The Mississippi Quarterly articles from January 1 2008

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from January 1 2008

Lynching Uncle Rye: a novel excerpt.(Rye Johnson)(Excerpt)
January 1, 2008... FROM THE ROCKER ON HIS PORCH, NOLAND JACKS SURVEYED THE ROWS OF new corn that ran from the end of the yard to what his eyes saw as a blur on the near horizon, where the river cut high banks through the field. The air had turned warm, but not...

Across the road from the barbecue house.(Report)
January 1, 2008... AS CALLOUS AS IT IS TO SAY IT, SOME LYNCHINGS ARE MORE HORRIBLE THAN others. While any extrajudicial mob execution should outrage us, nevertheless some so far exceed our capacity for understanding in their degree of brutality, in the...

Atrocity or nation-building? The difference is in the eye of the beholder.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. --Guy Debord (7) "RELEASING THE REST OF THE ABU GHRAIB PHOTOGRAPHS WILL GET MORE Americans killed." This fear lies at the...

Memorialization and its discontents: America's first lynching memorial.(Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, Duluth, Minnesota)(Report)
January 1, 2008... ALTHOUGH SPECTACLE LYNCHINGS WERE UNCOMMON IN THE NORTH, EVEN less common is the commemorative impulse for such an event. On October 10, 2003, in Duluth, Minnesota, the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial---consisting primarily of sculptural relief...

The afterlife of lynching: exhibitions and the re-composition of human suffering.('Witness: Photographs of Lynchings from the Collection of Frames Allen and John Littlefield' and 'Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America')(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... THE IDEAS I WILL PRESENT HERE ADDRESS THE ETHICS AND AESTHETICS OF representation and reception. When museums and other exhibition venues arrange, contextualize, and gloss the extant evidence of inhuman brutality and human suffering, audience...

Grotesque laughter, unburied bodies, and history: shape-shifting in Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle.(Critical essay)
January 1, 2008... "You make a joke like that and you jes part of the problem." --Wolf Whistle 102 LEWIS NORDAN'S 1993 BOOK WOLF WHISTLE IS A FICTIONALIZATION OF fourteen-year-old Emmett Till's murder, written by a white writer who for thirty-eight...

Submitted for their approval: Rod Serling and the lynching of Emmett Till.(Report)
January 1, 2008... Tell all the Truth but ten it slant-- Emily Dickinson YOU ARE WATCHING TELEVISION, AND A MAN IS ABOUT TO BE LYNCHED. The year is 2215. The earth is parched and abandoned, inhabited by only two groups of people: the Dwellers and the...

"The people ... took exception to her remarks": Meta Warrick Fuller, Angelina Weld Grimke, and the lynching of Mary Turner.(Report)
January 1, 2008... Now when I ponder the silences, the voices that are not heard, the voices of those wounded and/or oppressed individuals who do not speak or write, I contemplate the acts of persecution, torture--the terrorism that breaks spirits, that makes...

Out: on a limb the spatial politics of lynching photography.(Report)
January 1, 2008... Getting off a bus in a strange Mississippi town, a Negro visitor saw no members of the race around and asked a white man, "Where do the colored folks hang out here?" Pointing to a large tree in the public square, the white man replied, "Do you...

Lynching's legacy in American culture.(Report)
January 1, 2008... IN THE SUMMER OF 1901 MARK TWAIN WROTE AN ESSAY RESPONDING TO AN outbreak of racial violence in Missouri, beginning with a lynching and ending with the expulsion of some thirty black families from their homes. It was not until 1923, however,...