| This dissertation explores the proprietary logic of the lynching narrative in black-American literature, history, and culture. Borrowing from and expanding on insights propounded in cultural landscape studies, visual studies, and legal studies, the project argues that lynching can be read as both the cause and effect of disputes over gendered and racialized forms of property, including (but certainly not limited to) property rights in land. The routine triangulation of characters in the lynching narrative---black men, white women, and the mob---betokens or indexes not only inter-racial conflicts in the post-Reconstruction South, but also intra-racial, gender, and class conflicts regarding these characters' aspirations to property ownership. In the post-Reconstruction South, black men aspired to land ownership and were threatened, at best, and lynched, at worst, for following through with these aspirations. To solidify racial boundaries and consolidate white supremacy, the white mob sought to hold property rights in white women. Broadening the scope of the lynching narrative to include two more integral characters the setting of the South and the specter of abused black women---I argue, first, that the South's regional identity is partly shaped by its cultural investment, indeed its property rights, in lynch law. Finally, with respect to the role of black women in the lynching narrative, I argue that the ubiquitous visual history of black men's ostensible property rights in lynching iconography contributes to the reason why black women are so often excluded from lynching's efficiently and expediently triangulated narrative of physical and sexual violence. Since juridical claims to property ownership can often hinge on visual systems of association, the project relies on the visual aid of lynching photographs, political cartoons, and historical images and icons in order to discuss the lynching narrative in terms of Property (as land) and property (as something to which one lays a claim and ultimately uses to exclude others from using or enjoying). To demonstrate how questions and versions of "property" invariably matter to the lynching narrative, I focus on the story of Emmett Till, art exhibits of lynching photographs, and the works of Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. |
