Analysis Of Lynching By Robyn Wiegman

Lynching, as Robyn Wiegman has shown, is about law. According to Jacqueline Goldsby and Grace Elizabeth Hale lynching is also about the violent production of racial and cultural identity—whites were never whiter at the turn of the twentieth-century than when they participated in the terrorizing performance of lynching. This trajectory of scholarship makes clear that lynching was not an irrational practice or social anomaly that took place outside of history, nor was it simply a vigilante transgression of normative legal arrangements. Instead it cohered within a matrix of logics—legal, racial, cultural, religious, and economic. Extending these announcements, I draw on Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s early critical descriptions of and interventions against