se ~aNeoee ment that has made us turn to theirs, What, for example, accounts for the current resurgence of interest in Josephine Baker’ life and art, which hhas once again made of her a spectacle?! Are we, in our attempts at cul- tural criticism, modern-day primitivists? Are our Afrocentric interests and our vernacular theories and our feminist concerns for female agency colluding with primitivist proclivities like those that helped to bring the black “other” into vogue in the 1920s? Are we, paralleling the moments in which they lived and worked, inventing these artists as icons? Insist- ing on this question—debating who (or what) invented whom—is ‘more than a litte like arguing which came first, chicken or egg? Perhaps what is most important is our own awareness of just how complex and ideologically charged are both the question and our attempts at answers am thinking in particular of recent film representations of Baker’ life, which in ude 2 1987 British documentary, Chasing @ Rainbow a 1991 made-for cable television movie, The Josephine Baker Story. and a second television movie and a feature film, both in the planning stage In addition, two of Baker's French films from the 1930s, Princess Tam- ‘Tam and Zou-Zew, have beet tereleased with subsitles and shown to capacity crowds in theaters throughout the United States, 28 well as marketed on videocassette. See Phyllis Rose, "Josephine Baker: Exactly What Is It," New York Times, March 10, 1991 The Anatomy of Lynching ROBYN WIEGMAN Department of English and Women’s Studies Indiana University his eyes he noticed the ribs had been caved in The flesh was braised and torn. [The birthmark] was just below [Willic’s} navel, he thought. Then he gave a stare: where it should have been was only a bloocy mound of torn flesh and haie. Matt went weak. He felt as though he hac been castrated himself. He thought he would fall when Clara stepped up beside him, Swiftly, he tried to push her back, ‘Then Clara was screaming, ... Matt pushed [her] to go, feeling hot breath against the hand he held over her mouth, “Just remember that a car hit “im, and you'll be all ight,” the patrol ‘man said. “We don’t allow no lynching round here no more.” ‘Matt felt Clara’s fingers digging into his arm as his cyes flashed swiftly lover the face of the towering patrolman, over the badge against the blue shirt, the fingers crooked in the belt above the gun butt. He swallowed hard’... catching sight of Willie between the white men’s legs “Pll remember,” he said bitterly, “he was hit by a car” [Ralph Ellison, “The Birthmark,” in New Masses, July 2, 1940] ABOVE ALL, LYNCHING 15 about the law: both the towering pa- trolman who renarrates the body and sadistically claims it as sign of his ‘own power, and the symbolic as law, the site of normativity and sane- tioned desire, prohibition and taboo. In the circuit of relations that gov- ems lynching in the United States, the law as legal discourse and disciplinary practice subtends the symbolic arena, marking out a topos of bodies and identities that gives order to generation, defines and cir- ‘cumscribes social and political behavior, and punishes transgression, from its wildest possibility to its most benign threat, Operating accord- Lowa ofthe Hinery of Seca 1993, vo. 3, 0.5 ©1998 by The Unset of Chic. Al righ reseed, 1043407093/0303.002501.00| 445SereeeSeeeeeTeeeee ee eeee eee ing to logic of borders—racial, sexual, national, psychological, biolog- ical, as well as gendered—lynching figures its victims as the culturally abject, monstrosities of excess whose limp and hanging bodies function as the specular assurance that the threat has not simply been averted, but thoroughly negated, dehumanized, and rendered incapable of return. The overdetermination of punishment in the lynching scenario demon. strates its profoundly psychological function, reinforcing the asym: metry of empowerment that initiates and sustains the disciplinary mechanism in all of its violent complexity. How we understand this complexity—how we can approach the tableau of torture, dismember ment, and death that shapes Iynching’s specifically racialized deploy- ment—provides the locus around which this essay is organized and makes possible a theoretical foray into the intersecting relations of race and sexual difference in nineteenth- and twenticth-century United States culture In particular, I focus on the sexual economy that underlies lynching’s emergence as a disciplinary practice for racial control at the end of the nineteenth century, when the threat of ritualized death provided the ‘means for (re)articulating white masculine supremacy within the social and economic specificities of slavery’s abolition. As I hope to show, the decommodification of the African American body that accompanies the transformation from chattel to citizenty is mediated through a compli cated process of sexualization and engendering: not only does lynching, enact a grotesquely symbolie—if not literal—sexual encounter between the white mob and its victim, but the increasing utilization of castration 4s a preferred form of mutilation for African American men demon- strates Iynching’s connection to the sociosymbolic realm of sexual difference. In the disciplinary fusion of castration with lynching, the mob severs the black male from the masculine, interrupting the priv lege of the phallus, and thereby reclaiming, through the perversity of dismemberment, his (masculine) potentiality for citizenship.’ While this imposition of feminization works to align the black male, at the symbolic level of the body, with those still unenfranchised, it is sig- nificant that the narrative means for inciting and explaining the mob’s In facusingon black men in the lynch scenario, Tam interested inthe overlay of sexual difference as witnessed in castration as the ultimate denouement of the mob’s violence. Such a focus, however, is not meant to suggest that black women were not lynched, ‘burned, and summarily mutilated in ways that would als speak tothe race/gender ais. AS Twill discuss later, the inscription of the black male as rapist, that “necessary” narrativity that propels the white mob to violence, caries an inherent negation ofthe Affican Ameri- ‘an woman through the very absence of her significatory tole in the psychosexval drama of ‘masculinity that underwnites the lynching and easton of black men. But while black fwomen may be absent from the cultural nareativity thar defines and sanetions lynching, ee CS? violence takes the form of an intense masculinization in the figure of the black male as mythically endowed rapist. Through this double staging, of gender—where the hypermasculinized rapist must “become” the feminine through ritualized castration—lynching inhabits and per- forms the border crossings of race, sex, and sexual difference. MaRkING THE Bopy Readers familiar with nineteenth-century United States literature will no doubt recognize that the epigraph from Ellison’s exploration of the body politic involved in relations between black and white men bears the same title, “The Birthmark,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1843 alle- gory of sexual difference, In each story, the figure of the birthmark estab- lishes a system of corporeal inscription that links the body to cultural hierarchies of power: Hawthorne’s birthmark being the “crimson stain upon the snow” of the beautifull Georgiana, while Ellison’s is the mark below the navel ofa young black man, Willie Significantly, both marks evoke castration, Georgiana’s “bloody hand” functioning as symbol of her feminine lack, and Willie's mark, through its disappearance into the “bloody mound of torn flesh and hair,” evincing his literal castration.* While the antebellum story depicts the white female body as sexual difference, Fllison’s piece rearticulates the symbolics of gender and cas- tration at the site of the black male body. Such a rearticulation is made possible by the shifting relations of race and sexual difference in the late nineteenth century, where Emancipation’s theoretical effect—the black male’s social sameness—is symbolically mediated by a disciplinary prac- their intellectual political work aginst mob violence during the late nineteenth and ‘early ewentieth centuries in particular wis crucial to African American communal resist ance ona broad scale, On this last note, se Hazel Catby, “On the Threshold of Woman's Ena’: Lynching, Empire, nd Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory.” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, eA. Henry Louis Gates, Je. (Chicago, 1986), pp. 301-16. On white women’s antilynching strugele, see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jesie Daniel Annes andthe Women's Campaign against Lynching (New York, 1979), “Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark,”in The Seavlet Letter and Other Tale of the Puritans, ed. Harry Levin (Boston, 1961), p- 369. bid, p. 370. “In the final stages of revising this essay for publication, T encountered James R MeGovern's Anatomy ofa Lynching: The Kiling of Claude Nea! (Baton Rouge, LA, 1982). ‘While similarly interested in the practice oF ynching, McGovern focuses onthe specificities ‘of the Neal ease and his books therefore more singulely historial and Factual than my dis cussion here, But I think t significant —and certainly not coineidental—that the concept of anatomy figures centally in his discussion aswell even as my analysis differs drastically nits elda B, Well Barnett, On Lychings: Southern Horvors; A Red Record; Mob Rulein New Orleans (New York, 1969), 9. 8. Much lke statistics on rape, numerical accounts of lynch ing vary widely, most obviously because of the way the legal apparatus ignored violent crimes against African Americans. Trudier Harris, Exorcsing Blacknes: Hiszorial and Lit- trary Lynching wnd Burning Ricuals (Bloomington, IN, 1984), for instance, cites 4,951 Iynchings inthe United Seates between 1882 and 1927, using figures provided by Cutler, ‘who tends to rely on “oficial” statistics, Wells Barnetts figure, on the other hand, isan es timation that seks to account for those violent acts no documented within the lager US. munity. See also Dow Hall IAs T write this inthe aftershock of the April 1992 acquittals of che white Los Angeles police officers who beat black male suspect, Rodney King, unconscious, tis apparent that the figuration cf the law Ellison depicts in 1940 continues co function asthe disciplinary ‘mechanism for instantiatng and perpetuating white supremacy. One might even venture {to say thatthe decline ofthe Iynch mob in the second half of the twentieth century has less452 Ropyn WIEGMAN practices of torture through which the entire African American popula tion could be defined and policed as innately, if no longer legally, infe- rior.22 Such accounts extended the function of lynching as 2 mode of surveillance by reiterating its performative qualities, carving up the black citizen body in the specular recreation of the initial, dismembering, scene, For Trudier Harris, who has studied the legacy of lynching for ‘African American writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the imposition of a violent, bodily destruction works “to keep Blacks con- tained politically and socially during the years of Reconstruction convey{ing] to [them] that there was always someone watching over their shoulders ready to punish them for the slightest offense or the least deviation from acceptable lines of action,” What constituted “accepta- ble lines of action” for the newly emancipated slave depended, of course, on whose perspective was being articulated, In the conilict be- tween a South deeply shocked by its lost hegemony and the slave's eu: phorie desire to grasp the rights and privileges of citizenry, the Full panorama of racist violence emerges as the defining conditions of “America” (as ideological trope and national body) itself. In this regard, we might understand the end of slavery as marking in fuller and more complex ways the birth of the nation, where one of the questions that divided the delegates at the Continental Congress in 1776 was finally settled in favor of a rhetorical and legal, though not al- rogether economic or political, equality. But as the rise of lynching in the postwar years indicates, this birth brings into crisis the definitional boundaries of nation implicit in the early constitutional documents: here, issues of generation, inheritance, and property rights are theoreti- cally wrenched from their singular association with the white masculine dnd made available, at least in the abstract, to a new body of citizens. The effect of this transformation is the dissolution ofa particular kind of patriarchal order, for while the slave system ensured a propertied rela tion between laborer and master, and discursively and legally bound the ‘African American to the white father through the surname, Emancipa- tion represents the literal and symbolic loss of the security of the white patronym and an attendant displacement of the primacy of the white hale. The many documented reports of slaves changing their names in the first moments of their freedom—and the thematic value of naming, to do with real advancements in white supremacy's abatement than with the incorporation ‘tthe mob’s tenor and function within the egal and law enforcement systems themselves, For discussion of various newspaper accounts of lynching, see Hares, Exorising Blackness, pp. 1-19. Ibid, p. 19. ‘fhe Anatomy of kynctnng Se its I in the African American cultural tradition—are indicative of the significance of the material and metaphorical eclipse of the white fa ther’s patronymic embrace. For the nonpropertied white male, the Civil Warand Reconstruction represented important transformations in the historical articulation of a ‘white underclass consciousness, offering on one hand the recognition of specific class-bound political interests, while often positing free men and women as competitors to their own economic survival. One of the ‘most prominent national figures embodying this position was Lincoln's successor to the White House, Andrew Johnson. As Eric Foner discusses in his important reconsideration of the Reconstruction era, Johnson, having grown up in poverty himself, identified with the Southern yeo- manry. “He seems to have assumed that the Confederacy’s defeat had shatcered the power of the ‘slaveocracy’ and made possible the political asceadancy of loyal white yeomen. The freedmen had no role to play in his vision of a reconstructed South.” Like other poor whites, Johnson saw slaves as complicit with their masters in maintaining economic and political power over nonslaveholding whites. In this scenario, Foner writes, “the most likely result of black enfranchisement would therefore be an alliance of blacks and planters, restoring the Slave Power's hege- mony and effectively excluding the yeomanry from political power.”?* Johason’s inability to read the class interests of poor whites as aligned with the emergent black citizen—as in fact a multiracial underclass ex: ploited by a fcudalistic agrarian or developing free market system— demonstrates the contradiction between a class-conscious and white supremacist social vision, Such a contradiction contributed to the polit- ical fragmentation of the postwar years, producing violent reprisals to- ‘ward the emancipated slave from the white yeoman as well as from the planter class In these reprisals for offenses more often imagined than real, lynch- ing becomes a primary disciplinary tool, and it takes on over time a narrativizing context that both propels the white crowd to action and defines the methods of rorture subsequently imposed. The narrative I refer to features the African American male in the role of mythically en- The most famous name change, of course, is Malcolm Lite’ shift to X. On the sig nificance of mating to the Aftican American itary tradition, see especially Kimberly W Benson, “Yam What Am: The Topos of Un(naming) in Afro-American Literatu,” in Black Literature and Literary Thery, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York, 1984), pp. 151-72: and Michael Cooke, “Naming, Being, and Black Expetience," Yale Review 68 (1978): 167-86. Erie Fonet, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Resolution 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), p. 181 biddowed rapist, with the white woman as the flower of civilization he in- tends to violently pluck, and the white male as the heroic interceptor who restores order by thwarting this black phallic insurgence.2” But in the early decades of the nineteenth century, lynching does not function within this constellation of racial and sexual encodements. Instead, as ‘Trudier Harris discusses, it is a component of the system of frontier justice, operating in lieu of a legally sanctioned trial and consisting of a variety of punishments—most often whippings—without the final denouement of death.** In fact, before 1840, writes James E. Cutler in his study of the history of lynching in the United States, “the verb lynch ‘was occasionally used to include capital punishment, but ... ‘to lynch” had not then undergone a change in meaning and acquired the sense of ‘to put to death.’ .. I was not until atime subsequent to the Civil War that the verb lynch came to carry the idea of putting to death.” And it is not until that time as well that lynching becomes associated almost cx clusively with acts of retribution against the legally free citizenry of Af can American subjects. ‘The turn toward lynching as a racially coded practice owes its exis tence, as I have suggested, to the transformations attending Emancipa. arity presented by the loss of tion, from the threat to white economic a fice labor force to the competitive inclusion of African Americans into the open market's laboring class. But the significance of lynching as coterminous with violence against African Americans in the Recon: ©, W. Grifth’s 1915 The Birth ofa Nation is pethaps the classic example of the hys- terial tie between the African American's social participation and the discourse of the black rapist. Here, ina film that literally transformed the technical achievements of Ameri can filmmaking, the glory and order of the Old South are contrasted with the devastation and ruin wrought by the Civil War and its aftermath. The picturesque racial harmony of the slave system gives way to massive black corruption asthe seemingly innate bestiality of| the exslave wendls is way to the surface. As Blacks descend int laziness and drunkenness, they seize the pols and disenfranchise white citizens, before fil lying sexual claim 0 ‘white women. In the flm’s finale, as Donald Bogle writes, “t group of stalwart, upright white males, weasing sheets and hoods, no less. .[defend] white womanhood, white honor and white glory... estrfing] tothe South everything ic has los, including white supremacy. Thus we have the birth of a nation.” See Donald Bogle, Backs in American Films and Telescion (New York, 1988), 20; Alan Cast, “The Films of D. W. Grifth: A Soyle fr the Times" Journal of Popular Fm 1, no. 2 (1972): 67-79; and Michael Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing, Vision" D. W. Grid's The Birth ofa Nation,” Repreren tations 9 (1985): 150-95. See Harris, Exercising Blacks, pp. 6-7. Cutler, p. 16. liSee also Dowd Hal, who writes that “the proportion of lynchings taking place inthe South increased from 82% of the roal [of executions] inthe 1890s to 95% in the 1920s; ‘over the same periods the proportion of lynch victims who were white decreased from 32% 09%, Lynching had become virtually a Southern phenomenon and 3acial one” (p. 133). ANE AANAE OMY OF Liynciing struction era emerges as well from the historical configuration of citi- venry as part of a broader economy of the body in United States culture. As feminist political theorists have discussed, the white male citizen of Enlightenment thought draws his particular suit of rights and privileges from the rhetorical disembodiment of the citizen as a social category, where in Lauren Berlant’s words, “the generic ‘person’™ provides the ab. straction necessary for replacing, the historically located body with the discursivity of national identity.*! As she explains: “The American sub. ject is privileged to suppress the fact of his historical situation in the ab- stract ‘person’; but then, in return, the nation provides a kind of prophylaxis for the person, as it promises to protect his privileges and his local body in return for loyalty to the state. ... The implicit white- ness and maleness of the original American citizen is thus itself pro- tected by national identity.” In constituting the citizen through the value system of disembodied abstraction, the white male is “freed” from the corporeality that might otherwise impede his insertion into the larger body of national identity. For the African American subject, on the other hand, it is precisely the imposition of an extreme corporeality that defines his or her distance from the privileged ranks of (potential or actual) citizenry. With the ad- vent of Emancipation and its attendant loss of the slave system’s mark. ing of the African American body as property, lynching emerges to reclaim and reassert the centrality of black corporeality, deterring the now theoretically possible move toward citizenry and disembodied ab- straction. Through the lynching scenario, “blackness” is castas a subver- sive (and most often sexual) threat, an incontrovertible chaos whose challenge to the economic and social coherency of the nation can be psy- chologically, if not wholly politically, averted by corporeal abjection and death. That lynching becomes during Reconstruction and its after- ‘math an inercasingly routine response to black attempts at education, Personal and communal government, suffrage, and other indicators of cultural inclusion and equality attests to its powerful disciplinary fimnc- tion. As the most extreme deterritorialization of the body and its subjec- tive boundaries, Iynching guarantees the white mob’s privilege of physical and psychic penetration, grants it a definitional authority over social space, and embodies the vigilant and violent system of survei lance that underwrites late nineteenth- and early ewentieth-century ne- gotiations over race and cultural power. "Lauren Berlant, “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Lif," in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality i the Mademn Text, e4, Hortense Spillers (New York, 1991), p. 112, bid, p. 113.ee eee Waite Beauty, BLACK BEasT But why the charge of rape as the consolidating moment of Iynching’s justification? Why this scxualization of blackness as the precondition rot only for mob action, but for Iynching’s broad cultural acceptance and appeal? The answer to this, like any accounting of the historical, is less apparent than the many contexts in which the evidence of lynching’s sextalization appears.” But if we begin where I have suggested, with the narrative of rape (and its culmination in lynching) translating the crisis of Emancipation from economic to sexual and gendered terms, we en: counter a very powerful means through which not only black men but the entire black community could be psychologically and physically contained, Most important, we witness the way the rape narrative simul- taneously recognizes and subverts the African American male's theoreti- cal equality in the sexual as well as political and economic spheres. On a level less abstract, the rape mythos, as an overwhelmingly southern re- “The tise of black Iynchings in the late nineteenth century and the attendant articulation of the mythology ofthe black male as rapist demonstrates an increas: ing reliance on the discourse of sexual difference to negotiate race within the newly emergent economic structures of the twentieth century. This sift and its jmplications for reading gender and race emerge most fully in Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), our literature’s most compelling story of the black man ‘aught in the mythology of the rapist—that death, as Bigger Thomas says, “be- fore death came.” Revolving around the fated life of Bigger, his employment by a liberal white family, his accidental murder of their daughter, Mary, and his sub: Sequent flight and trial, the novel demonstrates what Wright considers the defin- itive pattern of race relations in the United States. As he writes in “How ‘Bigger Was Born,” “any Negro ... knows that times without number he has heard of some Negro boy being picked up ... and carted off to jail and charged with ‘rape.’ This thing happens so often that ro my mind it had become a representa: tive symbol of the Negro’s uncertain position in America” (p. xxvii). In Wright's novel, such uncertainty is explicitly linked to masculinity and to the competitive dimensions of black male and white male relations. The significance of masculinity for Wright's central character is apparent from the opening scene where Bigger's mother describes his failure: “We wouldn’t have to live in this garbage dump if you had any manhood in you" (p. 12). Her words fll Bigger with shame and hateed, a deep alienating guilt repest- cedly evoked throughout the text and expressly linked ro emasculation. When his ‘mother visits him in prison at the novel's end and begs on her knees before Mrs. Dalton for Bigger’ life, he is described as “paralyzed with shame; he felt vio lated” (p. 280). This violation, this symbolic emasculation, functions asa central metaphor in the novel, defining the black man’s status ina racist culeure, which, “Richard Weight, Native Sow (1940 pt, New York, 1966), p. 228. Further citations ap pear in the text. fhe Anatomy of Lynching = 457° sponse to enfranchisement, also challenges the work of the Ereedman’s Bureau, where the patriarchal logic of the dominant culture became the defining mechanism for organizing the newly freed slave: not only did the bureau appoint the husband as head of the household, assigning to him sole power to enter into contractual labor agreements for the entite family, but it fought for the allotment of land for every freed “male,” while granting only unmarried women acceso this domain” in these pronouncements—as in the routine gender segregation at tending voting, jury dt, the holding of political and Republican party office —the official program of Reconstruction understood the freedom ‘of black men to entail z “natural” judicial and social superiority over African American women, The nineteenth centucy’s determination of public and private along strict gender lines thus provided a definitional structure through which social space and familia roles were shaped for a population no longer denied the right (and privilege) of maintaining family bonds.** But while the patriarchalization of the black family served to institutionalize it within the gender codes prevalent in white as Wright says in his autobiography Black Boy, “could recognize but a part of a Iman. The parality of masculinity serves to sign black alenaton i sted States society in general. As Bigger tells his friends: “Every time I think about fel like somebody’s pokinga red-hot iron down my throat... . We live here and they live there... They goc things we ain’t. They do things and we ean’. It's just like living in jail” (p. 28). In the figure of the red:hot iron, Wright casts Bigger’s oppression in highly sexual and phallic terms, marking segregation, rac- ism, and poverty asthe symbolic phalluses of white masculine power burning in Bigger’s throat, “You ain’t a man no more,” Bigger finally says, “[White folks] ++ after you so hot and hard .... they kill you before you die” (pp. 326-27) Equating being a “man” with access to freedom and power, Bigger posits the white world, so “hot and hard” against him, as castrating contest to gendered relations within the olaecommunty-Angel Davis svongeers has argued that the salient heme emerging from comes life nthe eave ques oe ofsenal equals.” See Angel Davi, Women, Rav nd Css (New Yor 1981) 618 Mickle Wallace, lac Mah adh Mot of aperoman (Now Yr, 1979) conc ‘ith his Sig thar hough Emancipation, blk men were encourage toratoncce Peril ol race, Othe primp on ty ce transton fom sry toshateropping sec Susan A Mann, “Savery, Shareroppng and Sexual neal in iat Wouenin Americ: inl See Ponpeton eMac Nahon Bath Maite Ro, an FO Maye (Chia, 1990) pp. “Richard Weight, Black Boy (New York, 1945), p. 284.458 ROBYN WIEGMAN bourgeois ideology, thereby securing the black family to the formal di mensions of white social behavior, many whites were decidedly threat- ‘ened by the definitional sameness accorded former slaves. The loss of one patriarchal organization of social life—that of slavery—and its re placement by the seeming egalitarianism of a male-dominated black family, then, has the effect of broadening the competitive dimensions of interracial masculine relations, especially as the black male’s new prop- erty governance of black women threatens to extend to women of the dominant group as well. Ieis in this climate that the mythology of the black male as rapist emerges, working the faultline of the slave’s newly institutionalized masculinization by framing this masculinity as the bestial excess of an overly phallicized primitivity. In the contours of Western racial dis- course, of course, the primitive sexual appetite associated with blackness, is not a new articulation at the end of the nineteenth century, but its crafting in the highly stylized and overdetermined narrative structure of the rape mythos—along with the sheer frequency of its deployment— ‘marks a particular historical configuration of the sexual and gendered in thei relation to issues of race and nation. For while the slavery period in But importantly, this castration is also an inverted sexual encounter between black men and white men, as evinced in the elaborate scene of chase and capture that accompanies the charge of rape against Bigger. Hiding on the roof of a building, Bigger is entrapped by white men wielding a fire hose, “the rushing steeam jerked this way and that... Then the water hit him... . He gasped, his ‘mouth open. ... The water left him; he lay gasping, spent. ... The icy water clutched again at his body like a giant hand; the chill of it squeezed him like the circling coils of a monstrous boa constrictor” (p. 251). The passage that depicts Bigger’s subsequent conquest by this monstrous phallic image extends the hor rific sexual encounter: “He wanted to hold on but could not, His body tectered fon the edge; his legs dangled in the air. Then he was falling. He landed on the roof, on his face, in snow, dazed” (p. 252). Finally brought down by the mon- strosity of white masculine desire for and hatred of the black man, Bigger loses consciousness, his steength gone as the violent parody of romantic coupling ends. In capturing Bigger, the white men—nearly cight thousand searching the city—believe they have made the world safe again for white women. As the pros- ‘ccutor, Buckley, says in his plea for the imposition of the death penalty: “The law is strong and gracious enough to allow all of us to sit here .. . and not tremble with fear that a this very moment some hal-human black ape may be climbing, through the windows of our homes to rape, murder, and burn our daughters! Every decent white man in America ought to swoon with joy for the oppor tunity to crush with his heel the woolly head of this black lizard” (p. 373). While Bigger’s murder of the white woman is accidental and the subsequent destruc- tion of her body makes it impossible to gamer physical evidence of sexual abuse, The Anatomy of Lynching 459 the United States often envisioned the Uncle Tom figure a the significa tion of the “positive good” ofa system that protected and cared for its black “chiléren,” once emancipated, these children became virile men who wanted for themselves the ultimate symbol of white civilization, the white woman.** The transformation of the image of the black men from simple, docile Uncle Tom to violent sex offender characterizes the oppositional logic underwriting the representational structure of black male images in nineteenth-and twentieth-century United States culture a logic in which the discourse of sexual diference—from feminized locility to hypermasculinized phallicity—comes to play a. prima Significatory role eee me eae South Carolina Senator Ben Tillman demonstrates this logic in his 1907 speech before Congress, when he argues for the abandonment of ddue process for blacks accused of sex crimes against white women ‘The white women of the South are in a state of sige. ... Some lurking demon who has watched for the opportunity scizes her; she is choked or beaten into insensibility and ravished, her body the central crime, as Buckley claims, isrape”(p. 377). Tis forthe ape of Ma Dalton that Biggee must ci, as his trespass of white masculine property may him the symbol ofall hatte white world must protect set roman “eternal monster," a “treacherous beat” and “worthless ape” (p 377) Given the intensity ofthe taboo against black men ad white women, Bigger accepts Mary's death 2 a conscious at: “Though he had killed by acident not once did he fel the nced to tel himself that i had been an acldent- He was black nd he fad been alone in a roan where a white gil had been klled there fore he had kiled her” (p, 101), In accepting responsibility for Mary's death, Bigger sces himself not only as refuting white masculine authority, but as gare ingan advantage that had eluded him before: “The knowledge hah had led 2 whit gil they loved and regarded stir symbol of beauty made hit fel the qual of them, ikea man wo had been somehow cheated, but had now evened the score” (p. 188). Through his destruction of the objected symbol of white patriarchal We, Bigger claims hisrght to masculine selfhood ne longer does he reed the knife aad gn, ational symbols of mascaliny, tha inital scons panied him tothe Dalton home: What his knife and gun had once meant to him, his knowledge of having scrtly mired Mary now mean (9 T81) Bigger’ acceptance of Marys murder and his consequent sense of reer are partculatly meaning when viewed in terms of an erie and seeing in As Dowd Hall writes, “The ideology of racism reached a virulent crescendo, asthe dominant image of blacks in the white mind shifted from inferior child to aggressive and dangerous animal” (p. 133), "On the Uncle Tom figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel and its impact on rethinking race and gender inthe nineteenth century, sce Robyn Wiegman, “Towatd a Po litical Economy of Race and Gender.” Bucknell Review (Fall 1992),460 Ronyy WIEGMAN prostituted, her purity destroyed, her chastity taken from her Shall men... demand for [the demon] the right to have a fair trial and be punished in the regular course of justice? So far as Lam con- cerned he has put himself outside the pale of the law, human and Aivine. ... Civilization peels offus. .. and we revert to the... im- pulses... co “kill! Kill! Kill!" against the defilers of white womanhood, hat he does not hate blacks by recalling the negroes of the old slave days .... the negroes who knew they were inferior and who never presumed to assert equality.”** These blacks, with minds like “those of children,” posed no sexual threat, as was wit essed, according to Tillman, by the fact that during the Civil War, with, white men away fighting, “there is not of record a solitary instance of bre white woman having been wronged” by the nearly 800,000 black tren teft on plantation land. Only with Emancipation and the “return to barbarism” does rape follow; “the negro becomes a fiend in human In proposing mob retaliation Tillman assures his listeners « form. significant event in the novel. Before setting out for the Dalton home on the day OF Mary's accidental death, Bigger gathers with friends at Doc’s poolroom ro dis uss plans for robbing Blum’s Delicatessen, While the men had pulled other jobs” this was to be thie frst robbery of a white man. “For months they had iked of robbing Blums, but had not been able to bring themselves to do it. “They had the feeling that the robbing of Bhum's would bea violation of ultimate taboo; it would be trespassing into territory where the full wrath of an alien (white world would be turned loose upon them in short, it would be a symbolic World's rule over them a challenge which they yearned to id to” (pp. 17-18). The language here of “violation,” antly seripts the robbing of Blum in ‘between a black man and a white challenge of the white make, but were afrai taboo,” and “symbolic challenge” signific the same ferms as the mythic encounter jroman, This scene anda later one in which Bigger purposely argues with Jay to avoid going through with the plan indicate che more fundamental con flict that lies a the heart of the mythology of the black male rapist: the struggle ‘ver social, political, and sexual power between black men and white men. ‘More important perhaps, the incident surrounding Blum clarifies the role of the white woman in the negotiation of power among men, While white women have been complicit in the lynching and burning of black men, at times using the Charge of rape themselves in order to protect their positions inthe racial hierar Shy. the mythology ofthe black rapist sets them up as the displaced ste of amas: in Justice Denied: The Black Man in White Americ Ben Tillman, “The Black Pei” 182, ‘ed, William Chace and Peter Collier (New York, 1970), bid, p. 183, bid pp. 18 soabid., p- 188. 1, 184 (fhe Anatomy of Lynciing = #61 - s Tillman’ rhetoric indicates, the white woman serves inthe ethos of nineteenth-century racialism, as a pivotal rhetorical figure for shapiny the mythology ofthe black rapist. Using her emblem asthe keeper oF the puriey of the race, white men cast themselves as protectors of civiliza tion, reaffirming not only their role as social and familial “heads,” but their paternal property rights as well. In this way, as Trudier Harris ob- serves, the white male maintains a position of “superiority nor only in assigning a place to his women, but especially in keeping black people, particularly black men in the lace he had asigned for them." In this dual role, the mythology of the black male rapist simultaneously engi- neers race and gender hierarchies, masking the white male’s own histori cal participation in “miscegenating” sexual activities and ensuring his disciplinary control over potential sexual—and, one must add, political—liaisons between black men and white women. Within the culine strggle, the embodiments of white masculine desire and hence the Emblems oF thwarted culty forblack mem Innes of robe Bl oF challenging Mr Dalton, who makes his wealth fom the overpriced Yemals inthe “lack Bele” Bigger ves outa drama cated by the intersecting hierarchies oF fcc an ger dams ta ae the whe Woman the del ol 0 tne cnnacion isdn nt abo the white woman rom broader pattern in US culine where tllrenes bergen me ae played within highly charged configuration of gender. Win th conteyon th nde f heck woman eon partclar cultural negatity ashe symbolize the exes of white womanho. Tn'Naae Som for tsanc, the raped and murdered bay of Bene Mess Bigger'sgirliiend, is wheeled into the courtroom as graphic display of Biggcr’s Violent criminals, Ashe pots “Though he had killed a black gil anda white rl he Knew that it would be forthe death of the white il tha he would be Punished. The back giv was merely ‘evidence’ (p. 307) But while Bigger rec Dgnizes the asymmetrical vale placed on black women and white women, he nonetheless understands Bessic’s murder within the same contextual framework bb thar governing May’, finding both acts “the most meaningful things that iad ever happened ro hm. Fe was ving, truly and deeply. Never had his willbeenso ee (p.225)Intvng Bese to he symbolic act athe white wor i's murder~and in marking his violation of her as an equally cathartic trespass-Bigge redefines rape ise “Rape vas not what one did to women, Rape was what one felt when on’ back wa against a wall and one ha to stike out, whether one wanted to or not... Te was rape when he cred out in hate deep nhishearta he fer the strain o ving day by day” (p. 214). This displace tment ofthe gendered d:mension of sexual violence cass the mythology ofthe black male rapist as itself a cultural rape, one defined by the materiality of black Hacts, Exorising Blackness, p19.462 Rosyn Wreoman context of nineteenth-century abolitionist and feminist movements, the necessity for disrupting such potential bonds seems important indeed. ‘And yet, the central figuration of the white woman’s sexuality in the rape mythos must be understood as a displacement of the deeper and. ‘more culturally complex relation between black men and white men and their claims to the patriarchal province of masculine power. As Harris writes, “The issue really boils down to one between white men and black ‘men and the mythic conception the former have of the latter.”*? Such a ‘mythic conception—in which, as Frantz Fanon says, “the Negro... has been fixated [at the genital]"*—works through the discourse of the bio- logical, figuring blackness as the corporeal, and thereby equating the colonized laboring body with an extensive, uncontrollable sexuality. In reducing the black male to the body, and further to the penis itself, the oppression, Such a transformation of the metaphorics of rape simultaneously points to the gendered inscriptions of black male oppression, while crafting the ‘African American woman’s death as the ricochet effect of the white woman’s pedestaled superiority. From a feminist perspective, there is something deeply disturbing about the novel's rearticulation of rape as “not what one did to women” and Bigger’ sub- sequent insertion into the position of sexual—and not simply racial—vietim. In the evacuation of the body of woman, particularly the black woman, from the tctrain of sexual violence, Wright seems to hierarchicalize African American op- pression in such a way that the thwarting of black masculinity, through Titeralized castration, outreaches and indeed negates the historical problem of the black woman’s routinely violated sexuality, To find it necessary to deny the igendered dimensions of rape, then, to see only the black male as rape’s social and Sexual victim, serves not only to establish the black male's difference from the feminine, but to displace the category of woman altogether. In this way, the black woman is expelled beyond the narrative’s critical gaze as Bigger becomes the universalized emblem of black oppression—a universalization clearly predi cated on the framework of masculinity and differences among men. ‘But while Wright's method of foregrounding the masculine stakes at workin the rapist mythos is defined at the expense of black women, his novel refuses the mote traditional structure of male bonding that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has de- fined, in which “the spectacle ofthe ruin of woman is just the right Iubricant for an adjustment of differentials of power {among men],” This we witness in opid “ofrantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York, 1967), p. 165, Fora discussion of the role of black women in Native Son, see Trudier Harts, “Native Sons and Foreign Daughters” in New Essay on “Native Son," ed. Keneth Kinnamvon (New York, 1990), pp. 63-84 “Eve Kosolsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homorocial Desire (New York, 1985), p. 6. the Anatomy of Lynching = 463, psychic drama of masculinity as it is played out in the colonial scenario of United States culture hinges on the simultaneous desire and disa- vowal attending the black male’s mythic phallic inscription. In White Hero, Black Beast, Paul Hoch reads this process of desire and disavowal as constitutive of the unconscious formation of white masculinity ‘where the overdetermination of the black male’s mythic phallicism—as evinced in the proliferation of discourses proclaiming, describing, or de- nying it—represents “a projection of those aspects of [the white male’s] awn sexuality which society has made taboo.”** Under such conditions, as Hoch writes, “abandon|ing} control over the bestial supe! masculinity he has projected outward on to the black male would threaten the racist’s control over his own repressed sexuality.™* Hoch draws this conclusion not simply from the Freudian psychoan- alytic framework he employs, bur from the context of the relationship the fina moments ofthe novel when Bigger makes ile attempt to emerge from hi alenation t Sonocet vit Jans the white boyd of Mary Dun, “Tall. . Tell Mister». TellJn hello” (p. 92), Bigger say ois lawyer, Boris Max, shifting as he dacs from the servile address of Mise to Jan's at name Bue the contrat between this hesitant and rather hopeless attempt andthe image bf utopian masculine bond offered earlier in the novel—"an image ofa tong Blinding sun sending hot rye down sin he mide of avast crowd of men, Shite men and black men at ll men ith the es rape ling] aay the Iman diferent, the clos the clothes, and [drawing] wht was common and food upward toward the sn” (p.388)--demonetrates the deep abyss of olor Sd cant that wil accompany the many Bigges to thee graves, Th the seeming imposbiity ofthe atopan image to extend co Bigger any hope within the nacre emaio ofthe Black naleas rapist, Wrights novel par posely counters the thetorc of 1930 progressive polis (mst abviouly that rahe Communist party that offs the image of interracial bonds #0 silly ansgesive. Instead his naratne mas te extemity of hated and Wo Tene that ushers the black ial into the parachal province ofthe masculine, that province where hes simultaneously endowed with masculine prowess and cleanly deprived ofthe ality to pursue sexual (aswell associa) autonomy. Burin exploring the complexities ofthe epe mythos, Wright cannot wend his tay ou ofthe ceologia trap of gender tat exerts so much power within the Alstplinary practice of lynching and castration, Intend, he reiterates the binary insertions of sexual diference by positioning the black male's soca freedom. wells the critical reading of his ictimzation-~as oppositional to Mvomen, As such, Natioe Son compellingly and disturbingly capetes Bigger in the dentinal neni of ac sexuality and gender that Weight so defiant st Out to explore “Paul Hoch, White Hera, Black Beast: Racism, Sexism, and the Mask of Masculinity (London, 1979), p. $4 “Ibid, p. 55.464 Rosyn WIEGMAN between conquest and masculinity in Western cultures. Here, the na~ ture of conquest within the realm of the sexual underwrites the com- ‘modity status attached to the female body, helping to produce, through the formation of the feminine as masculine property, the contradictory logic of virgin/whore that subtends “woman” in her various cultural guises. In the bifurcation of the feminine into idealized and non: sexualized virginity on the one hand and defiled and fully sexualized promiscuity on the other, the conquestatory narrative of masculine sex- tality is caught between a necessary restraint and a licensed rein, But be cause conquest is preeminently motivated by the inaccessible, by the taboos orchestrated around restraint, itis ultimately the detilement of the feminine in its ideal state that activates the conquestatory dimen. sions of “normative” masculine heterosexuality. For Hoch, this means that the phantasm of the black beast conquering the white goddess offers the most impressive demonstration of virility, as itis the greatest violation of the boundaries of restraint. At a fundamental psychic level he claims, the white male “bitterly resents the black male for the greater opportunities for conquest and defilement his debased standing appar- ently affords him.”** Such resentment literally engenders 2 complicated process of cre~ ation and negation in which the white male invests the black male with. definitive masculine powers as the precondition for violently denying, and withdrawing such powers from him. In this regard, the white male creates the image he must castrate, and it is precisely through the my thology of the black male as rapist that he effectively does this. In the process, the creation of a narrative of black male sextal excess simulta: heously exposes and redirects the fear of castration from the white male to the black male body. And it is in the lynch scene that this transfer moves from the realm of the psychosexual to the material. Harris's de- scriptive account of the sexual undercurrent of lynching and castration is telling in this regard: “For the white males ... there is a symbolic transfer of sexual power at the point of the executions. The black man is stripped of his prowess, but the very act of stripping brings symbolic power to the white man. His actions suggest that, subconsciously, he raves the very thing he is forced to destroy. Yer he destroys it as an in cation of the political (sexual) power he has.” In this destruction of the phallic black beast, the white male reclaims the hypermasculinity that his own mythology of black sexual excess has denied him, finding in sex: ual violence the sexual pleasure necessary to uphold both his tenuous masculine and white racial identitics. “tbid Haris, Exocsing Blackness, p, 23. fhe Anatomy af Lynching — 209 In negating the black male’s most visible claim to masculine power, Harris describes lynching as a “communal rape,” a description that in scribes within the lynching and castration scene the relations of power and disempowerment at work in the disciplinary practice most associ ated with sexual difference: male sexual violence toward women.** Through the rape metaphor, the emasculation of the black male under- taken in lynching and castration emerges as the imposition of the binary figuration of gender, with the white male retaining hegemony over the entire field of masculine entitlements, while the black male is confined to the corporeal excess of a racial feminization, But as T have suggested throughout my discussion, and as my reading of Native Som in particular demonstrates, it is important to maintain the distinction between the imposition of feminization onto male bodies and the historical frame- work of the feminine as part and parcel of being born female, Such a dis tinction enables us to understand the force of the discourse of sexual difference as it constructs and contains hierarchical relations among ‘men without negating the specific materiality of gender oppression that accompanies women’s variously raced positions in United States cul- ture. In other words, the imposition of feminization onto male and fe- male bodies is not—politically, theoretically, or historically—the same. But while castration may function asa means for enactinga gendered difference at the site of the black male body, itis also the case that such a practice of dismemberment enables a perverse level of physical intimacy between the white male aggressor and his captive ex-slave, Dointing to an underlying obsession with sexual (as opposed to gender) sameness, Harris’s report that “in some historical accounts, the Iynchers were re puted to have divided pieces of the black man’s genitals among them: selves” allows us to envision the castration scene as more than the perverse sexual encounter offered by the rape metaphor.” In the image of white men embracing—with hate, fear, and a chilling form of em: powered delight—the very penis they were so overdeterminedly driven to destroy, one encounters a sadistic enactment of the homoerotic, in deed its most extreme disavowal. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has dis- cussed in Between Men, the male bonding relations that characterize patriarchal structures are dependent in nineteenth- and twentieth- century Anglo-American cultures on the panic image of the homosex- tual, whose very visibility of same-sex desire provides the disciplinary terms for normalizing heterosexuality in its compulsory formation. From this perspective, we might understand the lynching scenario and its obsession with the sexual dismemberment of black men to mark the smi bia466 Ronyn WIEGMAN limit of the homosexual/heterosexual binary: that point at which the oppositional relation reveals its inherent and mutual dependence, and the heterosexuality of the black male “rapist” is transformed into a vio- lently homoerotic exchange. “The homosociality of this world,” Sedgwick writes in a discussion of the late Renaissance, which holds true for the history of Anglo and African men in the United States, “is not that of brotherhood, but of extreme, compulsory, and intensely volatile ‘mastery and subordination.”® Tn such a volatile and sexually charged realm, the mythology of the black male as rapist functions to seript the deeply disturbing transforma- tions in United States racial relations in the late nineteenth century within the double regiscers of sexuality and gender, thereby granting to the white mob that captures and controls the black body the psychologi cal power of arbitrating life and death. In choosing death—and accom. panying it with the most extreme practices of corporeal abuse— whiteness enhances its significatory lack, filling the absence of meaning that defines it with the fully corporeal presence of a hated, feared, and now conquered blackness. The extremity of punishment in the lynching, and castration scenario thus provides the necessary illusion of returning, to the lost moment of complete mastery—a moment never actually “full,” though yearned for, indeed frantically sought after, through the disciplinarity of random mob violence. AxotHER WILLIE The enduring power of the black male rapist mythos is perhaps best wit- essed in the contemporary era in the specter of Willie Horton, the cov vieted black male rapist used in George Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign to signify the potential danger of Democratic party control. ‘Through the figure of Willie Horton, Bush challenged the toughness of his opponent, Michael Dukakis, whose penal reform program in Massa chusetts reportedly was responsible for putting a rapist back on the streets. Bush’s “get-rough” discourse, deployed here in the context of a test of masculine strength between white men, functioned to align rac ism with the broader and perlaps more ncbulous fear of national decline—that fear so well orchestrated by David Duke and other polit cal spokesmen for white supremacy.s! That Bush had to quickly disafi Ate himself, in the 1992 presidential campaign, from race-baiting in light of both Duke’s tactics and his popular support (which are not un- “Eye Kosofaky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocal Desire (New York, 1985), p. 76 sce Nina Burleigh, “David Duke,” Z Magesine, December 1991, pp. 47-51 Oe LOE OY ROIS connected) is one of the more enriching ironies of contemporary poli tics. But it also points to the historically aphasic conundrum in which we live: where the narrative scenario of black disempowerment follow- ing Reconstruction can be eternally renewed as the fear invoking con. text for organizing various levels of white supremacist activity. In this nse, the image offered by Ralph Ellison in “The Birthmark”—where the body of that seemingly fictional Willie lies dismembered between white male legs—occupies a symbolic range quite arresting in its histori- cal diversity. For Bush, in fact, the representation of the black male as sextial threat functioned as the phantasm of his own phallic potential, providing the framework for escaping the limitations of corporeality, and thereby making possible his ascension into the highest position the disembodied abstraction of citizenry in the United States can offer. Such a figuration of interracial male contestations has important im- plications for our understanding of the relationship between race and gender, necessitating as it does a rearticulation of the assumption, as Mervat Hatem writes, “that there is an automatic and natural patriar: chal alliance among men (of different classes and cultures) against women."®? The history of patriarchal organizations within the African American community—as well as the definitional relation that reads race through the binary of gender—points to the specificities of social and economic transformation and therefore cannot be assumed under a transhistorical model of masculine domination. In this regard, the equa- tion of women with sexual difference that often accompanies feminist theory's interrogations into the meaning of gender within the social must necessarily be suspended in order to read the multiplicity of ways in which the discourse of sexual difference has been, and continues to be, deployed.5 As the anatomy of lynching demonstrates, itis precisely through the discourse ofa sexual and sextalized difference that racial hi- cerarchies among men have been historically mediated in U.S. culture— the threat posed by black men to white masculine hegemony defined and recuperated by positioning that body as the site where gender and race converge. In such processes of cultural production, all writing of the black male body traverses the discursive terrain of race, sex, and gender, °Mervat Hatem, “The Poites of Sexuality and Gender in Segregated Patriarchal Sys tems: The Case of Eighteenth. and NineteenthCentury Egypt,” Feminist Soudies 12 (1986): 252. ‘fora more extended diseussion of the way in which feminist film theory in particular has confined the meaning of sexual difference tothe body of woman, sce Robyn Wiegman, “Feminism, the Boys, and Other Matters Regarding the Male," in Screening the Male: x= ‘loring Masculinitesin Hollywood Cinema, ed Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York, 1992),