UC Santa Cruz

Laughing at Meat and Fury: A Materialist Critique of U.S. Lynching Culture examines lynching’s aesthetic relationship to U.S. capitalist modernity. Through analyses of lynching photographs, postcards, and illustrations that circulated beyond the high era of lynching, the study troubles the end-of-lynching discourse that accompanied the ascendance of racial liberalism in the 1940s. Focusing on the repeated emergence and recession of the image of lynching in moments of political and economic crisis spanning from Progressive-era Georgia to Watts in 1965, the dissertation theorizes an altered historical and political genealogy of anti-black violence. It argues that dialectical constructions of lynching’s political and cultural history contest divisions erected between spectacle mob killings that attracted thousands from the 1880s to the 1930s and the executions that have quietly disappeared the dead since the onset, during the New Deal, of a low era of lynching.

Where racial liberalism figures lynching as an affront to the U.S. justice system and proffers a triumphant narrative of the law’s containment of extra-legal mob murder, Laughing at Meat and Fury theorizes lynching as an allegory for the present – as a belligerent image that illuminates the imbrication of vigilante violence and law-and-order. The dissertation analyzes critical moments when the image of lynching flashed up unexpectedly in a range of media: a photograph of a railway lynching that circulated in 1908 as a blood-stained postcard and again on the cover of a Communist Party USA pamphlet in 1934; courtroom photographs of Amy Mallard testifying against members of the Ku Klux Klan published in LIFE magazine in 1949; the removal of a photograph of the lynching of “Bootjack” McDaniels from Edward Steichen’s Cold War photography exhibition, The Family of Man; and the incineration of a photograph of William Brown in Now!, a Cuban newsreel issued in 1965 in solidarity with the Watts rebellion. Mobilizing Marxist critical theory, black feminist theory, affect studies, psychoanalysis, and visual studies, the dissertation situates lynching at the center of the post-World War II law-and-order mandate. It argues that lynching photographs are moving images that subvert common notions of documentary truth, liberal justice, legal personhood, and historical time, and it uplifts – through speculative critique and poetic invention – a counter-archive that illuminates U.S lynching culture’s constitutive relationship to racial capitalism.