Witnessing horror: Psychoanalysis and the abject stain of lynching photography

Abstract

This article engages Lacanian and Kristevan psychoanalysis to examine lynching photographs and picture postcards that were disseminated throughout the southern United States between 1890 and 1940. I argue that these photographs are not only archival objects intended to incite racial terrorization and propagate white supremacy, but also unstable signifiers that expose the concerted meconnaissance of whiteness as wholeness. Introducing the concept of the abject stain, I indicate how lynching photographs inaugurate an unsettling encounter with the extimate horror of racial alterity, which is experienced as an intimate ethics of witnessing.