UC Irvine

This dissertation examines the limitations of the current lynching lexicon using a rhetorical and linguistic analysis and focusing on Black women to read the lasting effect of lynching violence. I demonstrate that centering Black women in our analysis of lynching disrupt how lynching is theorized both temporally and spatially, on the one hand, and disrupts the language and type of speech used to describe lynching as a social process on the other. I study the occurrences of Black women's appearance in lynching language and our cultural memory while examining Black women's foreclosure from some iterations of memory. Threaded through and grounding each chapter is an interrogation and critique of the sociocultural status of womanhood, particularly when the terms are qualified by the signifiers "Black" or "white." Moreover, while the project will necessarily interrogate the anti-black violence of institutional archives, cultural memory, and lynching grammar, subsequently expanding them, the essential work here is to excavate the stakes of the social category of the woman and the concept of womanhood. I argue that the social category of "woman" and the assumptions about womanhood are racialized gender terms constructed through oppressive patriarchy, which subsumes women under the oppressive regime of white male dominance. Finally, the research formulates a grammar of lynching that expands lynching's lexicon to include Black women as survivors, witnesses, knowledge producers, and carriers of memory in the wake of lynching violence. Through this rhetorical and ontological critical theory project, I bring greater attention to how lynching is memorialized in public memory, which is a largely un-studied site of the production and reproduction of the meaning of lynching, and Black women survivors of lynching as the unseen authors of meaning-making about the nature and lasting effects of lynching violence. The project aims to challenge assumptions about racialized and sexualized anti-black violence.