A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature Goldsby Jacqueline
This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America's national life--the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows…
Specifikacia A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature Goldsby Jacqueline
This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America's national life--the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynching--a highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecy--was in fact a fundamental part of the national consciousness whose cultural logic played a pivotal role in the making of American modernity.To pursue this argument, Goldsby traces lynching's history by taking up select mob murders and studying them together with key literary works. She focuses on three prominent authors--Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Stephen Crane, and James Weldon Johnson--and shows how their own encounters with lynching influenced their analyses