial political resistance to the culture of victimization.”21 What was particularly remarkable about the King Center exhibit, however, was the somber reverence that it evoked. The walls of the exhibit were painted black against the deep red carpets of the King Center. Twenty-nine lynching photographs matted and framed in Georgia oak hung on the walls as if they were family photographs. Negro spirituals played softly in the background, imbuing the space with a sense of the sacred. The King Center exhibit called attention to the very thing that was missing from the fi rst two exhibits: a space for personal and spiritual reflections on loss and mourning. Perhaps the long community discussions that preceded the exhibit communicated to curators that this could not be just a historical exhibit when so many people who might be attending the exhibit would feel a personal connection to the victims. One woman who participated in the community discussions remarked, “When I look at those pictures . . . I don’t just see a lifeless body. I look at those pictures, and I see my son, I see my brother, I see my father. If I’m looking at that lifeless figure long enough, I see myself. Do I want to display this to the world? My initial reaction was no.”22 While this woman was considering ways in which the victims of lynching symbolically represented her own family, at least three families of lynching victims attended the exhibit. 23 The family of Anthony Crawford, a successful farmer who was lynched for arguing over a cotton price with a white man in Abbeville, South Carolina, chartered a bus so that 60 family members could attend the exhibit as part of their family reunion. Doria Johnson, the great-great-granddaughter of Crawford said of the exhibit, “I could hardly look at the pictures, but I’m glad I did it. You have to pay your respects.”24 One 67-year-old man began to cry when he reported that he came to the exhibit in hopes of fi nding a picture of his father who was lynched. 25 More than any other exhibit, the King Center version had to struggle with the problem of making room for personal and spiritual experiences of these images in the context of a public, historical exhibit. Critical to this daunting task was the use of just 29 photographs as opposed to the 100 displayed in the Warhol exhibit. By avoiding the excessive repetition of the images, curators were able to envelope them in a rich framework of historical narratives and the familiar rites of the black church. The use of the dark mahogany, the red carpets, and music together evoked a spiritual experience intended to remind viewers of the human spirit so often forgotten

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in the presence of brutalized bodies hanging on walls. Where the NYHS exhibit allowed viewers to retreat into the solipsism of intellectualism, the King Center exhibit, confronted the rituals of lynching with these rituals of mourning. The exhibit invested patrons’ experiences with spiritual importance. That the King Center exhibit became a place where families convened to remember and honor their ancestors indicates that this exhibit also empowered these families to symbolically reclaim their lost relatives and at the same time bear witness to the horrors that they suffered. Indeed, the regeneration of the photographs in this context recalls the way in which Mamie Till Bradley reclaimed the body of her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, who was murdered by white men in 1955 Mississippi. Though officials who recovered Till’s body released it to his mother on the promise that she would not open the casket, Bradley made the decision to display her son’s battered body in an open casket funeral so that the world would see what had been done to him. The photographs of Till’s body became a powerful catalyst for the Civil Rights movement. As Deborah McDowell points out, Bradley’s decision lives at the intersection between grief and activism. 26 Thus, Bradley’s conscious choice to expose the vicious brutality against blacks in the U.S. and mourn her son at once demonstrates the ways in which the meaning of the wounded black male body can be transformed through a determined act of appropriation. The King Center’s effort to expose the violent history of lynching and at the same time offer an opportunity to pay respect to the victims was done in the same vein. Still, the obvious difference between this exhibit and Bradley’s choice to display her son’s body, is that the family members of lynching victims did not make the choice to display the brutalized bodies of their kin. In fact, these families have no rights to these images, and the exhibit in no way depended on their participation. While some family members made conscious choices to seek out this exhibit, to experience their private pain in this public setting, there were likely others who stumbled upon lost relatives without warning. Thus, while the exhibit welcomed family members by enacting funeral rituals that acknowledged the humanity of the victims, one must not forget that the family members did not choose to put the wounded bodies of their loved ones on display. Indeed, it was not their choice any more than it was the victim’s choice to be displayed in this way. That these relatives of victims have to visit a public exhibit to see a photograph of a violated ancestor, a photograph that is owned by someone else, bears relevance to the very power dynamics intended by the original producers and owners of these images. If the Atlanta exhibit took the risk of displaying these photographs in a setting where family members were likely to encounter photographs of their violated ancestors, the online exhibit, withoutsanctuary.org, magnifies this risk by making the images available on such a wide scale. The online exhibit responds to this risk by increasing the power of the visitor to control his or

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her experience of the photographs. Though the website situates viewers as important witnesses to a long repressed history of violence, it also presents visitors with a myriad of choices for how to witness the photographs. Thus, the lingering violence of the lynching photograph must be addressed by a context that the viewer builds as he/she navigates the website. The flash presentation that serves as the main page of the website introduces visitors to lynching as a practice and establishes them as witnesses whose vision contributes to keeping this history alive in the national consciousness. This page presents a photograph of the 1916 lynching of 17-year-old Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas. Taken from above, the photograph shows an enormous crowd surrounding the burned corpse of the victim. Because the image on the website is relatively small and the smoldering corpse is so distorted, it is difficult to make out what is happening in the photograph. The website progressively crops the image, to focus on the blurry corpse. The words “Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynchings in America” appear below the photograph. Using a photograph that is so difficult to interpret and gradually cropping that photograph, the flash presentation slowly brings the viewer to a consciousness of the appalling crime. Indeed, by choosing an image in which the sheer size of the crowd overwhelms the space of the photograph, the designers encourage the viewer to focus fi rst on the crowd, and then on the corpse. Lest the viewer fail to interpret the occasion of the photograph, the appearance of the exhibit’s title brings the viewer to a realization of the violence. As the flash presentation continues, the title disappears, and the following quote from the collector, James Allen, emerges: Without Sanctuary is a photo document of proof, an unearthing of crimes, of collective mass murder, or mass memory graves excavated from the American conscience. Part postal cards, common as dirt, souvenirs skin thin and fresh tattooed proud, the trade cards of those assisting at ritual racial killings and other acts of a mad citizenry. The communities’ best citizens lurking just outside the frame. Destined to decay, these few survivors of an original photo population of many thousands, turn the living to pillars of salt. 27 Significantly, his statement situates lynching photographs as truth, not as interpretation or part of the lynching ritual itself. He positions the photographs as “proof” of these crimes, and the website presentation as the facilitator of necessary acts of witnessing. His statement also suggests that such witnessing is not without its dangers. The reference to viewers becoming “pillars of salt,” implies the ways in which these images still silence us, leaving us petrified in the face of such horrendous violence. For Allen, however, the display of these photographs combats the active repression of this history in American culture. Therefore, the witness participates in the preservation of this history. His reference to the way in which these images

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themselves are destined to decay over time, indicates not only the necessity of this digitized display, but the need for witnesses who will maintain a record of the history of lynching in the U.S. The page which features the quote pauses and allows the viewer to choose to click on the word “continue” at the bottom of the page in order to view the rest of the site. This feature which places the power to control the exhibit in the hands of the viewer characterizes the rest of the site, which also offers clear choices to the viewer about how he/she wants to view or not view these images. The page that follows if one chooses to continue, includes additional viewing choices. One can choose to read a brief overview of the site, watch a movie, which includes lynching photos and narration by the collector, enter a gallery exhibit, which includes 81 photographs, or enter a discussion forum. By choosing the movie, the viewer encounters a specific series of lynching photographs at a predetermined pace with narration. In the gallery, one can control which images one views and for how long. In addition, the gallery offers the opportunity to click on links for supplemental information about some of the photographs. In some cases, there is no more information to be had, but others include details about the circumstances of the lynching. In the forum, viewers may discuss the images and their reactions to them with other visitors to the site. By giving the viewer so many choices about order, narration, informational links, pace, etc., the designers acknowledge the endless number of possibilities for how visitors make meaning of these images, while also trusting the viewer to take responsibility for constructing this experience. In conceding so much power to the viewer, the website suggests that a context that will contest the original implications of these lynching photographs can only be determined by the individual. At the same time, this concession also implies that no singular exhibit of lynching photography can adequately control the meaning of the images, and thus the website offers a string of choices that allow viewers to individualize their experience. The choices offered to the viewer also include the choice not to view the photographs. Indeed, by presenting the viewer with a “continue” link on the main page, the online exhibit validates the choice not to continue. Of course, while one viewer may embrace the choice not to view, another might just as easily be titillated by this link. These multiple possibilities are the risks that the website takes. Ultimately, the website respects and facilitates each individual’s choices as he/she creates an experience. To facilitate many individual experiences, withoutsanctuary.org extends access beyond the usual audience that might see these photographs at a historical society or museum. Just as Hank Willis Thomas, whose work I discuss in the previous chapter, literally attempts to take his art to the streets, trashing the boundaries between the museum and the bus stop, withoutsanctuary.org attempts to take lynching photography to the virtual streets. Because the online exhibit does not require an admission fee, and thus anyone with access to a public library may enter the

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exhibit, withoutsanctuary.org invites many who may not ever see these images in any other context to experience them. In addition, the site also makes the images available for teachers and students for educational purposes. By making these images so accessible, the website suggests not only that widening the audience is not necessarily dangerous, but that keeping the audience limited to a narrow few and thus repressing this history, might very well be the biggest danger. This accessibility also comes with the risk that some viewers may assume ownership over these images by copying them. While the initial pages of the exhibit include a flash presentation, there is nothing, other than a copyright warning, to prevent viewers from copying the images in the gallery. Indeed, Allen’s statement included in the flash presentation, which stresses the importance of preserving the remaining few of the original thousands of lynching photographs might invite visitors to appropriate these images. This accessibility also suggests that no one, including the collector can really completely own these images, and that they are public documents to which everyone ultimately may lay claim. While this egalitarian approach encourages the viewer to take these images back from their original owners and their original intention, the kind of private viewing that the website allows for seems to mirror the way in which these photographs became personal mementos, tokens of remembrance tucked away in drawers with playbills or love letters. The website allows viewers to witness the exhibit without the experience of being in a public place. Part of the complexity of the live exhibit is this lack of privacy, or rather the fact that while one is viewing, one is also on view. Thus, one’s reactions in a public exhibit are often a kind of performance. At times, we perform interest and acclimate ourselves to the behaviors around us in the public arena. In allowing people to view privately, the web exhibit dispenses with the viewer’s performance, allowing him/her to view without the same level of self-consciousness. On the one hand, this creates a space for the personal experience of private grief and mourning. Conversely, the site may also create too free an experience in that those behaviors that we acclimate to in the public setting are also necessary boundaries that teach of us how to respond with appropriate respect for the objects and the victims. Without these boundaries, the viewer is cloaked in invisibility, allowing him/her to assume tremendous power over the object being viewed. As a counter to this invisibility, the website offers visitors an opportunity to participate in a community. The forum portion of the site allows viewers to share their experiences of the images and put their experiences alongside others to create a larger shared experience. In this way, viewers may not only communicate how they created their own understanding of the images, but they can learn how others encountered this process as well. To make comments on the forum, users have to register and submit an email address. By registering, users may form member groups around certain interests. In

90 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body addition, registered members can email other members privately. The website is monitored by administrators. In the frequently asked questions section of the forum, users are encouraged to report abusive comments to moderators. It is unclear, however, how much additional monitoring by moderators and users occurs on the site. The instructions on abusive comments seem to place the users in control of supervision. Comments on the forum include a broad range of reactions that extend from expressions of horror and disgust to considerations of the ways in which the behaviors exhibited in the photographs extend to contemporary American society. For example, there are discussions about how the Abu Ghraib photographs of prisoners of war being abused by American service men and women suggest a similar kind of mob mentality witnessed in lynching photographs. During the year in which President Barack Obama was running for election, forum members discussed the ways in which the public discussion about a black presidential candidate reflected problematic ideas about racial difference. Other members posted transcripts of PBS interviews with scholars about contemporary racial politics in the U.S. Some members share additional information they have discovered about unidentified lynchings pictured on the website. While these responses reflect the many ways in which viewers attempt to understand the images, they also include comments from those who are overwhelmed by grief, and thus the forum provides a space to express the pain of witnessing such atrocities. Occasionally, comments on the site have included white supremacist statements from visitors clearly encouraged by the availability of lynching photographs. According to one visitor, the site serves as entertainment for him. Another visitor who uses the name Nathan Bedford Forrest, the name of the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, celebrates the violence as an effective measure for keeping black people in line.28 Unlike those who attended live exhibits, these visitors felt free to celebrate white supremacy in the forum. While the site practices some level of censorship by removing such comments, withoutsanctuary.org still risks this sort of interpretation and accepts it as part of the endeavor to expose lynching. According to Jonathan Markovitz, while such comments are few, they are enough to suggest how easily “even the best-intentioned invocations of lynching can be put to dangerous uses.”29 I would add that the interpretation of the exhibit as fuel for white supremacy is inevitable, not just for the web exhibit, but for the live exhibits as well. Although we presume that everyone visiting the live exhibits is likeminded in the rejection of this violence, that assumption itself is a comforting lie that ignores the presence of white supremacist thought in contemporary culture. What makes the website exhibit different, however, is that it provides anonymity that allows visitors to freely express such views without fear of castigation or reprisal outside of the virtual space. For the most part, the forum provides a community, albeit an anonymous one where visitors share their experiences of the website. The forum then reminds us that the “meaning does not reside within the photographs but is, instead, determined through social interaction.”30 In this way, the

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forum is intended to serve as a significant act of appropriation in that it gives voice to visitors and makes their experience part of the framework of the exhibit. At the same time, the forum serves as a place to express white supremacist thought, demonstrating that the white supremacy witnessed in lynching photography is alive and well. This interplay then recalls the way in which appropriation is a process of reclamation and recession, an active encounter between differing forces.

ART AND THE APPROPRIATION OF LYNCHING PHOTOGRAPHS A number of artists have also attempted to appropriate lynching photography. Like “Without Sanctuary,” these artworks actively grapple with the original lynching photograph in an attempt to control its meaning. Artists explore the original image and at the same time alter it in ways that shift its significance. This sort of appropriation is no easy task. By transforming the lynching photograph into art the artists risk aestheticizing the photograph. In addition, the artwork also risks extending the original community of spectators. To mitigate these risks, the artists that I consider in this chapter, Pat Ward Williams, Kerry James Marshall, and Shawn Michelle Smith, create works that aggressively alter the original photographs to focus the viewer’s attention on the ideological frameworks that inform the original images. Thus, these artworks not only transform the image, but they alter the process of seeing itself by presenting lynching photographs through a carefully constructed lens.

Figure 5.1 Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock (1986) by Pat Ward Williams. Photo and mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.

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Pat Ward Williams’s Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock (1986) reproduces a photograph published in a 1937 Life magazine (Figure 5.1). The original photograph pictures a black man chained to a tree. His arms bound together behind him are extended as if being pulled. His face is turned away from the camera. The wounds on his back indicate the extensive torture he has suffered. The caption reads: “Accused in 1937 of murdering a white Mississippi man, this black man was tortured with a blowtorch and then lynched.” The artist discovered the photograph in a bookstore, while thumbing through a book entitled The Best of Life Magazine. Struck with horror, she put the book back on the shelf, only to realize later that she wanted to own the photograph in order to work out her own feelings about it. After examining the photograph and the feelings it evoked in her, she produced Accused/ Blowtorch/Padlock as a response to this experience. A mixed media piece, Accused includes the magazine page, and three additional photos which crop and enlarge specific parts of the original photo. From left to right the photos include the full photograph with its edges torn as if from a magazine, followed by three enlarged close-up photographs: one image of the man’s bound wrist, another photo of his back, and finally a photo of his torso chained to the tree. The photographs are surrounded by handwritten white text on black tarpaper. These items are encased in a window frame. The text reads: There’s something going on here. I didn’t see it right away. After all, you see one lynched man you’ve seen them all. He looks so helpless. He doesn’t look lynched yet. What is that under his chin? How long has he been LOCKED to that tree? Can you be BLACK and look at this? Life magazine published this picture. Could Hitler show pictures of the Holocaust to keep the JEWS in line? WHO took this picture? Couldn’t he just as easily let the man go? Did he take his camera home and then come back with a blowtorch? Where do you TORTURE someone with a blowtorch? BURN off and ear? Melt an eye? A screaming mouth. How can this photograph exist? WHO took this picture? Oh, God. Life answers—page 141—no credit. Somebody do something. Williams transforms the image by compelling the viewer to see the narrative of torture, rather than its end result, the corpse. This new focus figures the man pictured not as the symbol of lynching, but instead as a living being who was tortured and killed. By placing the original photo fi rst, and yet at the same time on the periphery, Williams announces that despite its primacy, it will not take center stage. Instead, with each cropped image that follows, she creates a visual narrative of what happened to this man: the binding of the arms, the chaining of the torso, and the burning of the back with the blowtorch. According to Williams, Very often we look at a photograph like this and its meant to stand for all the lynchings that have happened over the history of black

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people in this country. And we don’t really look at these photographs any more, we don’t really critically think about what this photograph means, or when it was taken, or who it is of. 31 Williams’s presentation of the photographs in this way forces the viewer to see the horrific fragments that add up to what we call lynching. By dismantling the original photograph, Williams insists that viewers critically engage the narrative of what the man and his body suffered. Thus, Williams also dismantles the term “lynching” as it is used in the original caption. Just as the photograph of the lynched black body has come to signify what is lynching, the term “lynching” has become a catchall for all manner of torture and inhumanity. Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock contest that conflation by persuading the viewer to recognize the hideous torture only faintly indicated by that word. Though Williams’s cropping of the images risks reducing the murdered man to just a body to be looked at, Williams actively combats this risk by creating both a consciousness of the artist and of the self as viewers. The use of the window frame, for example, creates an awareness that one is viewing through the artist’s lens. At the same time the frame suggests both distance and intimacy at once, the sense of looking in as well as of being inside looking out. The frame then encourages the viewer to ponder all of these acts of looking, and thus creates an awareness of self. Similarly, Williams’s use of text also encourages this awareness of the artist and the self. Williams uses questions to ponder her own experience of the photograph as well as the viewer’s experience. Indeed, the majority of the text asks critical questions about what is happening, who is doing it, and why. The horror and confusion expressed by the text blurs the boundaries between the viewer and the artist. Indeed, Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock reminds the viewer that the artist is also a spectator, struggling to understand the photograph. Thus, together, the viewer and artist share in the experience of encountering the wounded black male body. In this way, the artist engages in the communal experience with viewers who encounter this work in a gallery or museum. Williams’s text also acknowledges that this experience might be different, particularly for black viewers who may relate to the victim differently than nonblack viewers. The text offers no answers to this dilemma, but instead circles the issue by asking two questions: “Can you be BLACK and look at this? . . . Could Hitler show pictures of the Holocaust to keep the JEWS in line?” Thus, the text suggests the way in which the identity of the viewer might make the images themselves acts of terror. Williams’s contemplation of the viewer’s experience also makes room for different kinds of personal experiences of the photo. Williams uses text both to focus the eye on the body and move the eye away from the body, carefully directing the viewer’s vision. According to Williams, she “force[s] the viewer to look at what is really going on by dissecting the important body of information and by directing with text

94 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body what the viewer should notice: the tied hands (accused,), the scarred back (blowtorch,) and the lock, chain and tree (padlock).”32 At the same time, the images are engulfed by the frantic scrawl that surrounds them. Thus, to read the text, the viewer must also look around the image, focusing on the (con)text. The haphazard handwriting seems to suggest panic and urgency that demands the viewer’s attention. Thus, the viewer’s eye must glide over the images as he/she reads the text from left to right. Though each time that the piece is exhibited, Williams changes the text slightly, the text refuses the idea of the wounded black male body as merely symbolic by focusing on the narrative of what happened to this particular man. In one version she writes: “He doesn’t look lynched yet. What is that under his chin? How long has he been LOCKED to that tree?” These questions that emphasize the details of what happened encourage the viewer to interrogate the photograph as part of a gruesome process of torture, rather than as a symbol of blackness that does not require critical investigation. In fact, the text warns the viewer about the tendency to view the wounded black male body as merely representative: “After all, you see one lynched man you’ve seen them all.” This statement indicates that the danger of viewing the lynched black body as an emblem is that it can also lead to a dismissal of brutality in favor of a shallow, uncritical symbolism. This attention to the details of what happened also functions as a criticism of the brief Life magazine caption that fails to express the experiences of the man pictured. The text also encourages viewers to think beyond the body of the victim to consider the actions of those outside the lens of the camera. Thus, the text copes with the original image by shifting emphasis to the perpetrators of these crimes: “WHO took this picture? Couldn’t he just as easily let the man go? Did he take his camera home and then come back with a blowtorch? Where do you TORTURE someone with a blowtorch?” Significantly, the questions indicate the ways in which the photographer as well as the photograph participate in the torture ritual of the lynching. In Accused/ Blowtorch/Padlock, the text stands in for the crowd and the photographer, the murderers who remain invisible in this photograph. Ultimately, the preponderance of questions that seem to engulf the photograph as well as the fact that she changes the text slightly with each exhibition suggests the ways in which the artist is still grappling with the image. It is as if Accused is still in process, not only wrestling with the original image, but also with its own reproduction of the image. The questions are not merely about why the original photograph was taken, but also about why anyone would display this photograph now. That the white handwriting on tarpaper is reminiscent of a chalkboard, also seems to question the educational value of showing such a photograph. In this way, the piece is not indifferent to its own reproduction of the lynching photo and thus questions its own purpose in reproducing the image as well. By using questions rather than answers, Williams acknowledges the ways in which the process of knowing and understanding the image is never complete. Concluding

Figure 5.2 Heirlooms and Accessories (2002) by Kerry James Marshall. Inkjet prints on paper in wooden frames with rhinestones, three parts, each 51'' x 46''. Courtesy of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

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96 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body with the line: “Life answers—page 141—no credit. Somebody do something,” Williams points to the inadequacy of the photograph, its failure to provide answers. Life’s answer is nothing more than the photograph itself. The fi nal plea then is for something more than what the photograph can offer. But rather than answers, Williams’s artwork presents the audience with a series of critical questions that inform how they encounter this lynching photograph. Kerry James Marshall’s Heirlooms and Accessories (2002) also aggressively alters a lynching photograph (Figure 5.2). The photo of the 1930 lynching of Abe Smith and Thomas Shipp in Marion Indiana has become one of the most widely recognized photographs of a lynching, and as Shawn Michelle Smith notes, the many contexts in which it has appeared make clear the extensive circulation of lynching photography. 33 Taken by Lawrence Beitler, the photograph pictures two bloodied bodies that hang from trees, surrounded by a large crowd, many of whom gaze into the camera. They are dressed neatly, women in floral dresses and tidy coats, men in hats and ties. One couple holding hands appears to be on a date. The man grins profusely, while the woman clings with her other hand to a tattered piece of cloth, a souvenir taken from one of the victims’ bodies. Another man with a severe mustache stares wide-eyed into the camera, his raised arm pointing at the lifeless bodies. Heirlooms and Accessories makes the familiar photograph unfamiliar. Marshall radically enlarges and frames three reproductions of the original photograph, presenting them as a triptych. Everything in the photographs, except for three white women’s faces, has been dramatically whitened, leaving a faded impression of the bodies that hang in the background. Lockets that hang from gold necklaces encircle the women’s faces. Each frame is covered in sparkling rhinestones. The whitened parts of the image require that the viewer look carefully to realize that this is indeed a lynching photograph. Heirlooms and Accessories not only shifts the viewer’s gaze to the crowd, but it temporarily blinds the viewer to the lynching. This technique forces the viewer to process the image differently, focusing fi rst on the faces of the women who gaze into the camera and only later on the bloody scene they are attending. Thus, Marshall dramatically shifts the focus of the spectacle in a way that acknowledges the difficulty of confronting the original image. To change it’s meaning, Marshall actively shields parts of the image from the viewer. While the viewer can make out the lynching, the bloodied bodies in their tattered clothing are never completely visible. The eye focuses instead on what it can see: the women. By calling attention to the women, Marshall indicates the interconnections between the construction of black male sexuality and white female sexuality. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall sums this relationship up thus, “the racism that caused white men to lynch black men cannot be understood apart from the sexism that informed their policing of white women

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and their exploitation of black women.”34 Marshall visualizes this connection by not only focusing on the women, but also picturing them too as hanging, though from gold necklaces. This effect suggests the ways in which these women are active participants in the subjugation of black people and at the same time, themselves subject to patriarchy. Their role, however, is different from the black men who hang from trees behind them. The dangling women suggest a symbolic hanging, while the men behind them are dead. In addition, that the women hang from gold necklaces also indicates their access to privilege that black women did not have. Indeed the title, “Heirlooms and Accessories” seems to highlight the necklaces as symbols of power in a capitalist economy where privilege and its symbols are passed on from one generation to the next. Indeed, Marshall points out that, “This piece was sort of a reminder that these people are accessories to a crime in the fi rst place, and that the heirlooms and the things that their offspring inherited from them were inherited from them because they were engaged in this kind of violence.”35 The title also indicates the ways in which lynching photographs were heirlooms displayed in family photo albums, or tucked away among other treasured objects to be passed on. Heirlooms and Accessories actively takes control of how we see, making whiteness itself the site of spectacle. Marshall calls our attention not to the bloody spectacle of the wounded black male bodies, but instead to the women in the crowd. While the bejeweled frames indicate the power that white supremacy afforded these women, the juxtaposition between the crowd and the event still leaves us shocked, searching these women’s wide-eyed stares and bemused lips for explanation. In addition, just as Williams’s art asks the black viewer what it means to view this image, Marshall’s piece seems to put some pressure on white-identified viewers, forcing a kind of recognition of these women. The focus on their common faces confronts such viewers with their familiarity. Any one of these women could be a mother, a favorite aunt, or the self, staring back at the viewer. Such identifi cation pressures the viewer to consider his/ herself standing among this crowd. Heirlooms seems to ask, what would you do under these circumstances? Would you too have participated in this crime? To avoid reenacting the spectacle of the wounded black male body, Marshall fades the scene into a sparkly whiteness. The bodies are neither completely visible, nor invisible. This choice suggests the unwieldiness of the lynching photograph in that to control its meaning the artist must radically alter the image by shielding the wounded black male body from view. Marshall confronts this problem with particular complexity, both protecting the bodies from full view and intimating their presence at once. Rather than staring at the disfigured bodies, we focus on the familiar faces of the women in the crowd, until we gradually perceive the scene of murder behind them.

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Figure 5.3 Shawn Michelle Smith, Untitled 1, from the series In the Crowd, courtesy of the artist.

Shawn Michelle Smith continues Marshall’s explication of this complicated interplay of race and gender by also focusing on the role of white women in lynching. In the Crowd, Smith’s series of five untitled images, presents silhouette figures based on white women who appear in lynching photographs (Figures 5.3 and 5.4). Each photo-based image includes a white silhouette of a woman or girl extracted from a photo of a lynching.36 Because Smith uses white silhouettes to figure the bodies, the facial

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expressions of the figures are invisible. One can see just the postures of their bodies and the outline of their clothing. Some of the figures seem to pose sweetly for the camera, while others stand rigidly; One appears to crouch, whereas another floats in the outline of her bulky clothing. Each image, though untitled, was published with the location and year of the original photograph in parenthesis.37 Smith’s artist statement carefully explains that each image is based on a photograph of a lynching. Without these indicators of the event, these images might be taken for women at church picnics, rather than women who participated in a gruesome murder. This effect is telling in that it reminds the viewer that these two groups of women are indeed one in the same. Like Marshall, Smith is interested in the ways in which the construction of white womanhood fueled lynching. The stark whiteness of the figures not only indicates that these are white women, but also evokes the myths of white female purity that were so central to white supremacy. At the same time, some of the ghostly silhouettes with their blurry edges also reflect the ways in which the role of white womanhood in lynching is fi lled with shadowy contradictions. As Smith points out in her artist statement black men died at the hands of women along with men and children. At the same time, Hall’s argument about the ways in which these women too were often trapped by the ideology of white womanhood reminds us that white women occupied a peculiar liminal space in regard to lynching. Smith’s ghostly figures add another dimension to this complexity: by evoking the specter of haunting, Smith suggests the slippery links between the white women pictured and white women of today. According to Smith the series is intended to consider “the ways that white womanhood haunts lynching, and also the ways in which white womanhood must be haunted by the horrors performed in their name.”38 Thus, the faceless white figures that emerge in Smith’s work attempt not only to undermine the repression of the history of lynching, but also to unearth the connections between white womanhood then and white womanhood now. Circling questions about guilt, responsibility, and power, Smith’s art suggests that that the failure to acknowledge this history of involvement in lynching does not erase it and that the repressed returns to us like these ghostly apparitions. To appropriate the image, Smith radically changes it, removing the wounded black male body, the ultimate sign of white supremacy. In this way, Smith avoids the terror that the visual representation of the wounded black male body enacts. Smith prevents the viewer from becoming part of the original crowd by shielding the body from view and focusing instead on the members of the crowd. At the same time, her work takes a risk by not looking at the victims. For as Joseph Jordan points out, the act of not looking also has consequences: “If we put these photographs back into the trunks, or slide them back into the crumbling envelopes and conceal them in a corner of the drawer, we deny to the victims, once again, the witness they deserve.”39 But Smith’s work is not so much about not looking, as it

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Figure 5.4 Shawn Michelle Smith, Untitled 2, from the series In the Crowd, courtesy of the artist.

is about shifting our focus—looking differently and asking critical questions about the perpetrators of such crimes. Thus, while her untitled series does not visually include the wounded black male body, the body is present symbolically. Indeed, her investigation of white womanhood is always in tension with the invisible black male body evoked by the artist statement and the inclusion of the location of each lynching. By including the occasion of photographs in these subtle ways, Smith’s work presents a choice to

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viewers: They can recognize the ways in which lynching was a wide-spread cultural practice in the U.S. or choose to remain blind to that history. But choosing not to see that history leads to the very sort of haunting that Smith’s artworks visualize. Each image in the series explores the return of repressed and its inevitability. Thus, the process of repression, Smith’s artwork suggests, is never complete. *

*

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The many appropriations of lynching photography by curators, web designers, and visual artists suggest an urgent need to reclaim and transform lynching photographs as well as the wounded bodies they picture. Each vision seeks the clarifying context, the dynamic alteration, or the affecting deviation that will illuminate lynching as a deplorable cultural practice and endow the wounded black male body with profound meaning. But the lynching photograph remains a powerful material object embedded in white supremacy. The exhibits discussed in this chapter all struggle to take back lynching photographs and to turn the gaze from the wounded black male body to a critical investigation of racial violence in the U.S. Each of these attempts to reclaim and renew the lynching photograph vigorously wrestles with a forceful endorsement of terror against African Americans. As viewers encounter this dangerous dance between competing ideas, they must also navigate the emotional fall out of this encounter. The artworks discussed in this chapter are relentless in their attempts to modify lynching photographs, and thus they teach us new ways of seeing. By forcing us to recognize the ideologies that inform how we see, these works offer powerful examples of how to navigate the crisis of vision that lynching photographs enact.

6

Seeing Without Looking Lynching in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition

This fi nal chapter investigates the question that threads throughout this book: how can we bear witness to violence against black men, without enacting the violence of the look? In answer to this question, I turn to Charles Chesnutt’s novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), to consider how the author confronts the visual terrain of lynching. Aware of both a white supremacist audience that would relish the imagery of wounded black bodies as well as an African-American audience that would be terrorized by the very same spectacle, Chesnutt set out to expose the visual practices that shaped lynching, without whetting the appetite for black flesh. While it might seem that by choosing to address the problems of lynching through letters, Chesnutt could eliminate the problem of rehearsing spectacle violence, such imagery was not confi ned to visual representation. As I discuss in Chapter 1, these images glided seamlessly between literature and photography in a vigorous cross-fertilization. Sandra Gunning points out that “lynching became a familiar image in the American turn-of-the-century imagination through novels, photographs, and newspaper descriptions, all of which dramatically referenced a public spectacle.”1 As he attempted to illustrate the problem of lynching in The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt encountered this visual culture in which looking at the wounded black male body through a variety of media was central to white supremacist violence. His solution was to shift the lens from the horrors of the brutalized body itself to the cultural forces that informed racialized spectacle violence. As he negotiates the fi ne line between interrogating the brutal practices of lynching and reenacting them, Chesnutt omits the imagery of the wounded black male body to create a space in which to examine the practices of spectacle violence.

SPECTACLE CULTURE Criticism has sometimes characterized Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition as lacking any sustained engagement with the practice of lynching. Trudier Harris points out that lynching in the novel is “subsidiary to other

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concerns.”2 More recent criticism, has sought to demonstrate that “while no actual lynchings take place in The Marrow of Tradition,” the novel exposes “the reality of lynching” through its representation of the near execution of Sandy, a loyal servant accused of murder in the novel.3 Ultimately the novel avoids visualizing a lynching. The intended lynching of Sandy is interrupted, when whites discover his innocence. Thus, one might argue that the novel, rather than exposing “the reality of lynching,” opts for a fiction of lynching in which innocence could deter a determined mob. Indeed, it seems odd that Chesnutt’s magnum opus, a novel intended to address what he called “vexed moral and sociological problems” did not more explicitly expose the atrocious practices of these executions.4 Chesnutt’s subtle representation of lynching is best understood in light of the pervasive culture of communal racialized spectacle violence that surrounded him. Chesnutt was living in Cleveland, Ohio in 1897 when Charles Mitchell, a 23-year-old African-American man, was attacked and lynched by a mob in Urbana, Ohio. Chesnutt likely would have been aware of this lynching not only because of the close proximity, but also because of the national attention that it garnered. A prominent resident of the town had accused Mitchell of robbery and later added rape to her allegations. Despite what appears to have been fl imsy evidence of any crime, mounting racial tensions in the town ensured that the accusation alone would be evidence enough to convict Mitchell of the crime. Resigned to his fate, Mitchell submitted a guilty plea and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Still, a growing mob determined to lynch Mitchell attempted to break into the jail. They were prevented from doing so when a militia assigned to protect Mitchell fi red on them, killing two men instantly, and fatally injuring two other men. The following morning the militia withdrew from their post with the expectation that reinforcements from the Ohio National Guard would soon arrive. The mob seized this opportunity to enter the jail and capture Mitchell. The crowd beat Mitchell and hung him in the town-square, where they reportedly jerked the rope up and down until they were confident his neck was broken.5 The lynching and the deaths of white militiamen ignited a vigorous national debate about the responsibility of the government in protecting its black citizens from mob violence.6 National reportage of the lynching describes an array of visually centered practices designed to afford white viewers an opportunity to once again take possession of the tortured black body, guaranteeing their own self-determination through the act of looking. The corpse was photographed, placed on public exhibition, and later stripped by souvenir hunters. The photograph shows Mitchell’s corpse still hanging from a tree.7 His body is dressed in a somber suit. A cascade of tree branches hovers in the background. Along the bottom edge of the photograph a blurry crowd of whites, some facing the camera others facing the corpse, emerges. Their bodies seem more animated next to the lifeless body suspended above them. While the circulation of the photograph is uncertain, if the national

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media attention that the lynching attracted is any indication, it is likely that there was keen demand for this memento of the infamous event. The visual rituals that were part and parcel of the lynching remind us that “black death” as Deborah McDowell points out “has made good spectacle for audiences who have relished it historically in every form from fatal floggings to public lynchings.”8 The visual atmosphere demonstrated by the lynching of Charles Mitchell clarifies Chesnutt’s choice not to visualize the practice in The Marrow of Tradition. The lynching of Mitchell took place just a year before the Wilmington riots, which would inspire the novel.9 Chesnutt likely would have been aware of the infamous Urbana lynching, and he certainly would have been familiar with the broader culture of witnessing that informed it. Chesnutt’s account of lynching then is not so much “subsidiary” as it is shaped by the problem of visualizing lynching in an era in which the very act of viewing lynching was meant to reinscribe the white supremacist ideology that informed racial violence. Thus, to illustrate the crisis of lynching in this context meant to evoke the mesmerizing power of spectacle, which effectively disables critical intervention by transforming the critical eye into yet another spectator. To delineate lynching practices by exposing the tortured, dangling corpse of the victim would reinscribe the vulnerability and violation of so many black bodies, expanding and empowering an already increasing community of spectators. Chesnutt had to facilitate ways in which his audience could see lynching, to recognize it as an insidious, inhumane cultural practice, without allowing them to participate in the ritual act of looking at the wounded black male body. To that end, Chesnutt withholds the body and instead renders the nexus of forces that shape spectacle violence. Skirting participation in the gruesome theater of lynching, the novel dissects the origins of the racialized spectacle, its context, roots, cultural meanings, and political motives. The absence of the spectacle lynching in the novel creates a critical juncture to examine the racialized visual culture that gives birth to lynching. Pinpointing both the rhetoric that leads up to the lynching and its relationship to the visual culture of the new South, Chesnutt reveals the machinery of lynching, the ways in which the language of white supremacy demands visual evidence. Thus, the novel gives weight to the origins of racial violence, rather than its brutal, disaffecting conclusion.

THE FORCES OF SPECTACLE The issue of lynching in the novel is embedded in a complicated narrative of familial intrigue through which Chesnutt unearths the larger sociopolitical and historical context of spectacle lynching. Sandy, the faithful servant of a white aristocrat is accused of murdering Polly Ochiltree, an odious and deceitful patrician woman. Shortly after his arrest, the local

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newspaper flagrantly endorses violent reprisal, and talk of lynching spreads throughout the town. When rumors that the murder victim was also raped begin to circulate, it appears that Sandy’s fate is sealed. The townspeople begin collecting the necessary props to stage the lynching. Hoping to prevent the execution, Dr. Miller, the town’s black doctor, tells Sandy’s white employer, Mr. Delamere, about the looming violence. Upon brief investigation, Delamere discovers that his own nephew, Tom, committed the crime in black face and framed Sandy. Informed of the true criminal, Carteret the owner of the town newspaper announces to the crowd that Sandy has been absolved of the crime, but chooses to hide the identity of the real perpetrator to prevent the embarrassment and political injury of the white people. Significantly, all this takes place in the midst of rising racial tensions centered around political and economic control of the town. Long before Ochiltree is found dead, three conspirators, which include Carteret, Belmont, a retired confederate general, and McBane, a rising businessman, are plotting to disempower the black citizens of the town and reverse the economic and political progress of the black middle class. When the murder is discovered, the conspirators carefully consider the best political use of the incident—how to use the murder to incite violence and outrage directed towards the blacks of the town. The intricate plot explores connections between shifts in the sociopolitical and economic landscape of the post-Reconstruction South and outbreaks of spectacle violence. The fall of Tom Delamere suggests the decline of the aristocracy with its mythic traditions of honor, while the ascendancy of McBane from the son of an overseer to an influential businessman, delineates not only the rise of working-class whites in an economy no longer reliant on slave labor, but also the emergence of a new white solidarity that supersedes class differences. These shifts are matched by the emergence of a black middle class in the novel. The actions of the three conspirators expose the precariousness of their own positions in a culture that is changing dramatically. More specifically, they are conspiring for economic and political power in the town because of the perception that their power is under threat in this transforming society. This desire to secure white economic and political power in the town motivates the lust for spectacle violence as a visible sign of white supremacy. As Bryan Wagner convincingly argues, violence in the novel is inspired by visual signs of the rise of the black middle class, such as the building of a black hospital.10 Likewise, spectacle violence in the novel is intended to visualize the reverse: the political and economic suppression of the town’s black citizens. Denying the prevailing idea that lynching was an expression of some natural racial animosity, Chesnutt positions lynching instead as an observable negation of black self-determination. Chesnutt demonstrates how the boiling pot of white supremacist rhetoric in the community demands the violent spectacle as its defi nitive avowal. This rhetoric erases individuality in favor of broad symbolic categories and epic narratives that endow individual acts with emblematic consequence.

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For example, in a conversation between Carteret, Belmont, and McBane, the murder victim, previously a loathsome figure, is transformed by language into the “crown and flower” of the white race and her murder becomes a symbol of the dangers posed to the “whole white womanhood of the South.”11 Thus, the single murder translates into an epic race war that threatens the mass rape and murder of all white women and by extension jeopardizes the integrity of the entire white citizenry. Such epic proportions demand not merely punishment for the crime but “an example,” an act that will translate from a single deed to an emblematic one that reverberates with broader implications for the community. Thus, the three conspirators are not concerned for the victim, but rather for the survival of the whole white race. Their desire for a swift penalty is not merely about a lone reprisal, but rather the creation of an “example” to the entire community. McBane’s comments sum up this sentiment: “The example would be all the more powerful if we got the wrong one. It would serve notice on the niggers that we shall hold the whole race responsible for the misdeeds of each individual.”12 Without ever presenting a lynching, Chesnutt details the gathering forces of spectacle. Indeed, the novel delineates how the desire for a public example requires not only a forceful public act, but just as important, a crowd to witness it. As the men erase the individuality of black people, they also erase their own individuality in favor of their membership in the white race. Thus, they emerge as the beginnings of the white crowd. Underscoring all three men’s disappearance into the crowd, Chesnutt presents the rhetoric that swells in the streets of Wilmington as a mirror of their conversation. Though Carteret insists that he will not participate in the lynching itself, the echoes of his newspaper editorial’s call for violence among the masses in the streets, confi rms his role as an active member of the fuming crowd. Indeed the rhetoric itself forms the crowd, transfiguring the people of the town into a swarming throng, without recognizable signs of singularity. Significantly, the white supremacist rhetoric expressed in the streets has no particular speaker. Instead, a cacophony of voices swells demanding: “An example must be made.”13 This call for an example is equivalent to a demand for the public performance of spectacle violence, and thus it demonstrates the way in which this furious rhetoric can only be satiated by the act of looking. In other words, violent retribution is not necessarily enough, for as one member of the crowd puts it, “to hang him would be too slight a punishment.”14 Only through repetitive acts of looking can the crowd be satisfied. Lest the reader miss the visual implications of the demand for an example, Chesnutt carefully delineates the preparations for spectacle violence: Nameless members of the crowd obtain a large rail to use in the hanging, while others gather wood. Another erects seating available for purchase. Train schedules are planned to allow people from neighboring towns to travel to witness the lynching. An early time is set to allow children to attend. Meanwhile, young men make plans to obtain portions of the body as souvenirs. Chesnutt’s description of these

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preparations presents the lynching much like a theatrical production, that requires planning, props, seating, and direction, rather than as an impulsive explosion of aggression. Indeed, this description depicts lynching as being in keeping with Kirk Fouss’s characterization of lynchings as “performancesaturated events,” publicized happenings taking place in specific places, with clear beginnings and endings, and with communal participation and structured orders of procedures.15 All of the preparations described focus on ways of looking and the desire to look, whether quite literally achieving well-placed seating in order to better look, or obtaining the remains through which to visually re-experience the original scene of violence. Chesnutt’s illustration of the preparations not only highlights visuality as a critical part of the event, but it also demonstrates how visuality serves the crucial function of sharing this event with a growing community of spectators. Lynchings, as Harvey Young points out, were significant events in the lives of participants, motivating them to seek ways of sharing their experiences.16 Perhaps the best example of this desire is the postcard lynching photograph that allowed senders to not only testify to what they witnessed, but to pen personal notes that sometimes indicated their participation along with their affection for their families. These cards then functioned as Shawn Michelle Smith deftly argues to expand the community of experience.17 Chesnutt’s representation of the preparations pinpoints the way in which looking was a vital means of transferring and dispersing the event to an ever increasing crowd of spectators whose own freedom to look would serve to justify the captivity and murder of the victim they witnessed. Significantly, though Chesnutt exposes this desire to look, he also steers away from satiating this desire for both the crowd in the novel as well as his own reading audience. Chesnutt’s representation of the crowd without the corpse looming above them allows him to make the swarming horde the site of spectacle for the reading audience. The representation of looking as racially inflected acts throughout the novel illuminates the power of this shift from the wounded body to the crowd as spectacle. Throughout the novel, Chesnutt reminds the reader that acts of looking are always shaped by the racial codes of the culture. Soon after the murder of Ochiltree is discovered, the blacks in the town disappear from view. The narrator remarks that their disappearance was not an admission of guilt, but rather an attempt to “seek immunity in a temporary disappearance from public view.”18 For the black people of the town, to be looked at is a prelude to violence, while not being looked at is the only chance for invulnerability. After the murder, Watson, a black lawyer in the town, is met with “black looks” from the whites with whom he has previously been friendly.19 Even Miller, the town’s black doctor, withdraws from the sight of the crowd, after delivering Sandy’s employer to the jail. Further elucidating the complexity of these visual codes, Chesnutt demonstrates how the crime of which Sandy is accused also functions as a crime of looking. The rumors that Sandy not only murdered Ochiltree, but raped her as well, despite no evidence of a rape, suggest the

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way in which Sandy is also believed to have looked upon the body of a white woman. More specifically, the act of Sandy allegedly viewing the body of Ochiltree in this case implies rape, a violation of the cultural codes that dictate who is allowed to gaze upon whom. Chesnutt’s illustration of the rules of looking illuminates how these codes operated as part of a larger visual culture of racialized violence. The racial codes of the South were predicated on the rules of looking and therefore maintained through staged spectacles that reaffirmed those codes. Jacqueline Goldsby captures the racialized power paradigms that informed and were informed by acts of looking when she points out that while on the one hand “reckless eyeballing,” or looking at a white woman could get a black man killed, just the knowledge that lynching photographs were being circulated, terrorized black communities, whether they viewed them or not.20 Goldsby’s observation rather than merely confirming the now oft made point that looking functions as an assertion of power, instead delineates how strict racialized codes of conduct assigned variable meanings to acts of looking. Indeed, some blacks were forced to participate in the viewing of the corpses of lynching victims as a terrifying illustration of their own vulnerability to white mobs.21 Chesnutt’s depiction of these visual codes not only demonstrates this way in which acts of looking could reaffirm the status quo, but it also positions spectacle violence as the likely result of such racialized visual codes. More precisely, by exposing these visual codes of conduct, Chesnutt clarifies the broader visual culture that gives birth to spectacle lynching. The lynching is designed to display the righting of these codes, and thus it requires a staged act that will secure racial hierarchies by at once reaffirming white power and terrorizing blacks.

SPECTATORSHIP, MINSTRELSY, AND LYNCHING Elucidating this relationship between white spectatorship and violence in the novel, Chesnutt draws a striking connection between minstrelsy and lynching. Impersonating Sandy, Tom Delamere gives a black face performance of the cakewalk for northern white tourists. Later Tom dons the same costume when he robs and murders Polly Ochiltree, thus framing Sandy for the crime. As Sandra Gunning and Nancy Bentley indicate, “Chesnutt . . . points to lynching as the ultimate extension of other forms of amusement, a merging of race-based pleasure into racial violence.”22 Significantly, the link between minstrelsy and racial violence also demonstrates how both lynching and minstrelsy operated as part of the larger visual landscape of racialized performance spectacles intended not only to promote the power of the white onlooker’s gaze, but to also diminish the notion of black advancement by enacting carnivalesque stagings. Lynching sometimes included palpable carnival features that, like minstrelsy, were intended to mock the very idea of black equality. Felipe Smith explains this carnival aspect of lynching thus: “Lynching’s festive celebration of ritual murder was in itself an act of defiance against

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the ghost of ‘Negro Rule’.”23 At a lynching in Paris Texas, the victim, Henry Smith, was “placed upon a carnival float in mockery of a king upon a throne and followed by an immense crowd.”24 The bodies’ of some lynch victims were also painted and costumed as minstrel figures by their assailants. One photo postcard circa 1900 shows the abused body of an African-American man, his face painted with white and dark paint, and pieces of white cotton glued to his head.25 In the corner of the photograph, a man’s hand extends a pole to prop up the body of the victim, and in the background the shadow of the same man hovers like a cunning puppeteer. The paint and costuming are so spectacular that the viewer can hardly tell that the image is a photograph, rather than a painting. In the photograph, lynching and minstrelsy are one, a spectacular marriage of ferocious violence and malevolent mockery, culminating in the erasure of the victim’s humanity. The collapsing of minstrelsy and lynching in the photograph illuminates the continuity that Chesnutt draws between Tom’s blackface impersonation of Sandy and the near lynching of Sandy. Both kinds of performances represent the black body as not only vulnerable, but also as lacking concrete integrity—a brittle caricature of itself awaiting disassembly. Both forms of entertainment also produce disregard for individuality, in favor of the racial type. As one character says of lynching, “Who remembers even the names of those who have been done to death in the Southern States for the past twenty years?”26 The practices of lynching, particularly the parsing of remains of the victim as souvenirs, exemplify this view of the black body as disconnected from selfhood and thus lacking in real integrity. According to Young, “the lynching souvenir is a spectacular performance remain or, more accurately, a remain of the performance spectacle.”27 The remains allowed for ways of looking that construed the black body as disconnected from the life of a person, neighbor, friend, or family member. Indeed, lynching souvenirs could extend the spectacle violence of the original scene, functioning as a ghastly synecdoche. Writing about the lynching souvenirs taken from the body of George Ward, Young explains that for viewers “It was not George Ward’s toe. It was a black toe. Some nigger’s toe.”28 Similarly, in the novel as young men discuss the prized body parts that they hope to obtain from the corpse, there is no discussion of Sandy, but rather bodily fragments that appear to exist independent of him. Thus, Chesnutt makes clear that these commodified spectacles of lynching served to train white eyes in the rules of viewing black bodies as nothing more than just that, black bodies without meaning beyond their unwilling participation in the theatre of racial violence.

LOOKING AND LYNCHING Though Chesnutt offers no grand solution to the lynching epidemic, he illustrates how the racialized codes of conduct regarding looking must be

110 Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body addressed to consistently prevent lynching. In a chapter entitled “How Not to Prevent a Lynching,” the novel’s primary black characters, Dr. Miller, Watson, the town’s black lawyer, and Josh Green, a working-class man, discuss possible courses of action to prevent the spectacle lynching. Given that being looked at by whites is a prelude to violence against their persons, the black men have few safe options for recourse. Thus, each possibility that they introduce only seems to pose more danger to Sandy and to them. Although Josh has information that would absolve Sandy, the men fear that by coming forward Josh will be viewed as an accomplice. Ultimately, they choose to rely on the honor and loyalty of Sandy’s white employer, but not before they discuss the possibility of seeking help from local, state, and federal governments. By making Delamere an aging man approaching death in the novel, Chesnutt suggests the tenuousness of this solution, and thus he gives consequence to the discussion of the role of the government in protecting its black citizens from mass violence. Ultimately, the novel indicts local, state, and federal governments and their willingness not to see as the central factor in the propagation of mob violence in the U.S. Just as codes of conduct suggest that African Americans must not dare be looked at by whites to avoid injury to themselves, the same codes suggest that whites, including representatives of the government, must willfully be blind to the illegal actions of white assailants. Watson says of the government, “It never sees anything that is not officially called to its attention.”29 Similarly, local officials, including the sheriff turn a blind eye to the plans for the lynching. The sudden onslaught of blindness among Chesnutt’s characters replicates a common response to lynching. Indeed, Arthur Raper points out that “a lynching makes a lot of otherwise good people go blind or lose their memories.”30 Chesnutt had already explored this phenomenon in his fiction. In “The Sheriff’s Children,” the Sheriff, who has vowed to protect his prisoner from a lynch mob, still refuses to recognize members of the crowd in order to protect them from the law. Similarly, in Chesnutt’s novel, Mandy Oxendine, one member of a lynch mob warns another, “Never you min’ who’s here . . . I don’t know a soul in this party, My eyesight’s po’ and my memory’s failin’, so I can’t recollect one day whar I wuz the night befo.’”31 In The Marrow of Tradition, the racially coded culture of witnessing also remains in tact. The very crowd that anxiously waits to look at the lynch victim is blind to the actions of the true criminal, Tom Delamere. Though Chesnutt uncovers the origins of violence in the shifting socioeconomic and political conditions of the post-Reconstruction South, the inclusion of the white tourists who view Tom’s blackface performance, situates race spectacle and by extension racial violence, as larger national problems. This is not to discount the cultural specificity that Chesnutt uncovers, but rather to suggest that the novel also indicates that this culture did not exist in a vacuum and thus comes to bear upon the national consciousness. Certainly, the lynching of Charles Mitchell in Ohio, a

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former free state, is a reminder that the visual culture of lynching was a pervasive force in the U.S. Chesnutt’s novel attempts to help the audience to see the ugly skeletal structures of lynching, the ways in which it is predicated on a larger visual terrain that reinscribes the ideology of white supremacy and re-entrenches the vulnerability of African Americans to violence. Given that he was writing in a cultural moment so saturated with the blood of lynching victims, Chesnutt had to plumb lynching down to its very marrow to clarify the cultural practices of looking that dictated spectacle violence as their fi nale. But rather than offering a solution to lynching, Chesnutt, leaves readers with the sense that ridding the nation of lynching would require a dramatic shift in these traditions of looking and not looking. Indeed, the narrator points out that the prevention of Sandy’s lynching relied on “a slight change in point of view” that ultimately “demonstrated the entire ability of the leading citizens to maintain the dignified and orderly processes of the law whenever they saw fit to do so” [emphasis mine].32 *

*

*

I conclude here with Chesnutt’s novel because he offers an example of what it means to see without looking. While looking is shaped by relationships of power, I conceive of seeing as perceiving the complex power dynamics of our own vision. Chesnutt fi nds ways of seeing the tragedy of racial violence—clarifying the practices of looking as they relate to power, without re-entrenching those power dynamics. For Chesnutt, only through recognizing the forces of spectacle can we dismantle these racialized power structures. In this way, his work is a predecessor to the contemporary visual art included in this book. Chesnutt presents a blueprint for how we might confront the imagery of the wounded black man by seeing the relationship between spectatorship and terror.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 85. 2. See Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and The Mob (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 3. Smith, Photography on the Colorline, 127. 4. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), xx. 5. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 8. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 7. 8. Myrah Jehlen, Readings at the Edge of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002), 113. 9. Donna Haraway, “The Persistence of Vision,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 677. 10. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 11. Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 26. 12. Marianne Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 2 (1997): 308. 13. Cheryl Marie Wade, “I Am Not One Of The,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard Davis (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 408. 14. Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 38. Here Thomson builds on Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque body. For more information see, M.M. Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Texas, 1981), 159. Thomson notes that although Bakhtin does not explicitly relate the notion of the carnivalesque body to disability, he was himself disabled. 15. Ibid., 37. 16. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), xiii.

114 Notes 17. Belinda Smaill, “Injured Identities: Pain, Politics and Documentary,” Studies in Documentary Film 1, no. 2 (2007), 154. 18. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 73–73. 19. I am paraphrasing a statement that Spillers made on a panel entitled “Generations: Scholars, Texts, and Debates in African American Literary Studies,” at the Modern Language Association Conference, San Diego, CA 2003. 20. Hortense Spillers, interviewed by Tim Haslett, Black Cultural Studies Website Collective, February 4, 1998, http://www.blackculturalstudies.org/ spillers/spillers_intvw.html. 21. Kara Walker, interviewed by Elizabeth Armstrong in No Place (Like Home), ed. Elizabeth Armstrong et al., exhibition catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center 1997), 107. 22. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 20–21. 23. Public Enemy, “Hazy Shade of Criminal,” Sony Music Entertainment, 1992. 24. Mark Anthony Neal, New Black Man (New York: Routledge, 2006), 23–24. 25. Wilbert Tatum, “Take Good Care,” New York Amsterdam News, May 22, 2008, 12. 26. “Threats Emerge in Presidential Race,” UPI NewsTrack, May 27, 2008, . 27. Clinton reportedly remarked that “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” Katharine Q. Seelye, “Clinton’s Reference to Killing of Robert Kennedy Stirs Uproar,” New York Times, May 24, 2008. 28. Elisabeth Bumiller and Sarah Wheaton, “In Huckabee Joke, Gun Aims at Obama,” New York Times, May 17, 2008. 29. In an essay entitled “The End of Race as We Know it,” Gerald Early poses the question: “What sign would show that we have arrived at, in effect, the end of America’s racial history? Might the presidency of Barack Obama be the tipping point?” Gerald L. Early, “The End of Race as We Know It,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 10, 2008. In his concession speech, Obama’s opponent, John McCain in effect answered this question by asserting that that the election of Obama proved that the U.S. was “a world away from the cruel and frightful bigotry” of the past. John McCain, “McCain’s Concession Speech, ” New York Times, November 5, 2008, http://www. nytimes.com/2008/11/04/us/politics/04text-mccain.html.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Kathleen Collins, “The Scourged Back,” History of Photography 9, no. 1. (1985): 44. 2. For a discussion of this CD cover, Dead Prez’s Let’s Get Free, see Chapter 3. 3. Collins, “The Scourged Back,” 44. 4. Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” The Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (1978): 862–863. 5. National Antislavery Standard, “The ‘Peculiar Institution’ Illustrated,” June 20, 1863, quoted in Collins, “The Scourged Back,” 45. 6. Augusta Rohrbach, “‘Truth Stronger and Stranger Than Fiction’: Reexamining William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator,” American Literature 73, no. 4 (2001): 745.

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7. Marianne Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 4 (1997): 295. 8. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 246. 9. Ibid., 246–249. 10. Joanne Dobson, “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” American Literature 69, no. 2 (1997): 279. 11. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Sentimental Aesthetics,” American Literature 76, no. 3 (2004): 500. 12. Dillon, “Sentimental Aesthetics,” 498. 13. Harper’s Weekly, “A Typical Negro,” July 4, 1863, 430. According to this article, which accompanied the engraving of The Scourged Back in Harper’s Weekly, the occasion of the photograph was the medical inspection of Gordon before he was mustered into service in the Union army. 14. Robert I. Goler, “Loss and the Persistence of Memory: The Case of George Dedlow and Disabled Civil War Veterans,” Literature and Medicine 23, no. 1 (2004): 168; Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989), 116. 15. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 116. 16. Goler, “Loss and the Persistence of Memory,” 169–170. 17. National Antislavery Standard, June 20, 1863, quoted in Collins 45. This passage was later reprinted on the verso of the English reproduction of the image. 18. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 9. 19. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 4. 20. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 28–29. 21. Ibid., 30. 22. Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding,” 295. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 304. 26. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19. 27. The name of the man pictured was reported in Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863 as Gordon. On the verso of another carte that pictures the same man, he is called Peter. For more on this carte de visite, see note 34. 28. Mary Niall Mitchell, “‘Rosebloom Pure White,’ or So It Seemed,” American Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2002): 394–395. 29. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 59. Trachtenberg is referring to a series of daguerreotypes of slaves commissioned by Louis Agassiz and taken by daguerreotypist, J.T. Zealy in Columbia, South Carolina in 1850. His reference to Hegel’s notion of the master-slave relation, however, seems particularly relevant here as well. 30. Hartman, 94. 31. For a discussion of the significance of scarring and the inscription of black bodies with meaning, see Carol E. Henderson, Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). 32. Mitchell, “‘Rosebloom Pure White,’” 396. 33. Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 3–4.

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34. This carte de visite is held by the U.S. National Archives. The image on the front of the carte de visite is nearly identical to an untitled carte de visite owned by The International Center for Photography. The verso of the ICP photo reads: “Photographed by McPherson & Oliver, Baton Rouge, La.” The ICP image is crisp and detailed. The quality of the National Archives image is somewhat poor in comparison, suggesting that it may be a copy of a copy. The face is positioned slightly away from the camera in comparison to the positioning of the face in “The Scourged Back,” making this appear to be a different man. Ironically, the scars serve as a mark of identity, however, in that the shape of the scar tissue makes it clear that this is indeed, the very same man. I have not located any wood engravings of the ICP carte de visite or the National Archives carte de visite, suggesting that the distribution of these images may not have been as wide as that of “The Scourged Back.” 35. Dennis Patrick Slattery, The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 54. 36. Collins, “The Scourged Back,” 44. 37. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 61. 38. Ibid. 39. Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding,” 296, 307. 40. Ibid., 308. 41. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), 47. 42. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 97. 43. Jim Cullen, “‘I’s a Man Now’: African-American Soldiers and Gender,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, eds. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 85. 44. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 97. 45. Ibid. 46. “A Typical Negro,” Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863, 430. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), 73. 50. Kevin Rozario, “‘Delicious Horrors’: Mass Culture, the Red Cross, and the Appeal of Modern American Humanitarianism,” American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003): 426. 51. Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Secker & Warburg, 1988), 7. 52. For a discussion of the eroticization of pain in reform literature, see Karen Halttunen “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo American Culture,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 303–334. 53. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67. 54. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 4.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11; Brian Massumi, A Shock to Thought: Expressions after Deleuze and Guattari (London; New York: Routledge, 2002).

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2. Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, 1995), 12. 3. Ibid., 3. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 11. 7. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability In American Culture And Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 8. 8. Ibid. 9. Karen Sanchez Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” Representations 24, no. Fall (1988): 36. 10. Marianne Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 4 (1997): 295. 11. Ibid., 10. 12. Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 7. 13. Carrie Mae Weems, Modern Voices (from the exhibition Out of Time: A Contemporary View, August 30, 2006–April 9, 2007), Audio, http://www. moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A71 77&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1. 14. Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 30. 15. Thomas Piché, “Reading Carrie Mae Weems,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Recent Work, 1992–1998 (New York: George Braziller in association with Everson Museum of Art, 1998), 10. 16. Cherise Smith, “Fragmented Documents: Works by Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Willie Robert Middlebrook at the Art Institute of Chicago,” in African Americans in Art: Selections from the Art Institute of Chicago, ed. Susan F.N.L. Rosen (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1999), 119. 17. Thelma Golden, “Some Thoughts on Carrie Mae Weems,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Recent Work, 1992–1998 (New York: George Braziller in association with Everson Museum of Art, 1998), 29–30. 18. In 1850, the famous scientist Louis Agassiz commissioned J.T. Zealey to take photographs of slaves in Columbia, South Carolina. According to Brian Wallis, the point of the photographs was to create photographic evidence of racial differences between Africans and Europeans and to ultimately prove black inferiority. See Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (1995): 39–61. 19. Smith, “Fragmented Documents,” 119. 20. Madhu Dubey, “The Politics of Genre in Beloved,” Novel 32, no. 2 (1999): 195. 21. Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 5. 22. Dubey, “The Politics of Genre,” 187. 23. Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” Thought 59 (1984): 387. 24. Dubey, “The Politics of Genre,” 188. 25. Toni Morrison “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” by Nellie McKay, Contemporary Literature 24, no. 4 (1983): 426. 26. Dubey, “The Politics of Genre,” 193. 27. Piché, “Reading Carrie Mae Weems,” 15–16. 28. Piché, “Reading Carrie Mae Weems,” 10. 29. Lisa Saltzman and Eric M. Rosenberg, “Introduction,” in Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, ed. Lisa Saltzman and Eric M. Rosenberg (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2006), xi–xii.

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30. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: vintage, 2004), 43. 31. Bruce Simon, “Traumatic Repetition in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” in Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century, ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker (New York: New York UP, 1997), 104. 32. Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 8. 33. Gillian Harkins, “Seduction by Law: Sexual Property and Testimonial Possession in Thereafter Johnnie,” Discourse 25, no. 1 (2003): 139. 34. Anne Cubilié and Carl Good, “Introduction: The Future of Testimony,” Discourse 25, no. 1 (2004): 5. 35. Simon, “Traumatic Repetition,” 104. 36. Ibid. 37. Bennett, “Empathic Vision,” 11.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. 50 Cent, From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens (London: Pocket, 2004), 2. 2. I have chosen to refer to hip hop artists by given names and stage names to signify the striking ways in which they integrate personal biography and stage personas. 3. 50 Cent, From Pieces, 2. 4. Ibid. 5. Elizabeth Alexander, “‘Can you be BLACK and look at this?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 92. 6. According to trial transcripts, Sergeant Stacy Koon compared King to a “wounded animal,” and testified that he believed King to be under the influence of the illegal drug, PCP, which later proved false: “It’s a kinda like a policeman’s nightmare that the individual that’s under this is super strong ah they have more or less a one track mind they exhibit super strength, they equate it with a monster is what they equate it with.” For more see, University of Missouri Kansas City Law School, Famous American Trials: Los Angeles Police Officers’ (Rodney King Beating) Trials, http://www.law.umkc.edu/ faculty/projects/FTrials/lapd/lapd.html. 7. 50 Cent, From Pieces, 2. 8. Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 2, (2005): 276. 9. Margena A. Christian, “Nelly: Hot Rap Star Sounds Off on Being No. 1, His Pop Appeal and the Role of an Entertainer,” Jet, August 5, 2002, 62. 10. 50 Cent, From Pieces, 2. 11. Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien, “Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity: A Dossier,” in Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, ed. Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), 149. 12. Ben Sisario, “Jeepers Rappers, Where’d You Get Those Arms and Torsos?” New York Times, January 15, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/ arts/music/15hiph.html?_r=1. 13. For a thorough discussion of this shift, see Charise L. Cheney’s Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism (New York: New York University, 2005), 5–8.

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14. Scott Poulson-Bryant, Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 182–183. 15. Ibid., 182. 16. Ibid., 183. 17. Allen Ellenzweig, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/ Delacroix to Mapplethorpe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2. 18. Mercer and Julien, “Race, Sexual Politics,” 134. 19. Ibid., 133. 20. Ibid., 134. 21. bell hooks, “Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic,” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 79. 22. Ibid., 80. 23. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 112–113. 24. Daniel Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 4. 25. Ibid, 5. 26. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 30. 27. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 19. 28. Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 68. 29. Poulson-Bryant, Hung, 7. 30. Harvey Young, “The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching,” Theatre Journal 57 (2005): 646. 31. Ibid. 32. Hortense Spillers, “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, The Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, eds. Arnold Rampersand and Deborah McDowell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 44–46. 33. Marianne Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 10, no. 2 (1997): 297. 34. Ibid., 308. 35. Mercer and Julien, “Race, Sexual Politics,” 133. 36. Ellenzweig, “The Homoerotic Photograph,” 64. 37. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 171; Mulvey, Visual and Other, 14–26. 38. Todd Boyd, The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 71. 39. Kim, Writing Manhood, 50. 40. Deborah McDowell, “Viewing the Remains: A Polemic on Death, Spectacle, and the [Black] Family,” in The Familial Gaze (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 169. 41. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 109. 42. Sisario, “Jeepers, Rappers.” 43. Ibid. 44. A recent internet ad campaign reflects this treatment of Jackson’s wounded body. The ad included a website banner game that allegedly pictured an animated likeness of Jackson and text that read, “shoot the rapper and you will win $5,000 or five ring tones guaranteed.” Jackson sued the company, arguing that the game encouraged attempts on his life. But ironically, the game shares an ideological

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Notes

framework with the “Many Men” video and the Get Rich or Die Tryin’ CD cover. All of these images facilitate fantasies of wounding black men. The interactiveness of the game makes apparent the ways in which vicarious wounding is essential to such images. “50 Cent sues ad company, says it illegally used his image in violent game online.” Associated Press, July 20, 2007, Newsbank. 45. Thelma Golden, “My Brother,” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 19.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. Hank W. Thomas, “Swoosh: Looking Black at Nike, Moses, and Jordan in the 80s,” MFA Thesis (Oakland: California College of the Arts, 2004), 5. 2. For more on these drawings and their inclusion in broadsides, see Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America (New York: Routledge, 2000), 22. 3. Thomas, “Swoosh,” 3. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 8. 6. Hank W. Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, http://hankwillisthomas.com/ portfolio.html. 7. Thomas, “Swoosh,” 2–3. 8. Ibid., 5. 9. The seal created by Josiah Wedgwood pictures a childlike black man kneeling with hands clasped. Chains dangle from shackles that bind his wrists and feet. His head tilts upward as the question “Am I not a man and a brother?” hovers above him. By the late eighteenth century the image was plastered on an array of commercial goods; including buttons, broaches, sugar bowls and snuff pots. For more information see, Jeannine Marie DeLombard, Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 35. 10. William C. Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 6. 11. Ibid., 50. 12. Ibid., 54. The case of boxer Tom Molineaux supports these contradictions that Rhoden outlines. Enslaved on a plantation in Virginia, Molineaux worked as a fighter for his master who placed bets on his performances. After receiving a challenge from a neighbor, Molineaux’s master went as far as to hire a boxing trainer to prepare Molineaux for the match. When the trainer complained that Molineaux was not training hard enough to win the match, his master had Molineaux flogged. Molineaux won the match and was granted his freedom along with $500. He then made his way to England where he became a professional boxer. With the scars of slavery on his back exposed, Molineux boxed in one of the most celebrated matches in England. Sport had become the means of liberation for Molineux. At the same time, it was a way in which his master exploited, abused, and profited from his body. For more on Molineaux’s experiences as a slave and athlete see, Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slave, 38–54. 13. Many critics have argued that contemporary athletics mimics the power dynamics of a plantation in which the largest stakes are reserved for the owners. Certainly, the lexicon, which includes terms, such as “the trade” and “owners,” supports this. Not surprisingly resistance to this view has emerged from various corners. In 1999, when NBA player Larry Johnson once referred to himself and

Notes

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

121

his teammates as “a lot of rebellious slaves,” he faced a torrent of media criticism, which echoed the biting sarcasm of one white heckler who shouted at him: “Hey Johnson you’re nothing but a 40 million dollar slave.” See Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slave, 237. Cultural critics have also sought to explore the ways in which the game has become a site of black cultural expression and creativity, despite the exploitive factor. According to Michael Eric Dyson, “There is also the creative use of desire and fantasy by young blacks to counter, and capitulate to, the forces of cultural dominance that attempt to reduce the black body to a commodity and text that is employed for entertainment, titillation, or financial gain.” Still, Dyson points out that despite the ways in which the game functions as a site of black expression, it is “indissolubly linked to the culture of consumption and the commodification of black culture.” See Michael Eric Dyson, “Be Like Mike?: Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire” in Michael Jordan Inc: Corporate Sport Media Culture, and Late Modern America, ed. David L. Andrews, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 264. For a reprint and discussion of the original ad, see Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 60. Huey Copeland, “Being in the Picture: Hank Willis Thomas’s Frames Series,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 138. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 32 (Autumn 1985): 84. I am indebted to Huey Copeland’s thoughtful analysis of Thomas’s Frames series. In the essay, Copeland points out the relevance of Metz’s theory to Thomas’s art. Copeland, “Being in the Picture,” 138. Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” 87. Thomas, “Swoosh,” 10. Ibid., 10. David L. Andrews “The Fact(s) of Michael Jordan’s Blackness: Excavating a Floating Racial Signifier,” in Michael Jordan Inc: Corporate Sport Media Culture, and Late Modern America, ed. David L. Andrews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 108. Norman K. Denzin, “Representing Michael” in Michael Jordan Inc: Corporate Sport Media Culture, and Late Modern America, ed. David L. Andrews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 11. Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson, Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh (London: Sage, 1998), 47. Ibid. Denzin, “Representing Michael,” 130; Sara Banet-Weiser, “Hoop Dreams: Professional Basketball and the Politics of Race and Gender,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 23, no. 4. (1999): 406–407. Denzin, “Representing Michael,” 130. C.L. Cole, “Nike’s America/America’s Michael Jordan” in Michael Jordan Inc: Corporate Sport Media Culture, and Late Modern America, ed. David L. Andrews, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 76–78. Rick Telander, “Senseless,” Sports Illustrated, May 14, 1990, 37. Ibid., 44. Selim Algar, “Sneaker Thieves Making Comeback,” New York Post, July 25, 2005, Newsbank. Thomas J. Gibbons Jr., “4th Suspect Arrested in Nightclub Slaying a Young Rap Artist, A Bystander During a Robbery, Was Shot at Club Evolution on Delaware Avenue,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 29, 2000, Newsbank. Hank Willis Thomas, Interview by Clarissa T. Sligh, “Picturing Us Together: Deborah Willis and Hank Willis Thomas,” The International Review of African American Art 20, no. 3 (2005): 46.

122 Notes 33. Interestingly, art played a peculiar role in the case against Willis’s murderers. During the trial, prosecutors entered into evidence a drawing that police found in the home of one of the murderers. Prosecutors described the drawing, which depicted the execution of the victims in careful detail, as a “Kodak picture” of the murder. The drawing was a key piece of evidence in the trial. See Jacqueline Soteropoulos, “N.J. Men are Found Guilty of Delaware Avenue Killings.” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 23, 2002. Newsbank. 34. Hank Willis Thomas, http://hankwillisthomas.com. 35. Hank Willis Thomas, “Sunday Op Ed,” Birmingham News, August 12, 2007, quoted in Art Participant: http://www.charlesguice.com/art_ participant/2007/08/looking-for-answers-or-at-leas.php.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and The Mob (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 23. Although I use the term “lynched,” Apel is more specific, explaining that in this time frame, “4,800 African Americans were killed by extralegal means—tortured, shot, hanged, or burned to death, mostly but not exclusively in the South.” 2. Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America 1890–1940 (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 85. 3. Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 122. 4. Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 219. 5. This debate, however, is not new or exclusive to this exhibit. When the NAACP sponsored an anti-lynching art exhibit in 1935, they intended to include lynching photographs and even offered a prize for the best lynching photo. But in the end, exhibition organizers were wary of their ability to recontextualize lynching photography in an anti-racist context, and consequently they decided to omit this portion of the exhibit. See Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 303. 6. Nina Burleigh, “Pictures from an Execution,” New York Magazine, January 24, 2000, 17. 7. Ibid. 8. Anthony Lee, “Introduction,” in Lynching Photography, by Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 4. 9. Burleigh, “Pictures from an Execution,” 17. 10. Quoted in Anne P. Rice, Witnessing Lynching (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 2. 11. According to Jacquelyn Goldsby, Crisis magazine published lynching photographs submitted by readers as early as 1912. Jacquelyn Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 391. 12. Lee, 4. 13. James Polchin, “Not Looking at Lynching Photographs,” in The Image and the Witness, eds. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 212. 14. Polchin, “Not Looking,” 215. 15. For another view, see Polchin, “Not Looking,” 213. Polchin argues that by focusing on the larger trajectory of historical racial violence, the exhibit focused patrons on their own emotional reactions to the images rather than on interrogating the images themselves. 16. Scott Durham, Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 55.

Notes

123

17. Polchin, “Not Looking,” 217. 18. David Griffith, A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2006), 104. 19. Mary Thomas, “‘Without Sanctuary’ Digs Deeply Into Painful Issues of Inhumanity,” Post-Gazette.com, February 15, 2010, http://www.postgazette.com/ae/20010929thomas0929fnp5.asp. 20. Dora Apel, “On Looking: Lynching Photographs and Legacies of Lynching after 9/11,” American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003), 461. 21. Ibid., 463. 22. Ibid., 465. 23. Natasha Barnes, “On Without Sanctuary,” NKA 20 (2006): 91. 24. Catherine Fox, “Record Crowds See Lynching Photo Exhibit,” Atlanta Journal- Constitution, August 31, 2002, A1. 25. Ibid. 26. Deborah E. McDowell, “Viewing the Remains: a Polemic on Death, Spectacle, and the [Black] Family,” in The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 169. 27. James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynchings in America, http://withoutsanctuary.org/ 28. Jonathan Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 140–141. 29. Ibid., 141. 30. Ibid. 31. Quoted in Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 264. 32. Ibid., 265. 33. Smith, “Photography on the Colorline,” 135. 34. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), xx. 35. Kerry James Marshall interviewed by Jeffrey Brown on “NewsHour: An Artist’s History,” PBS, November 28, 2003. 36. Shawn Michelle Smith, “In the Crowd,” African American Review 42, no. 1 (2008): 41. 37. Ibid., 42–46. 38. Ibid., 41. 39. Apel, “On Looking,” 427.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature 1890–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 77. 2. Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 184. 3. Angelo Rich Robinson, “Race, Place and Space: Remaking Whiteness in the PostReconstruction South,” The Southern Literary Journal 35, no. 1 (2002): 106. 4. Charles W. Chesnutt, “Charles W. Chesnutt’s Own View of His New Story ‘The Marrow of Tradition,’” Cleveland World, October 20, 1901, in Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, eds. Joseph McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz, III, and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 169. 5. “Two Citizens Killed; Nine Others Wounded in Urbana Ohio, by the Troops Defending Charles Mitchell from a Mob. The Negro Afterward Taken Out of Jail and Lynched,” New York Times June 5, 1897, 1.

124 Notes 6. For an astute account of this debate, including primary source materials from nineteenth-century newspapers see http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/ lynching/ UrbanaLynch.cfm. 7. James Allen, ed. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers), plate 72. 8. Deborah McDowell, “Viewing the Remains: A Polemic on Death, Spectacle, and the [Black] Family,” The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsh (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 168. 9. Though referred to as a riot, the racial violence that broke out in Wilmington, North Carolina on November 10, 1898 might just as easily be referred to as a massacre. African-American citizens were attacked by armed crowds of white supremacists. Accounts of the number of blacks killed have varied widely from nine to over one hundred. Countless homes and businesses owned by African Americans were destroyed. For an account of the Wilmington riots see, H. Leon Prather, We Have Taken a City: The Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898 (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984). 10. Bryan Wagner, “Charles Chesnutt and the Epistemology of Racial Violence,” American Literature 73, no. 2 (2001): 312. 11. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, ed. Nancy Bentley and Sandra Gunning (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2002), 156. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 178. 14. Ibid. 15. Kirk W. Fuoss, “Lynching Performances, Theatres of Violence,” Text and Performance Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1999): 5–6. 16. Harvey Young, “The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching,” Theater Journal 57 (2005): 645. 17. Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Colorline: W.E.B. Du Bois Race and Visual Culture (Durham : Duke, 2004), 121. 18. Chesnutt, Marrow, 154. 19. Ibid., 160. 20. Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 249. 21. Fuoss, “Lynching Performances,” 16. 22. Nancy Bentley and Sandra Gunning, “Introduction: Cultural and Historical Background,” The Marrow of Tradition, eds. Nancy Bentley and Sandra Gunning (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 22. 23. Felipe Smith, American Body Politics: Race, Gender, and Black Literary Renaissance (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1998), 149. 24. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “The Red Record,” in On Lynching: Southern Horrors, a Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans (New York: Arno 1969), 28; quoted in Fuoss, “Lynching Performances,” 16. 25. Allen, Without Sanctuary, title page. 26. Chesnutt, Marrow, 218. 27. Young, “The Black Body,” 641. 28. Ibid., 652. 29. Chesnutt, Marrow, 162. 30. Arthur Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Minneola: Dover, 2003), 40. 31. Charles Chesnutt, Mandy Oxendine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 103. 32. Chesnutt, Marrow, 186.

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Index

Note: References in bold type are to fi gures and are placed at the end of page number sequences. 50 Cent, see Jackson, Curtis 9/11 events 83, 84

A abolitionism 12, 32–4 abolitionist literature, see anti-slavery literature Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock (Williams) 92–4, 96, 91 advertising 47–8, 49, 62–3, 65–71 aesthetics 16 Agassiz, Louis 117 n.18 Alexander, Elizabeth 42 Allen, James 77, 80, 81, 84, 87 alternative hip hop 58 Ames, Jesse Daniels 85 Anderson, Alexander, Injured Humanity 62 Andrews, David L. 70–1 Andy Warhol Museum 81–4 anti-slavery literature 18, 20, 21, 62; truth and 14–15; see also Uncle Tom’s Cabin Antislavery Standard 18 Apel, Dora 3, 84 art, and appropriation of lynching photographs 91–101 Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching 85 athletic culture 65–71, 120 n.12 and 13 autonomous subjectivity 16–17

B Bakhtin, Mikhail 113 n.14 Banet-Weiser, Sarah 71 Barthes, Roland 66

Basketball and Chain (Thomas) 65, 68, 75, 64 beauty 59; standards of 18, 20 Beitler, Lawrence 8, 96 Beloved (Morrison) 38 Bennett, Jill 30 Bentley, Nancy 108 black inferiority/white superiority 32–3 “Black Jesus” (Shade) 47 Black Skin, White Mask (Fanon) 52–3 “Black and Tan Fantasy” (Ellington) 7, 39 Black and Tanned (Weems) 30, 32, 34–6, 37, 39–40, 31 black women 3, 8, 97 blackness 4, 32, 33, 39; and suffering 45 blues rhythms 41 Bradley, Mamie Till 86 branded consciousness 65 Branded Head (Thomas) 72, 74–5 Branded series (Thomas) 62–76 branding 62–76 Brecht, Bertolt 33 Brown, Wendy 6 Byrd, James 10

C capitalist economy 63 Carby, Hazel 53 carnival 108–9 carnivalesque body 113 n.14 Chang, Jeff 48, 60 The Chase Mastercard (Thomas) 62–3, 68, 63 Chesnutt, Charles: Mandy Oxendine 110; The Marrow of Tradition 10,

134

Index

102–11; “The Sheriff’s Children” 110 Civil Rights movement 86 Clinton, Hillary 11 Cobb, Howard 26 collective memory 39 collective other 31–2 colonial fantasy 51 Combs, Sean (Puff Daddy) 57 commercialism 47–8, 49, 62–3, 65–71 commodification 65 commodity fetishism 57, 58 connectivity 16–17 consumption, culture of 9–10 Copeland, Huey 68 Crawford, Anthony 85 crime, brand name items and 72 Crisis 79 crucifixion images 48, 54–5, 57–8, 47, 56 Cubilié, Anne 40 Cullen, Countee 84 Cullen, Jim 26

D Dale, W.J. 14 Davis, Lennard 30–1, 32 Dead Prez 61; Let’s Get Free 58–9; “They Schools” 59 death 72–5 Death and Disaster series (Warhol) 81, 82–3 DeLuca, Michael 45 Denzin, Norman K. 71 desire 25, 30; economy of 10 Dessa Rose (Williams) 36 difference 3–4, 17 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock 16 disability 4, 5, 9, 30–6; non-normate status 33 dissection, rituals of 54 DMX, see Simmons, Earl Dobson, J. 16 documentary photography 35 Don Killumati: The Seven Day Theory (Shakur) 55 double-consciousness 5 Douglass, Frederick 26 Dre Dog 55 Dubey, Madhu 36, 37 DuBois, W.E.B. 5 Durham, Scott 83

Ebony 11 Ellenzweig, Allen 50, 57 Ellington, Duke, “Black and Tan Fantasy” 7, 39 Ellison, Ralph 3 Emory University, Atlanta 84 empathic experience 33 eroticism/eroticization 24–9, 33–4, 45, 49, 50, 58–9

F Facing History and Ourselves organization 80 Fanon, Frantz 51, 57; Black Skin, White Mask 52–3 feminization: of black male body 4, 5; of disabled figures 33 fetishization 48, 49, 55, 57, 58, 65 fiction: neo-slave 36–7; portrayals of slavery in 4–5, 12, 14–15, 20; and truth 14–15; see also Chesnutt, Charles; Stowe, Harriet Beecher 50 Cent, see Jackson, Curtis First Round Draft Pick (Thomas) 66 Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood (DMX) 52, 52, 53 Foucault, Michel 57 Fouss, Kirk 107 From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems) 35–6 From Pieces to Weight (50 Cent) 42

G gangsta rap 50 gay pornography 50, 51 the gaze 4, 33, 50–4, 57; power of 30, 31, 57; white male 51, 57 gender 4, 9 Get Rich or Die Trying (50 Cent) 44–5, 48, 120 n.44, 44 Gliddon, George R. 18 Golden, Thelma 35, 61 Goldman, Robert 71 Goldsby, Jacqueline 108 Goler, Robert I. 17 Good, Carl 40 The Greek Slave (Hiram Powers) 20 grief, commercialism and 71–5 Griffith, David 83 Gunning, Sandra 102, 108

E

H

Earl, The Autobiography of DMX 52

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd 3, 96–7, 99

Index Hangtime (Circa 1923) (Thomas) 65, 70, 71, 72, 69 Haraway, Donna 4 Harold, Christine 45 Harper’s Weekly 22, 26, 27 Harris, Michael 30 Harris, Trudier 102–3 Hartman, Saidiya 21, 22 “Hate Me Now” (Nasir “Nas” Jones) 57–8 Hayes, Cornell “Nelly” 46 “Hazy Shade of Criminal” (Public Enemy) 8, 85 Hegel, G.W.F. 22 Heirlooms and Accessories (Marshall) 96–7, 95 “Hidden Witness” exhibit (Getty Museum) 35 hip hop culture 9, 42–61 Hirsch, Marianne 39 Holiday, Billie, “Strange Fruit” 7, 39, 81 homoeroticism 49, 50 homophobia 50 homosocial culture 50 hooks, bell 8, 51 Hoop Dreams (film) 68 Huckabee, Mike 11 Hughes, Langston 84 Hurt, Byron 50 hyper-masculinity 45

I ideal human form 18, 20 identity: injured 6; self- 5–6, 65–6; visual conceptions of 20 identity positions 3, 4 In the Crowd series (Smith) 98–101, 98, 100 Injured Humanity (Anderson) 62 injured identities 6

J J. Paul Getty Museum 35 Jackson, Curtis (50 Cent) 5, 7, 42–5, 48, 54, 60–1; From Pieces to Weight 42; Get Rich or Die Trying 44–5, 48, 120 n.44, 44; “Many Men” 60–1, 120 n.44 “Jamaica Flux” exhibition 75 jazz 39, 41 Jean, Wyclef 60 Johnson, Doria 85 Johnson, Larry 120–1 n.13

135

Jones, Nasir “Nas” 45, 55; “Hate Me Now” 57–8; Naz 45, 43 Jordan, Brad (Scarface) 55 Jordan, Joseph 99 Jordan, Michael 65, 68, 70–1 Julien, Isaac 48, 50, 51

K Kim, Daniel Y. 51 King, Rodney 10, 43 Klein, Calvin 49 Kool J, L.L. 49 Ku Klux Klan 1–2

L LaChapelle, David 56 Lee, Anthony 79 Lee, Spike 72 Let’s Get Free (Dead Prez) 58–9 Life magazine 92, 94 literature, see anti-slavery literature; fiction Littlefield, John 77, 80, 81 the look 51, 57 looking 10, 107–8, 109–11 Louima, Abner 10 lynching 10, 39, 54, 65, 71, 75, 102–11 lynching photography 3, 8, 10, 71, 75, 77–101

M McDowell, Deborah 86 maleness 2 Mandy Oxendine (Chesnutt) 110 Mannion, Jonathan 52, 53 “Many Men” (50 Cent) 60–1, 120 n.44 Mapplethorpe, Robert 49 Markovitz, Jonathan 90 Marky Mark 49 The Marrow of Tradition (Chesnutt) 10, 102–11 Marshall, Kerry James 10, 78, 91; Heirlooms and Accessories 96–7, 95 Martin Luther King Center 84–6 masculinity 27; hyper- 45 mass media 28 Massumi, Brian 30 master-slave relation 22 MasterCard ads 73–4, 75 MC Lyte 49 medical photography 17 memory: body and construction of 39; collective 39; cultural 34; traumatic 32, 37–9, 40

136

Index

Mercer, Kobena 48, 50, 51 Metz, Christian 70 minstrelsy 108–9 Mitchell, Charles 103–4, 110 Mitchell, Mary Niall 21 Molineaux, Tom 120 n.12 Morrison, Toni 36–7; Beloved 38 Mulvey, Laura 4, 53, 57 Mushnick, Phil 72 music 39, 41; see also Ellington, Duke; hip hop culture; Holiday, Billie

N Nas (Nas) 45, 43 NBA 65, 66 “NBA Trade” (Thomas) 68 Neal, Mark Anthony 8–9 neo-slave narratives 36–7 New York Historical Society (NYHS) 80–1, 86 New York Independent 14 New York Post 72 New York Times 11, 28, 60 Nikatina, Andre (Dre Dog) 55 Nike 65, 68, 71, 72, 75; Air Jordan brand 70, 72; Jumpman logo 70 9/11 events 83, 84 Noble, Marianne 4–5, 15, 21, 25, 33, 55 normal/abnormal body 4 normate/nonnormate 4, 33 Nott, J.C. 18

O Obama, Barack 10–11, 90 objectification 51; erotic 9 Olujimi, Kambui 74 oppression 3, 4, 6 other, collective 31–2 otherness 17, 25

P pain, visualization of 59–61 Papson, Stephen 71 patriarchy 8, 97 Peluce, Meeno 43 phallus, black 53–4 photography 12–29, 30–41, 68, 70; artistic 15–16; and black subjectivity 35–6, 38; and cultural memory 34; documentary 35; lynching 3, 8, 10, 71, 75, 77–101; medical 17; as realistic medium 12, 15–16, 20; testimony of 22; and truth 14, 32

Piché, Thomas 35, 37 Pittsburgh Courier 81 Polchin, James 80, 83 Pony sneaker ads 48, 47 pornography 28–9; gay 50, 51 positivism 15 Poulson-Bryant, Scott 49, 54 Powers, Hiram, The Greek Slave 20 Priceless #1 (Thomas) 73–4, 75, 76, 73 prison aesthetic 46, 47, 50 Pruitt, Robert 30 Public Enemy, “Hazy Shade of Criminal” 8, 85 Puff Daddy 57

R race 4, 8, 9 racial difference 3 racism 6–7, 8, 9; and the look 51 Raper, Arthur 110 rappers: women 49; see also hip hop culture readability of bodies 33 realism 12, 15–16, 17, 20 religious imagery 48, 54–5, 57–8, 47, 56 rememory 38 Reynolds, David 28 Rhoden, William C. 66, 68 Rohrbach, A. 14 Rolling Stone 45, 56 Rosenberg, Eric 38 Roth, Andrew 78–9 Roth Horowitz Gallery 78–80 Rozario, Kevin 28

S Sanchez-Eppler, Karen 16, 33 Savage, Kirk 18, 20, 24–5 Scarface (Brad Jordan) 55 Scarred Chest (Thomas) 68, 70, 67 The Scourged Back 9, 12–29, 30, 13; as anti-slavery image 14–15, 18, 21; as erotic image 24–9; evocation of ideal human form 20; and pro-slavery sentiment 24; and realism 12, 16, 17, 20; and sentimentalism 12, 15, 16, 17, 22, 25, 29; as visual truth 14, 15 sculpture 20 Sekula, Allan 14 self-identity 5–6, 65–6 sensationalism 28 sentimental wounding 15, 25, 33

Index sentimentalism 12, 14–17, 22, 25, 29, 33 sex kitten rappers 49 sexism 8, 9, 96–7 sexual exploitation 3, 28, 29 Shade, Claude, “Black Jesus” 47 Shakur, Tupac 50, 54, 55; Don Killumati: The Seven Day Theory 55; “Smile” 54–5 shared humanity 16 Shipp, Thomas 8, 96 Simmons, Earl (DMX) 52–3; Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood 52, 52, 53 Simon, Bruce 38, 40 Slattery, Dennis Patrick 24 slavery 32, 39, 62; abuses of 12, 14, 28, 29; and athletic competition 66, 120–1 n.12 and 13; legacies of 30, 63; portrayed in fiction 4–5, 12, 14–15, 20; sensationalism of 28–9; trauma of 32, 40 Small, Belinda 6 “Smile” (Brad Jordan/Shakur) 54–5 Smith, Abe 8, 96 Smith, Cherise 35, 36 Smith, Felipe 108–9 Smith, Henry 109 Smith, Shawn Michelle 3, 10, 20, 78, 91, 107; In the Crowd series 98–101, 98, 100 soldiers 26, 27 Sontag, Susan 29, 59 spectacle/spectatorship 102–11 Spillers, Hortense 6, 55 sports and branding black men 65–71 Sprewell, Latrell 71 steroid use 59–60 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 4–5, 12, 14, 20, 55–6, 58 “Strange Fruit” (Holiday) 7, 39, 81 strip-tease 48 subjectivity: autonomous 16–17; black 35–6, 38 superhuman image 60 survival 40 “Swoosh: Looking Black at Nike, Moses, and Jordan in the 80s” (Thomas) 65

T terror 7 testimony 39–40, 45; of photography 22 “The Sheriff’s Children” (Chesnutt) 110

137

“They Schools” (Dead Prez) 59 Thomas, Hank Willis 5, 7, 9–10, 30, 62–76; Basketball and Chain 65, 68, 75, 64; Branded Head 72, 74–5; Branded series 62–76; The Chase Mastercard 62–3, 68, 63; First Round Draft Pick 66; Hangtime (Circa 1923) 65, 70, 71, 72, 69; “NBA Trade” 68; Priceless #1 73–4, 75, 76, 73; Scarred Chest 68, 70, 67; “Swoosh: Looking Black at Nike, Moses, and Jordan in the 80s” 65; Winter in America 74–5 Thomas, Mary 84 Thomas, Michael Eugene 72 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland 4, 5, 33 Till, Emmett 86 Timbaland 60 Towle, S.K. 14, 24 Trachtenberg, Allan 17 trauma, as testimonial act 39–40 traumatic memory 32, 37–9, 40 truth 14–15, 32; visual 14, 15 Tyson, Mike 8

U Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 4–5, 12, 14, 20, 55–6, 58 urban violence 45 USA Today 1, 11

V victimization 7, 9 violence: black-on-black 7, 72; spectacle 102–11; urban 45 visuality, of traumatic experience 37–9

W Wade, Cheryl Marie 5 Wagner, Brian 105 Wagner, Peter 28–9 Wahlberg, Mark (Marky Mark) 49 Waldman, Sach 44 Walker, Kara 6–7 Ward, George 109 Warhol, Andy, Death and Disaster series 81, 82–3 Washington, Desiree 8 Washington, Jesse 87 Webb, Lavell “City Spud” 46 Weems, Carrie Mae 5, 7, 9, 30–41; Black and Tanned 30, 32, 34–6,

138

Index

37, 39–40, 31; From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried 35–6 Wells, Ida B. 81 West, Kanye 45, 55, 56 white supremacy 3, 71, 77, 79, 90, 91, 97, 104 white women 3; and lynching 97, 98–9, 100; and subjugation of black people 96–7 whiteness 3, 18, 20, 97; and bodily integrity 45 Williams, Pat Ward 10, 78, 91; Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock 92–4, 96, 91 Williams, Patricia 79 Williams, Sherley Anne, Dessa Rose 36

Willis, Songha T. 72–3, 74–5 Wilmington riots 104, 124 n.9 Winter in America (Thomas) 74–5 “Without Sanctuary” exhibit 77–8, 80–91 Withoutsanctuary.org 86–91 “Witness” exhibit 78–80 women: rappers 49; see also black women; white women Wood, Amy Louise 77 wounded attachment 6

Y Young, Harvey 54, 107, 109

Z Zealey, J.T. 117 n.18