Racial Violence and Representation: Performance Strategies in Lynching Dramas of the 1920s

Abstract

Plays representing history of lynching in United States are only beginning to be understood as a distinctly American theatrical genre, a type of drama that began to appear at least as early as 1905 and continues to evolve on contemporary stage. As first anthology to address how horrors of lynching have been represented in American theatre, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, which Kathy A. Perkins and I edited in 1998, reveals genre's historical continuity and speaks to its prior neglect in areas of theatre history and dramatic criticism. Except for my studies and those by Perkins and Winona Fletcher, lynching drama, as a body of work, has remained unrecognized and unexamined. [1] For purposes of this study, lynching means racially motivated murder of black individuals (primarily black men) by white mobs with no repercussions for perpetrators. Victims of lynchings were hung, beaten, burned, or stabbed to death; they were commonly tortured and/or castrate d before they were killed. This particular version of lynching developed during Reconstruction and became a systematic feature and official indicator of black-white relations until 1950s. [2] As a form of racial violence, lynching was fostered by an ideology of white supremacy which developed and flourished in United States after abolition of slavery. [3] In context of institutionalized white supremacy, black men and women, no longer valuable property as slaves, increasingly became victims of lynchings, and lynching clearly became a manifestation of black-white relations in United States. While racial theorists generally agree that no scientific proof exists as a basis for racial determination, contemporary critical thought has challenged very concept of as a useful category, arguing that race, similar to categories such as gender, is a social construct. [4] According to Omi and Winant, for example, race is indeed a pre-eminently sociohistorical concept. Racial categories and meaning of are given concrete expression by specific social relations and historical context in which they are embedded (60). Lynching dramas, then, provide insight into an understanding of as a social construct in United States since they reflect a distinctly American phenomenon shaped by African American struggle for survival in a white-dominated culture, as well as simultaneous existence of interracial conflict and cooperation that has characterized black-white relations throughout American history. For nearly a century, lynching was a highly visible and concrete exp ression of institutionalized white supremacy and a symbol of existing power relations between black and white races in United States; its legacy lives on in numerous incidents of racial violence and hate crimes that continue to occur in American society today. [5] Although brutal public ritual which these plays address for most part no longer occurs, history of lynching, as well as cultural legacy of lynching drama, continues to shape our understanding of in America. In a 1996 article, Jaquelin Goldsby refers to lynching as the image that compresses horrific brutality of America's racial history with regard to African Americans into a single act (246), and Nellie McKay has described lynching as one of most heinous atrocities that white America has ever perpetuated against black America. Perhaps no other outrage against blacks, except slavery, has ever elicited as uniform a consensus in its condemnation by black people from all walks of life ... (141). As a growing body of work, lynching dramas function as a dynamic cultural text by both conserving memory of this particular form of racial violence and continuing to evolve as an theatrical genre on American stage. Thus, an examination of lynching drama provides a focus on a c ultural legacy based on a specific and uniquely American form of racial violence that continues to play a fundamental role in constructing an understanding of a national identity as well as black and white racial identities in United States. …