Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: A Guilted Age
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 3/26/1961
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.wesleyan.edu/academics/faculty/arushdy/profile.html * http://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/2013/01/25/5qrushdy/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 92026973
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n92026973
HEADING:
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., 1961-
000
00387nz a2200133n 450
001
4017749
005
19920312075122.0
008
920311n| acannaab |n aaa
010
__ |a n 92026973
035
__ |a (DLC)n 92026973
040
__ |a DLC |c DLC
100
10 |a Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., |d 1961-
670
__ |a His The empty garden, c1992: |b CIP t.p. (Ashraf H.A. Rushdy) data sheet (b. Mar. 26, 1961)
953
__ |a ba01
PERSONAL
Born March 26, 1961.
EDUCATION:University of Alberta, B.A., M.A.; Cambridge University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, Benjamin Waite Professor of the English Language; professor and chair of African American Studies; professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; academic secretary.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Ashraf H.A. Rushdy is the Benjamin Waite Professor of the English Language at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. In addition, he is the university’s academic secretary, and he holds professorships in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and in African American studies; he also serves as the chair of Wesleyan’s African American studies program. Rushdy has published books about the English poet John Milton, African American literature, race in American history, and contemporary history. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Alberta, as well as a Ph.D. from Cambridge University.
In 2012, Rushdy published American Lynching, which chronicles the history of racially motivated murder in the United States. Prompted by the 1998 killing of James Byrd Jr. in Texas, which many labeled as a lynching, Rushdy began researching the history of lynching, which began in Virginia in 1780 with a Revolutionary War colonel. This abhorrent practice has endured, even though its broader meaning and the methods used to perpetrate it have changed over the years. Rushdy calls the history of American lynching a “story about not one man but a race, about not one town but a region, about not one country but an empire.” In discussing the collective violence against blacks, he explores the rationales that have been used to justify lynching and analyzes the language used to describe lynching. Rushdy views lynching as an outgrowth of the institution of slavery, which has taken the form of violence empowered by a mob mentality.
A writer for Kirkus Reviews deemed the book “a triumphant work on the problematic history of one of America’s longest and most troubling traditions.” In Times Higher Education, Céleste Marie-Bernier observed: “In the same way that [Frederick] Douglass watched with horror as the ‘spirit of slavery’ rose at the end of the 19th century, Rushdy’s starkly original book leaves 21st-century audiences in no doubt that the spirit of lynching continues.”
Rushdy followed up American Lynching in with The End of American Lynching, which focuses on three lynchings that happened in Pennsylvania in 1911, Indiana in 1930, and Texas in 1998. In his account, Rushdy examines distinct ways of thinking and talking about lynchings in America. He also discusses how complicity, in both a legal and moral sense, relates to these murders, and he also looks at the impact of photographs of lynchings and how denial has factored into recent claims that lynchings have ended. Writing in the American Historical Review, Claude A. Clegg III observed: “[Rushdy] argues for expansive definitions of lynching and complicity that capture whole communities, past and present.”
In 2016, Rushdy published A Guilted Age: Apologies for the Past, in which he discusses the modern trend of apologizing for past historical atrocities. His thesis is that after two global wars, the world has entered a “guilted age,” in which various nations recognize their guilt for past crimes, such as slavery and the Holocaust, and are in a forgiving mood. He describes two kinds of apology, political and historical, and how the evolution of one led to the other. He also considers how apology and forgiveness can affect understandings of the institutions and events to which they refer.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2012, review of American Lynching.
ONLINE
American Historical Review, https://academic.oup.com (April, 2013), review of The End of American Lynching.
News at Wesleyan, http://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/ (January 25, 2013), Olivia Drake, “Five Questions With . . . Ashraf Rushdy on Lynching in America.”
Times Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com (March 28, 2013), review of American Lynching.
Wesleyan University, http://www.wesleyan.edu/academics/faculty (June 11, 2017), faculty profile.
Benjamin Waite Professor of the English Language
Professor of African American Studies
Center for African American St, 236
860-685-3577
Professor of English
Center for African American St,
860-685-3577
Academic Secretary
Professor, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
arushdy@wesleyan.edu
BA University of Alberta
MA University of Alberta
PHD Cambridge University
ASHRAF H.A. RUSHDY
ACADEMIC AFFILIATIONS
EnglishAfrican American Studies ProgramPresident's OfficeFeminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program
OFFICE HOURS
Fall '13:
Location: 343 High St (CAAS) #236
COURSES
Spring 2017
ENGL 324 - 01
Black Modern Slave Narratives
REFLECTIONS ON INDEXING MY LYNCHING BOOK
ASHRAF H. A. RUSHDY
Skip other details (including permanent urls, DOI, citation information)
Volume 53, Issue 2, Spring 2014
Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0053.203
Permissions
I am now indexing the second and final volumes of my lynching trilogy.
If you are indexing your own book, you might at some point, like me, be resigned to the fact that you are going to keep your day job. Your book is not going to make a lot of money. The kind of book that is lucrative is either not going to need an index or will have one done by a professional indexer.
You have a lot of time to have thoughts like that when you are indexing your own book since it is not particularly mindful work. Most of my thoughts, fortunately, have not been so mordant, or so obviously envious of others. I would say that they have fallen into three large categories—nostalgia, anger, and sadness.
1.
My first response has been a particular kind of nostalgia—a mixture of joy, resignation, longing. Indexing, after all, is probably the last time an author will read the book through in its entirety. We might look up particular things for future reference, to pillage our own earlier research, but most authors I know are not going to pick up and read a book on which they have been working for a number of years. It is with mixed feelings that one recognizes that here is a book that one will not read again. I remember reading a beautiful short essay, by Jorge Luis Borges, I think, in which the blind author lovingly runs his fingers over his books and nostalgically reflects on never again reading each specific volume in his library. The experience of reading for one last time a book I have read in so many different forms during the fourteen years I have been working on it is not nearly so grandiose. Writing this book cost me much, but it did not cost me my sight or sense of proportion.
It is not just a relief to know that the task is completed, that the research and writing are at an end—although there is that. There is a curious sense of reversal in indexing. You can see the logic of the composition of your book backwards, as it were. As I develop a list of particular words and page numbers, I see where I made specific choices, the places I developed key connections, when I made revisions that put this section here and not there. I see, then, through the selection of key terms and page numbers just where the book took the particular shape it ended up taking. And I remember where I might have written a specific passage, or how a set of ideas came to occupy the same page or the same series of pages. To a reader, the index is a way of navigating the book from the back. To an author, an index reveals just how this book came to be the one it is.
That nostalgia made up of remembering and relief at finishing is likely a common one for academic authors of all books. The other two feelings that I have felt pervasively as I compile this index are more personal and specific.
2.
One is a long pent-up anger that is the result of a persistent and undue restraint. As someone trying to produce a historical study of a horrible and cruel practice, I wanted to make sure that I examined the phenomenon with as much detachment as I could muster. I don’t mind reading something that is polemical or indignant, dripping with righteous antipathy for injustice, but I did not believe that the study I was writing in the historical mode and moment in which I was writing it could assume that tone or stance, or that it would be the most productive way to understand what lynching means in America. I had to be measured and temperate in my assessment of what people who performed inhumane things believed themselves to be doing.
I envy and admire those historians of an earlier age who could express their opprobrium without restraint. It would be wonderful to be able to say of some people who appear in my work, as Thomas Babington Macaulay said in one of his historical essays on the English Revolution, for example, that of Archbishop Laud “we entertain a more unmitigated contempt than, for any other character in our history” (Macaulay “Hallam”). Or as he said of Bertrand Barère in an essay on the French Revolution: “Barère approached nearer than any person mentioned in history or fiction, whether man or devil, to the idea of consummate and universal depravity” (Macaulay, “Barère”).
That luxury of honest expression, however, is not generally permitted the modern historian. And so one labors under a more painful self-control. It is taxing work to be fair to people one does not believe to be fair themselves. In indexing, though, you do not have to repress your honest reactions as you do in writing.
Here is the process by which I compiled the index. I read through each chapter, highlighting key words and concepts and names of people. After I finish the chapter, I then type in those words and names and the pages where they occur. I then read the next chapter, rinse and repeat. That means that I am constantly inserting new words and concepts into an expanding list, organized alphabetically.
So, I found myself proudly writing down the name of someone I admire deeply, someone who stood up for justice and righteousness, someone who performed a daring intellectual or heroic deed. Here, in a history of depravity was someone who stood for decency. Here were such august names in the history of antilynching as Jessie Daniel Ames, who as a white Southern woman courageously exposed the lie that lynching was an act of chivalry, or John Jay Chapman, who in 1912 revealed the undeniable responsibility borne by all Americans in the lynching of any American, and, finally, the greatest of them all, Ida B. Wells, who incisively diagnosed and tirelessly fought lynching from the time she recognized it for the racial crime it was in 1892 until her death in 1930.
Here I also recorded the names and acronyms of important groups that demanded justice and antilynching legislation, groups famous like the NAACP, and not sufficiently appreciated like the Anti-Lynching Crusaders. Here, too, were heroic individuals who were not well known. In one case, there was a man whom I know only as “Reverend King” who risked his life in facing down a mob of fifteen thousand in 1893 to try and prevent the immolation of Henry Smith. He was unsuccessful, but his courage strikes me as exemplary. I felt it an honor to record his name in the only way I knew it in my index. I do not think of this index as some kind of roll of honor, a hall of fame, or anything of the sort. But I did, for those moments when I recorded the heroes of my tale, think of it as an appropriate place for those whose names deserved recuperation, recovery, and celebration.
But, because it is an index, it could not remain the place for only the heroes. A book on lynching is populated primarily with villains. I, like Macaulay, felt loathing for many a character in my studies.
The people whose presence in my book raised my ire the most, the ones who struck me as the most despicable of the lot, were those intellectuals who defended and apologized for lynching. The lynchers did what they did, and ought to be arraigned for the terrible things they did, but they enjoyed the benefit of anonymity since they were constituted as masses and mobs, not individuals. But the apologists, those who defended past lynchings and incited future ones, were individuals, and moreover they possessed the power of press and pulpit at their disposal. When they proclaimed something, they had an audience and readership that took seriously what they wrote and said. The three for whom I had the most utter contempt, the most loathsome and detestable of a despicable lot, to employ the liberating language of Macaulay, were a newspaper editor (John Temple Graves), a novelist who was racist (Thomas Nelson Page), and a rabid racist who wrote novels (Thomas Dixon).
First, and most obviously, is the fact that they were racists—that is, they believed that someone’s racial identity, bred in the blood, gave that person a particular kind of moral and intellectual grounding. It is perhaps unfair to expect them not to be racists at a time when it was intellectually acceptable to believe that race was such a determinant of ability, that the genetic properties of a person constituted his or her cultural possibilities. That position, challenged from the time it assumed a coherent form in the middle of the nineteenth century, and entirely upended by the 1920s, was called scientific racism. Of course, there were lots of people in the late nineteenth century who disputed that argument, who believed that race was no determinant of cultural, intellectual, or moral abilities. This trio, my personal axis of evil, did not.
But even more than being racists of that particular sort—scientific racists, as it were—these three were intent on promoting a harmful untruth about the specific way that race inflected morals. That argument, of course, was that men of African descent, freed from the fetters of slavery, had become insatiable rapists, and that it was this very epidemic of rape that called forth the chivalrous activity of lynchers. What is striking about this untruth is not only that it was statistically false (and they knew it to be false because they were familiar with the data published in mainstream venues). Newspapers reporting on lynchings, newspapers like the Chicago Tribune that began in 1882 annually tabulating lynchings by region, state, and alleged instigating crime, had shown that lynchers themselves alleged rape as the cause of lynching in a minority of cases (somewhere around twenty-five percent). Remember, these are allegations made by mobs intent on murder—not charges issued by legal and police forces. Yet, even those frenzied mobs in their frenzied acts were more discriminating than their apologists, who argued, again and again, over and over, that lynchings were performed to punish rapes and prevent future rapes of white women. Rebecca Latimer Felton, for instance, who was a populist racist in 1899, and who became the first woman to serve in the United States Senate in 1922, had issued a proclamation claiming that if it took lynching to protect white women from rape, then let them lynch a thousand a week if necessary. Graves, Page, and Dixon never reached that apogee of rhetoric, but they shared Felton’s belief and always implicitly, sometimes explicitly, urged their readers to follow Felton’s exhortation.
Rather, what struck me was how convoluted their arguments had to become in order to stretch the facts to fit into their preconceived beliefs. After all, interracial rape as a crime on American soil had been pretty one-sided. Anyone even superficially familiar with the history of slavery in the Americas knows the extent to which masters consistently and with impunity raped the enslaved women on their plantations and on the plantations of their neighbors. Here, then, was a truth that these writers wanted to invert, just as the masters and their wives had inverted the truth of white masters’ raping slave women to blame slave women for inciting them to it. In both cases—proslavery ideologues who constructed the model of the black slave seductresses and the prolynching apologists who created the type of the black beast rapist—these writers simply projected what whites had done onto the blacks to whom they had done it. It was not even imaginative racism. One might respect a racist diatribe that had the virtue of novelty, but this was as tawdry in its morality as it was in its unoriginality.
Here, then, was the dilemma of the indexer. It pained and angered me to record the names of white supremacists and apologists for lynching, people who justified criminal and genocidal behavior, and have them live forever next to the names of people who deserve better, people who fought against their evil or died because of it. So, while I tried to be fair and temperate in the text of the book in my assessment of people who justified lynching, people I thought deceitful and inhumane, people I frankly despised with a bottomless hatred, I found myself feeling a resurgent anger as I dutifully placed their names next to those who represented heroic resistance or inhumane suffering. I fought the temptation to make up a faux concept, a word starting with the appropriate letter, just so that I could separate the names of the admired from the loathed. Every now and then, a legitimate way of separating them came my way, and I cheered whenever an opportune concept or name in a later chapter allowed me in good faith to keep the names of the doers of good separate from and uninfected by the purveyors of evil. These were small victories, the only kind of victories there are in the life of an indexer. In the end, indexing teaches you that the alphabet is unforgiving.
3.
The other and possibly most powerful feeling that I have had throughout the indexing is profound sadness. I should mention that it was by no means only during the process of indexing this book that I have felt sad. More than a decade of reading about the cruelty, the savagery, the inhumanity of lynching had its toll, leaving me fatigued with something akin to melancholy. The research for this study frequently left me in bad humor, and even more frequently left me dejected and despondent. For reasons I will explain below, I felt this sadness most poignantly while I was compiling a list of names of places and names of people.
As I proceeded in the relatively routine task of indexing, I began at first to highlight all the names of places where the lynchings I mention in my book occurred. In the historiography of lynching, the facts that are most important, or at least the ones that get mentioned most frequently, are the names of the victims, and the site and the date of the lynching. In this sense, lynchings, like any historical event, are identified by where and when they happened. The “when” requires little commentary; it is a date, and acts like any historical date—to identify the exact moment when the event took place. The name of the place where the event took place is also pretty clear. Traditionally, those who have worked to identify lynchings have used either the names of cities, when lynchings took place in or on the outlying borders of cities, or the names of counties, when the lynchings were more rural and not in the vicinity of an identifiable urban space.
At some point in the indexing, I began to reconsider whether it made sense to index all the place names in my book. I did not want an index that was unwieldy or disproportionate to the book. As I was deciding whether to continue highlighting and indexing city and county names, I began to think about what these place names mean for the event with which they are associated. For the victim, it is not the place of birth or home, the usual markers for a historical personage, but only the place where his or her life ended. For those who ended that life, the place name is home or close enough to home, and the place where they performed a murder. There is a difference, though. Unlike places where a simple murder happened, these are sites of a collective act, the action of a mob that, according to some of the most influential historians of lynching, necessarily has the support of the community behind it. These are cities or counties that countenanced what was performed on their land, and what was done in their name. We don’t generally think of indicting a place where a murder occurs, since a murder can occur anywhere and it is not representative of the place it happens. That is frequently a matter of accident. A lynching, though, has usually brought opprobrium on the town or county where it happened because people believe, with some reason, that the lynching had the sanction of the mob gathered from that community to perform it.
So the name of a lynching site—Paris, Texas, in 1893, Newnan, Georgia, in 1899, Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in 1911, Marietta, Georgia, in 1915, Waco, Texas, in 1916—for some of us has come to represent something more sinister. Those are places that now become associated with what happened on that land. It would be odd to find someone of my generation who was not moved by the mention of particular places—Dachau, Hiroshima, My Lai, for example—to think of the horrors that occurred there. Those are now names that do not just connote the terrible things humans can do to each other; they are names that are now primarily indicators of horrors, and only secondarily actual places, for most of us with any kind of historical memory.
These are names that have become tainted by historical associations. In these cases, it is not just that many died at that place, but rather that there was something startling, revealing, in the ways they died. In the first case, they died in a drawn-out, extended, and systematic fashion that demonstrated what genocide was and how the whole world was implicated in it. In the second, they died in a single moment that showed what horrible technology humans could create and use against other humans. Here we saw a mass of people die in a single moment in a way that was, and should remain, inconceivable. In the last, we learned about how innocent villagers died in what we comforted ourselves by calling a “war crime” in order to avoid confronting what brutality in any war exacts on the victims and the people whom war and training and opportunity have made inhumane purveyors of violence.
I brought that sensitivity to place names—that reflex action of investing meaning into what happened in a particular site—to my research, and researching the history of lynching has tried that sensitivity. Let me offer two personal anecdotes as examples.
One beautiful spring day, I took a break from writing the book and went for a long walk with my almost two-year-old son from our neighborhood to downtown New Haven, about a thirty-minute walk pushing the stroller. As I was waiting at an intersection, a large truck-trailer pulled up at the lights. For no reason at all, other than a compulsion I cannot easily control, I tend to read the information written on the side of truck-trailer cabs, information concerning the gross vehicle weight (GVW) or combined gross vehicle weight (CGW) of the truck and the place the truck is licensed, its home, as it were. This particular truck’s home happened to be Marion, Indiana. Had it been another Indiana city, I might have mused on what kinds of commodities were traveling to or from Connecticut and Indiana. But this particular name happened to be the name of the city where a notorious 1931 lynching took place, and the subject of that very morning’s writing session (index: 17, 60–94, 160). The beauty of the day, the pleasure of the walk, everything but the continued delight in being with my son, was in a moment lost and became as colorless as the black and white photograph of that lynching.
The second anecdote is similar. I compiled the index to my lynching book while I was on a sabbatical in the south of France (a fact that may temper a lot of what I have written). About halfway through the year, I began to make the preliminary arrangements for our return. That subject of ending a sabbatical and leaving France, with its quite different nostalgia, anger, and sadness (or should I say, nostalgie, colère, et tristesse), belongs to a different essay. As I was exploring how to travel with the least amount of luggage, including bags freighted with heavy books, I consulted a website for a British company that specialized in transporting luggage internationally. As I was entering the information on the website to get a quote, I encountered a scrolling window with a list of American city names for me to identify the one to which I wanted my luggage shipped. The first name on that list was Abbeville, South Carolina. This city’s preeminence on the scrolling list, like my index, is an accident of the alphabet. But this city, to me, represents a particular lynching, which I briefly discuss in my book (index: 47, 48–49, 55).
A pleasant walk interrupted, a website visit stalled, by a place name—because these names for me have a historical burden, a shadow, a taint. These are names that have lost whatever innocence they might have had prior to the date when that community lynched someone; these are names that are now largely symbolic and representative, rather than real and referential.
What lynching sites represent, for me anyway, is a place where the taking of life was insufficient, where the crime extended to the taking of dignity. When we think that a lynching in one of its most brutal manifestations, the spectacle lynching in which thousands watched and participated, involved not only murder, but torture of the person before and abuse of the body after, we can appreciate that what a lynching involves is far more than just the awful taking of life. I think the most comparable cases for me are European concentration camps, and, in this country, those defiled burial grounds of oppressed people—of enslaved Americans and of Native Americans.
In all cases, what we are dealing with is desecration—as if the taking of life alone were insufficient to satisfy blood or land lust. These are examples of punishment beyond the death, a failure to accept mortality itself as the boundary marking what can be punished or killed. These are cases where a mob wanted more than blood, more than flesh, where it wanted the spirit itself of what it cast as a demonic force, which in the end was a demonic force only of the mob itself.
Perhaps, in the end, though, marking some places as especially tainted by acts that happened there, and trying to understand why some brutal acts can taint more than others, is simply a way to avoid making ourselves too vigilantly aware of the almost daily evidence of our inhumanity to each other—the legions of homeless men and women sleeping on our streets to whom we have become habituated, the inequality and poverty we hide from ourselves or have hidden from us by city planners, and the host of other daily injustices to which we have become inured or blind.
4.
These place names also have an additional meaning for me in that each of them is particularly associated with the name of a person whose life was the emblem the mob required and took. In the examples I gave above—in Paris, Texas, Henry Smith; in Newnan, Georgia, Sam Hose (which turned out to be not his real name); in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, Zachariah Walker; in Marietta, Georgia, Leo Frank; and in Waco, Texas, Jesse Washington. The thought of writing this essay came to me as I was highlighting and dutifully typing the names of lynch victims into my index. It is not the number of them that startles me, although there are many, always too many. It is the fact that they often get cited once, on one page. These are not household names, people who are known for their accomplishments in some field of endeavor, athletes, politicians, artists, or activists. These are people whose solitary importance is that they were tortured and killed in a particular way.
It struck me as unfair that these were individuals who had become defined as victims or as statistics simply because their life came to an end at the hands of a mob. I must confess that I could not rectify that injustice; indeed, I may have exacerbated it. In one particular instance, some of these victims were catalogued in my book not only because they were lynched, but solely because they were lynched in a very specific way.
Here is the context. I had been arguing against several writers who denied that what happened to James Byrd, Jr., when he was dragged behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, in 1998 could be called a lynching. I took up each point these writers raised and attempted to reveal what was wrong with it. Because the specific mode of his lynching was relatively unknown—most people were hanged or burned—I provided a list of lynchings where the victims were dragged behind horse carriages and then automobiles from the 1890s to the 1940s. This list was meant to show that this particularly gruesome way of torturing and taking of life was not new and had in fact been frequently employed in the history of lynching. My point was to show those who denied he was lynched because of the way he was killed (by dragging) the history of that particular form of lynching.
That specific part of the argument took two paragraphs on one page (page 140) and consisted of listing the instances where people were dragged to death or dragged after they had been killed. It included Robert Lewis, Lee Walker, Rob Edwards, William Turner, John Carter, Willie Kirkland, Claude Neal, and Cleo Wright, who all suffered this brutal treatment in various parts of America. It also included Jesse Washington, George Johnson, and David Gregory, who had all been dragged behind vehicles in Texas specifically, as had Byrd. I felt that I had made my point that this was a practice that was both national and local. It was a compact part of the argument because it primarily required examples, and in this case examples that took the form of names that, for the most part, did not appear again in my book.
This moment in my indexing gave me pause. Here was a list of names of people who were connected only by virtue of the fact that they were all victims of a particular, and particularly heinous, kind of crime. Here, concentrated in two paragraphs, and one page, were decades and decades of lives whose sole importance at this moment was the specific way their lives were taken from them. It was with sadness that I recorded their names in my index. I did not think I was recuperating them or celebrating them, as I had felt when I wrote down the names of the unknown antilynching heroes. It was merely to testify that they had existed, and that the most signal thing about their existence was how their fellow citizens had ended it. There is something unalterably depressing about reducing a life no doubt rich in ideas, emotions, connections, and actions to a statistical anecdote. And, in a way, all histories of lynching do just that, have to do it, yes, but do it in a way that perhaps should make us think about what it means to produce such catalogues, lists, tables, and, yes, paragraphs, that encapsulate and concentrate these names and crimes into a succinct form and with the intent of making a particular point in which these lives are only examples.
5.
What I have learned, then, as I completed the final part of my book, the index, the part with the least imaginative input, is that such lists contain a great deal of emotional energy that is probably not readily apparent to the reader. Indeed, it was quite late in the process of indexing my book that I came to the startling realization that the list I was making shared the form and some of the properties of precisely the kind of lists that I had been studying for over a decade—the lists of tables and charts made by antilynching activists and organizations to show how pervasive the crime of lynching was. My list was rudimentary and organized alphabetically, while theirs were more factually detailed and organized chronologically. But they were lists all the same, a cataloguing of the bare data of a lynching (names, places, allegations, mob sizes, modes of death) that attempted in the most succinct way to demonstrate just how widespread lynching as a practice was, and just how painfully intimate and personal was each lynching of an individual human being.
I have come, belatedly but profoundly, to gain an entirely new respect for those lists and an even deeper admiration for those earlier writers on lynching who produced them. During the past decade and a half of research I have read so many tables and charts and lists of lynchings without thinking in the least about how these items were composed, about what kind of emotional investment they express. Now that I have finally compiled my own such list, I know better, much better than I did during my research, how to look for what went into the composition of those tables and charts and indices.
I have come to love even more than I had the earliest antilynching advocates who inaugurated the making of lists—especially the pioneering Ida B. Wells, on whom it must have exacted a great toll for her to write down just facts taken from mainstream newspapers, and refrain from lamentation and declamation, even when one of the names she recorded was that of the father of her goddaughter. Likewise, I have come to appreciate just what courage was shown by the recordkeepers of those later institutions and organizations who followed Wells’s trailblazing efforts—Tuskegee, the NAACP, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, the Association for the Study of Lynching—all of whom published pamphlets and books with tables of information on lynchings, tabulated and detailed, with names of victims, places, dates, allegations, and particulars. I now find myself able to imagine what anguish must have gone into this painful task of reducing lives to a single event, of tabulating a national series of horrors in a succinct form that even the most mindless reader would have no trouble following.
I now know what pain might have attended the writing of each name, the weariness that might have moved the author listing each city and county and site of horror, the anger incited at each recording of the alleged crime, the size of the mob, and the mode of killing. These lists at the backs of lynching books are not just serial or alphabetical chronologies, not just data ready for plumbing and formulating into statistics. They are rife with all the humane emotions of those of us who could not express elsewhere in the book just how hard it was, just how much it hurt.
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. 1961-
Overview
Works: 10 works in 61 publications in 1 language and 6,652 library holdings
Genres: History Criticism, interpretation, etc Essays
Roles: Author
Classifications: HV6457, 364.134
Publication Timeline
By
Posthumously by
About
198…
198…
198…
198…
198…
199…
199…
199…
199…
199…
200…
200…
200…
200…
200…
201…
201…
201…
201…
201…
202…
By Posthumously by About
1980-1981 0 0 0
1981-1982 0 0 0
1982-1983 0 0 0
1983-1984 0 0 0
1984-1985 0 0 0
1985-1986 5 0 0
1986-1987 5 0 0
1987-1988 0 0 0
1988-1989 15 0 0
1989-1990 0 0 0
1990-1991 0 0 0
1991-1992 5 0 0
1992-1993 20 0 0
1993-1994 0 0 0
1994-1995 0 0 0
1995-1996 0 0 0
1996-1997 0 0 0
1997-1998 0 0 0
1998-1999 0 0 0
1999-2000 25 0 0
2000-2001 0 0 0
2001-2002 25 0 0
2002-2003 0 0 0
2003-2004 0 0 0
2004-2005 0 0 0
2005-2006 0 0 0
2006-2007 0 0 0
2007-2008 0 0 0
2008-2009 0 0 0
2009-2010 0 0 0
2010-2011 0 0 0
2011-2012 0 0 0
2012-2013 30 0 0
2013-2014 0 0 0
2014-2015 10 0 0
2015-2016 20 0 0
2016-2017 0 0 0
2017-2018 0 0 0
2018-2019 0 0 0
2019-2020 0 0 0
2020-2021 0 0 0
Most widely held works by Ashraf H. A Rushdy
Remembering generations : race and family in contemporary African American fiction by Ashraf H. A Rushdy( Book )
11 editions published in 2001 in English and Undetermined and held by 640 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
"Slavery is America's family secret, a partially hidden phantom that continues to haunt our national imagination. Remembering Generations explores how three contemporary African American writers artistically represent this notion in novels about the enduring effects of slavery on the descendants of slaves in the post-civil rights era." "Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Ashraf Rushdy begins by situating these works in their cultural moment of production and highlighting the ways in which they respond to contemporary debates about race and family, which assumed new levels of importance in the 1970s with the waning of the Black Power movement and the release of the Moynihan Report. He then shows how each novel, in its own way, traces the historical origins of race to the practices of American slavery; comments on how racialized slavery causes deviations in the treatment of such traditional literary themes as desire, death, and kinship; and constructs new ways of conceiving of the interrelationship of race and family in America. Following the evolution of this literary form into the 1990s, Rushdy looks at such works as Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998) and Macky Alston's Family Name (1997), in which descendants of slaveholders expose the family secrets of their ancestors." "Remembering Generations examines the questions of how cultural works contribute to social debates, how a particular representational form emerges out of a specific historical epoch, and how some contemporary intellectuals meditate on the issue of historical responsibility - of recognizing that the slave past continues to exert an influence on contemporary American society."--Jacket
Neo-slave narratives : studies in the social logic of a literary form by Ashraf H. A Rushdy( Book )
14 editions published in 1999 in English and Undetermined and held by 605 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
"This book studies the political, social, and cultural content of a particular literary form - the novel of slavery cast as a first-person slave narrative. After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding its first appearance in the 1960s, Neo-Slave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent cultural debates that arose during the sixties."--Jacket
American lynching by Ashraf H. A Rushdy( Book )
12 editions published between 2012 and 2014 in English and Undetermined and held by 556 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
"A history of lynching in America over the course of three centuries, from colonial Virginia to twentieth-century Texas. Some called the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. in Texas a lynching, while others denied that the racially charged term was applicable to the killing of the forty-nine-year-old African American man by three white men. To gain an objective grasp of this tragedy, Ashraf Rushdy concluded that an understanding of the long history of lynching in the United States was necessary. In this meticulously researched and accessibly written interpretive history. Rushdy shows how lynching in America has endured, evolved, and changed in meaning over the course of three centuries, from its origins in early Virginia to the present day. Rushdy argues that we can understand what lynching means in American history by examining its evolution - that is, by seeing how the practice changed in both form and meaning over the past three centuries, analyzing the rationales its advocates have made in its defense, and, finally, explicating its origins. The best way of understanding what lynching has meant in different times, and for different populations, during the course of American history is by seeing both the continuities in the practice over time and the particular features in different forms of lynching in different eras."--Jacket
The empty garden : the subject of late Milton by Ashraf H. A Rushdy( Book )
5 editions published in 1992 in English and held by 517 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
"The Empty Garden draws a portrait of Milton as a cultural and religious critic who, in his latest and greatest poems, wrote narratives that illustrate the proper relationships among the individual, the community, and God. Rushdy argues that the political theory implicit in these relationships arises from Milton's own drive for self knowledge, a kind of knowledge that gives the individual freedom to act in accordance with his or her own understanding of God's will rather than the state's. In essence, Rushdy redefines Milton's creative spirit in a way that successfully encompasses his poetic, political, and religious careers." "By contrasting the theories of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Thomas Hobbes on self-knowledge with Milton's narratological and diachronic theory, Rushdy illustrates how Milton sees the subject in a dynamic and changing relationship with the natural and supernatural worlds." "The Empty Garden demonstrates how the narrative of Paradise Regained depicts a Jesus who gains self-knowledge through meditation, uses that knowledge to defeat Satan, and forms a new culture for Israel. Jesus' life becomes an object of interpretation for the characters within the poem (as well as for the poem's readers), and Jesus and Satan produce radically different interpretations that reflect the differences between the old and new cultures." "Critics have acknowledged that Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, published in one volume in 1671, are to be read as two parts of a whole, and Rushdy has an exciting way of defining the volume as Milton's final exploration of a political idea. He develops useful points of comparison and contrast between the works to show how Jesus and Samson become different kinds of subjects of God and state." "The Empty Garden concludes with a reading of and implicit dialogue between Milton and Hobbes that shows that Milton's last original poetic achievement is as involved in issues of politics - the state as site of potential subjectivity or subjection - as ever he was during the heyday of his prose contributions."--Jacket
The best American essays 2015( Book )
1 edition published in 2015 in English and held by 387 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
Compiles the best literary essays of the year 2014 which were originally published in American periodicals
The end of American lynching by Ashraf H. A Rushdy( Book )
7 editions published in 2012 in English and held by 258 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
"The End of American Lynching questions how we think about the dynamics of lynching, what lynchings mean to the society in which they occur, how lynching is defined, and the circumstances that lead to lynching. Ashraf H.A. Rushdy looks at three lynchings over the course of the twentieth century--one in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in 1911, one in Marion, Indiana, in 1930, and one in Jasper, Texas, in 1998--to see how Americans developed two distinct ways of thinking and talking about this act before and after the 1930s. One way takes seriously the legal and moral concept of complicity as a way to understand the dynamics of a lynching; this way of thinking can give us new perceptions into the meaning of mobs and the lynching photographs in which we find them. Another way, which developed in the 1940s and continues to influence us today, uses a strategy of denial to claim that lynchings have ended. Rushdy examines how the denial of lynching emerged and developed, providing insight into how and why we talk about lynching the way we do at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In doing so, he forces us to confront our responsibilities as American citizens and as human beings"--Provided by publisher
A guilted age : apologies for the past by Ashraf H. A Rushdy( Book )
5 editions published in 2015 in English and held by 217 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
"Public apologies have become increasingly common scenes and representative moments in what appears to be a global process of forgiveness. The apology-forgiveness dynamic is familiar to all of us, but what do these rituals of atonement mean when they are applied to political and historical events? In his timely, topical, and incisive book A Guilted Age, Ashraf Rushdy argues that the proliferation of apologies by politicians, nations, and churches for past events--such as American slavery or the Holocaust--can be understood as a historical phenomenon. In our post-World War II world, Rushdy claims that we live in a 'guilted age.' A Guilted Age identifies the two major forms of apologies--political and historical--and Rushdy defines the dynamics and strategies of each, showing how the evolution of one led to the other. In doing so, he reveals what apology and forgiveness do to the past events they respectively apologize for and forgive--and what happens when they fail."--Publisher's Web site
The empty garden : an interpretation of Paradise Regained by Ashraf H. A Rushdy( Book )
3 editions published in 1988 in English and held by 4 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
The better fortitude : a study in Miltonic heroism by Ashraf H. A Rushdy( )
2 editions published between 1985 and 1986 in English and held by 3 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
'The miracle of the web' : community, desire, and narrativity in 'Charlotte's Web' by Ashraf H. A Rushdy( )
1 edition published in 1991 in English and held by 0 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
Weergave van lezing voor het congres (1991) van de IRSCL te Parijs (1991), met een beschouwing over de verandering van rolpatronen in het genoemde jeugdboek en de verhaaltechnische vormgeving ervan
A Guilted Age
Apologies for the Past
Search the full text of this book
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
"A Guilted Age exhaustively researched, analyzing texts and arguments from numerous disciplines—philosophy, politics, history, and religion—with sensitivity and insight. Rushdy writes beautifully and with a strong and confident authorial voice. His argument concerning the differences between apologizing and mourning is especially intriguing. This is a learned and humane work."
—Brian Weiner, Associate Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and author of Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National Apologies in the United States
Public apologies have become increasingly common scenes and representative moments in what appears to be a global process of forgiveness. The apology-forgiveness dynamic is familiar to all of us, but what do these rituals of atonement mean when they are applied to political and historical events?
In his timely, topical, and incisive book A Guilted Age, Ashraf Rushdy argues that the proliferation of apologies by politicians, nations, and churches for past events—such as American slavery or the Holocaust—can be understood as a historical phenomenon. In our post–World War II world, Rushdy claims that we live in a “guilted age.”
A Guilted Age identifies the two major forms of apologies—political and historical—and Rushdy defines the dynamics and strategies of each, showing how the evolution of one led to the other. In doing so, he reveals what apology and forgiveness do to the past events they respectively apologize for and forgive—and what happens when they fail.
BACK TO TOP
Excerpt
Read the Introduction (pdf).
BACK TO TOP
Reviews
"A Guilted Age is an important and extremely timely book—a significant contribution to current work on state apologies and questions of reparation. Rushdy offers not only a useful read of major books on apology, forgiveness, and retributive and restorative justice but also a comprehensive synthesis of the work that has been done and a new way of thinking about the contexts, limits, and audiences for public apologies. His case studies are carefully chosen, and his analytical and critical intervention will help frame renewed and vigorous discussion."
—Christina Sharpe, Associate Professor of English, American Studies, and Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University and author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-slavery Subjects
"[A] level-headed and stimulating essay.... This book, by usefully identifying the culture of guilt, provides an essential starting point for debating these difficult issues."
—Times Higher Education
"Rushdy argues not only that the present age is an age of apology—the 'guilted age'—but that this age of apology is relatively recent.... A fine, well-written book, this volume is especially engaging in the way that Rushdy works across disciplinary boundaries—history, literature, philosophy, rhetoric—to illuminate issues of inherited responsibility, historical continuity, and the soliloquy of apology.... Summing Up: Highly recommended."
—Choice
BACK TO TOP
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Guilted Age
2. Political Apologies I
3. Political Apologies II
4. Historical Apologies I
5. Historical Apologies II
6. The Metaphysics of Undoing
7. The Concrete Past: Memorials
Conclusion
Notes
Index
BACK TO TOP
About the Author(s)
Ashraf H. A. Rushdyis the Benjamin Waite Professor of the English Language, a Professor of African American Studies, and the Academic Secretary at Wesleyan University. He is the author of The Empty Garden: The Subject of Late Milton, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form, Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction, American Lynching, and The End of American Lynching.
Subject Categories
Sociology
Philosophy and Ethics
Political Science and Public Policy
5/5/17, 4(21 PM
Print Marked Items
Rushdy, Ashraf H.A.: AMERICAN LYNCHING
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2012): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rushdy, Ashraf H.A. AMERICAN LYNCHING Yale Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $35.00 10, 30 ISBN: 978-0-300- 18138-8
An all-encompassing history of lynchings in America from 1780 to the present. Rushdy (African-American Studies/Wesleyan Univ.; Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction, 2000, etc.) delves deeply into the complicated subject of lynching in America, both from a historical and linguistic perspective. "There are different kinds of lynchings," writes the author, "different sorts of acts, some of which are called lynchings and others not, driven by different motives, employing different strategies, and occurring in different historical contexts." In short, "lynching" knows no singular definition, and, according to Rushdy, it is a term "more evocative than descriptive." For the most part, however, the author steers clear of the subject's evocative nature and relies on an intellectual distance that allows scholarship to outweigh pathos. From Revolutionary War colonel Charles Lynch's 1780 extralegal execution of a Tory to the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. by white supremacists, Rushdy's sweeping story addresses race, politics and the sordid history of vigilante justice that often brought them together. While relying heavily on previous scholarship, the author's most interesting contribution surrounds his argument that lynching "was not just a means of social control that replaced slavery. It was a product of slavery." That institution, Rushdy argues, created the culture that "empowered [the] lynch mob." A triumphant work on the problematic history of one of America's longest and most troubling traditions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rushdy, Ashraf H.A.: AMERICAN LYNCHING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2012. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA302274263&it=r&asid=1f5ba2b668a7ddb9f55313890d0cef38. Accessed 5 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A302274263
about:blank Page 1 of 2
5/5/17, 4(21 PM
A Guilted Age: Apologies for the Past
ProtoView.
(Jan. 2016): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Ringgold, Inc. http://www.protoview.com/protoview
Full Text:
9781439913222
A Guilted Age: Apologies for the Past Ashraf H.A. Rushdy
Temple University Press
2015
211 pages
$27.95
BF575
Rushdy notes that guilt seems to be the appropriate emotion to describe a world emerging from two global wars and a series of atrocities that required new categories of crime recognizing human barbarity (genocide, crimes against humanity). He cites that political and historical apologies have been on the rise long enough to become fodder for pundits and comedians. His five major arguments are: the oguilted ageo exists; two types of apologies have emerged and that one has evolved from the other; each type of apology--political and historical--has a particular dynamic and strategy; these apologies address a particular metaphysical question: the question of what apology and forgiveness do to the past event they respectively apologize for and forgive; there might be a telling categorical error that explains what these apologies are attempting and frequently fail to do. Chapters are: the guilted age; political apologies I; political apologies II; historical apologies I; historical apologies II; the metaphysics of undoing; the concrete past: memorials; conclusion. ([umlaut] Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Guilted Age: Apologies for the Past." ProtoView, Jan. 2016. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA439057525&it=r&asid=ff3c85995eb1accb4aad7ba0d3fb8fd1. Accessed 5 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A439057525
about:blank Page 2 of 2
American Lynching by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
Céleste Marie-Bernier admires an original approach to a shameful period in US history
March 28, 2013
Share on twitter
Share on facebook
Share on linkedin
In May 1918, in Brooks County, Georgia, Hayes Turner, a black farm labourer, was lynched by a white mob seeking vengeance for the death of Hampton Smith, a white farmer and racist. The fact that Turner was not responsible for Smith’s death was no deterrent to the white men who kidnapped him from police custody and hanged him from a tree. Almost instantly, his wife Mary’s condemnation of the white mob’s violence was met with murderous retaliation. As activist Walter White reported, Mary - at the time eight months pregnant - was lynched in ways that render language powerless: “Gasoline was taken from the cars and poured on her clothing which was then fired. When her clothes had burned off, a sharp instrument was taken and she was cut open in the middle, her stomach being entirely opened. Her unborn child fell from her womb.” This is one of the many stories not to be found in Ashraf Rushdy’s book, but for good reason.
Adopting a long time frame and wide-ranging regional milieu, Rushdy traces the history of lynching as a “story about not one man but a race, about not one town but a region, about not one country but an empire”. He provides proof of the extent to which lynching’s ideological foundations and practical rituals have maintained a stranglehold over the white American body politic no less than its civil and cultural life over the centuries. He offers an invaluable lesson to readers by insisting on the damage done by the tendency to single out “spectacular” lynchings to the exclusion of thousands of black women, men and children dying as a result of widespread acts of “collective violence”. However lacking in iconic ritualised content, he insists, mob violence must be named and shamed in order to do full justice to the multiple rather than singular forms and functions of lynching as a quintessentially American institution.
Tracing the rise, race, age and discourse of lynching, Rushdy cuts to the heart of its “meanings” by confirming the failures of statistical information. Working in the vein of 19th-century African-American reformer and philosopher Frederick Douglass, who theorised the lives of enslaved black women and men as a non-existence since they circulated in (white) official histories solely as “chattel records”, Rushdy points to the senselessness of reducing the history of US lynchings to a body count. Any attempts to tabulate the number of lynchings, he argues, will at best only ever be incomplete or, at worst, erase lynching as a practice woven into the warp and weft of US national ideology.
The brilliance of Rushdy’s investigation into the discourse of lynching would have been even more clear-cut had there been space to provide a comparative investigation into lynching’s iconography. The photography, sculpture and paintings of James P. Ball, Meta Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas and Lois Mailou Jones, among many others, would have complemented this book’s discussion of literary works by Albion Tourgée, Owen Wister, Oscar Micheaux and Charles Chesnutt. The issue of “controlling the stories” of lynching remains inseparable from the fight for the power over its imagery. This kind of comparative work would have also enhanced the book’s claim that the black body as lynched icon reveals far more regarding white as opposed to black national, political and racial identities.
In the same way that Douglass watched with horror as the “spirit of slavery” rose at the end of the 19th century, Rushdy’s starkly original book leaves 21st-century audiences in no doubt that the spirit of lynching continues to experience a powerful afterlife, or rather “afterdeath”.
American Lynching
By Ashraf H.A. Rushdy
Yale University Press, 240pp, £25.00
ISBN 9780300181388
Published 7 February 2013
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. The End of American Lynching.
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy . The End of American Lynching.New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2012. Pp. xv, 208. Cloth $72.00, paper $25.95.
Claude A. Clegg, III
Am Hist Rev (2013) 118 (2): 552-553. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.2.552
Published: 04 April 2013
PDF Cite Share Tools
search filtersearch input
Issue Section: Canada and the United States
This thoughtful book is an exploration of how the history of racialized mob violence has established itself within academic parlance and American public discourse. It is particularly concerned with the lynching of thousands of African Americans since the 1880s and the manner in which these occurrences have been portrayed, memorialized, forgotten, and denied. The thematic core of the book is anchored in the notion of complicity: that is, how ideas about community, family, popular will, and racial progress facilitate the crafting of narratives involving victimization, accountability, and national identity. Additionally, the text is a meditation on how politicized both history and memory can be, particularly when the stakes hinge upon the very essence of what people believe about themselves, or would like for others to believe.
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy's main argument, which becomes clear and vital by chapter three, is really a tension between two conceptual polarities. The author asserts that, since about 1940, civil rights activists, academics, public officials, and others have construed the trajectory of lynching in linear terms. According to this thinking, collective extralegal killings followed a teleological path of rise, decline, and demise. Thus, groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, and other reformers who had kept vigilant tallies of annual lynchings assumed that as spectacle mob killings became less frequent, it was possible not only to have a lynching-free year but also to predict the eventual disappearance of such lawless communal murders in America. These presumptions, which the author labels “end-of-lynching discourse,” were predicated upon the inexorable march of American civilization into a higher stage that would marginalize lynching as anachronistic, barbaric, and premodern. Rushdy suggests that this discourse was also based in a variant of American patriotism that reveled in the country's putative capacity for positive change and enlightened improvements over time, surmounting any past difficulties that issues of race had previously posed. In short, votaries of this perspective believed in the possibility of a “last American lynching,” a final, definitive endpoint for this most shameful of pastimes that would bracket the era of mob executions as a thing of the past.
Rushdy is decidedly at odds with this perspective and stands at the other end of the spectrum, which champions continuity and complicity as the distinguishing features of lynching's history. In sections that deal with the lingering impact of lynching photography and the increasingly rare lynchings that have occurred during the second half of the twentieth century, the author argues for expansive definitions of lynching and complicity that capture whole communities, past and present. Whether as seen through the latter-day outrage of activists, the anguish of the families of victims, the silence of observers and bystanders, or the indelible stain that mob murder has left on American history, Rushdy posits that lynching—which he defines as a hate crime committed by a group (p. 141)—has never been eradicated completely; it has simply morphed and evolved over time. In elaborating his position, the author tends to overstate the sway of the end-of-lynching narrative in academe and among the general public. If anything, abundant examples demonstrate the enduring presence of the phenomenon in the nation's consciousness and vernacular, as exemplified by self-serving lynching references by public officials, choreographed images of American cruelty at Abu Ghraib, and the occasional strung-up effigy of President Barack Obama. Indeed, lynching has never fully exited the American experience, nor has there ever been a lack of willingness on the part of many to call it out by name, even in the current century.
The End of American Lynching has a slow, somewhat pedantic start, which belies the intellectual momentum of its latter portion. In more pages than seem necessary, the author recaps the history of lynching in America, citing the origins of the phenomenon in the vigilante underpinnings of the American Revolution and its racialized transformation by the Reconstruction era into an alleged curative for perceived black threats to white masculinity, chastity, and supremacy. Beyond some early etchings of an argument that is more compellingly articulated later in the narrative, the first two chapters (there are a total of four, plus conclusion) center around a survey of the extant literature, despite the author's efforts to construct a typology of lynching around various paradigms—“legal complicity model,” “ethical complicity model,” “familial complicity model,” and so forth—that see, at best, only infrequent and lukewarm deployment in the remainder of the book. Notwithstanding this initial inertia, Rushdy has some intriguing things to say about lynching photos, which were “not a historical rendering of an event but part of it—the part where the event moves from ritually staged activity to ritual recollection” (p. 92). Likewise, Rushdy has contributed provocatively to our understanding of lynching's far reach into the recesses of the American psyche and past, which, according to him, is not yet behind us.
© 2013 American Historical Association. All rights reserved.