A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature

by Jacqueline Goldsby

This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America's national life—the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynching—a highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecy—was in fact a fundamental part of the national consciousness whose cultural logic played a pivotal role in the making of American modernity.

To pursue this argument, Goldsby traces lynching's history by taking up select mob murders and studying them together with key literary works. She focuses on three prominent authors—Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Stephen Crane, and James Weldon Johnson—and shows how their own encounters with lynching influenced their analyses of it. She also examines a recently assembled archive of evidence—lynching photographs—to show how photography structured the nation's perception of lynching violence before World War I. Finally, Goldsby considers the way lynching persisted into the twentieth century, discussing the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the ballad-elegies of Gwendolyn Brooks to which his murder gave rise.

An empathic and perceptive work, A Spectacular Secret will make an important contribution to the study of American history and literature.

Genres: Race, History, Photography, Nonfiction

384 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2006

Reviews

[Leigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable work of literary/cultural history. Goldsby's meticulously researched text seeks to understand lynching's "cultural logic," lynching's "capacity to reproduce and even mimic social structures while seeming distant, strange and disavowable to us because its violent excess is directed against black people"; that is, what are the mechanisms through and by which lynching is simultaneously spectacular and yet hidden, a secret in plain view? In answering this question--through brilliant and new readings of Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Gwendolyn Brooks and Stephen Crane and the archive of lynching photography--Goldsby places lynching at the very center of American modernity and forces us to rethink the contours of US modernity itself. This is the new standard for the field.

[Koritha Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely amazing example of literary and cultural history. Goldsby's rigor is inspiring, and so is her writing. She manages to find new ways to say even the smallest things so that the prose never feels repetitious. Both what is said and how it is said will leave you informed and impressed. A longer review available here.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book on one of the more horrific topics one could write about in America's cultural past. Goldsby writes with scholarly grace and nuance (I glided through this book, even despite the painful and necessary topic), and I aspire to someday be as brilliant an academic writer.

[Aleighdavis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The chapter on photography is really good.