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
what she called lynch law. Lynch law is specified not as a suspension or transgression of law. Rather it delineates lynching’s force as law which disciplines a racial-religious anthropology. Furthermore, I read Sutton Griggs’ 1899 utopian novel Imperium in Imperio as an emergent mode of resistance to lynch law’s condemnation of blackness. Specifically, I read this text as enacting a critical utopian counter-performance within what Clyde Woods calls the blues tradition of explanation which disrupts the negating presence of lynching by envisioning future life and space—a there and then—beyond its jurisdiction. Imperium maps a futurity that structures rural space as a home for black life to find belonging outside of the sovereignty of white racial terror and inside the register of the human. The utopian impulse towards a not yet existent social world provides a counter for thinking the future otherwise than the horizon of white supremacist lynch law and its regulation of the human according to the color line.