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Beyond the photograph: a graphic

history of lynching
a
Megha Anwer
a
Department of English, Purdue University, West Lafayette,
Indiana, USA
Published online: 23 Aug 2012.

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To cite this article: Megha Anwer (2014) Beyond the photograph: a graphic history of lynching,
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5:1, 15-28, DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2012.703960

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 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2014
Vol. 5, No. 1, 15–28, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2012.703960

Beyond the photograph: a graphic history of lynching

Megha Anwer*

Department of English, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

(Received 20 December 2011; final version received 11 July 2012)

This paper studies the 2008 graphic novel Incognegro in conjunction with the sur-
viving lynching photographs. It argues that Johnson and Pleece’s work gives us a
behind-the-scenes documentation of lynching – an ‘inside view’ that the photographs,
despite their claimed reliance on a facticist projection of ‘objective reality’, often fail to
do. To the extent that the period’s white-sponsored lynching photographs follow a care-
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fully coded if unwritten convention and aesthetics of representation, they tend in fact
to elide and gloss over the ‘whole truth’, or distract from immediate and direct enreg-
isterment of the full and utter horror of the violence being perpetrated; this, despite the
presence of the ‘strange fruit’ that grotesquely and ominously hangs from the itinerant
scaffolds dotting the lynchtime landscape. In this backdrop of history and representa-
tion, Incognegro may be understood as an interventionist text in the long and innovative
narrative of America’s visual culture; a first-order intervention that reconfigures a racist
visual archive from within, so as to unravel and deconstruct the undergirding matrix of
ideological, socio-cultural and aesthetic values upon which the lynching photographic
archive stands.
Keywords: Incognegro; Matt Johnson; race; lynching photographs; graphic novel

The 2008 graphic novel Incognegro, with text by Matt Johnson and illustrations by Warren
Pleece, concerns the exploits of an early twentieth-century black journalist from New York
whose beat involves the infiltration of lynch mobs. By virtue of the ‘camouflage provided
by his genes’ (Johnson et al. 2008), Zane, the novel’s coloured protagonist, is able to pass
as a white man, mingle with white southerners at lynchings, talk to them openly as ‘one of
them’, to garner their personal views, their affective response to the violence and the extent
of their participation in this communal event. With this ‘inside information’ he is able to
pen candid exposé accounts of racial crimes that otherwise would go unreported – and in
effect unmarked and unnoticed – by national media.
This paper studies Incognegro in conjunction with the surviving lynching photographs,
the earliest of which were taken in the late nineteenth century. Even though incidents of
lynching reduced during the First World War, the majority of these photographs come to
us from the first three decades of the twentieth century. I argue that Johnson and Pleece’s
work gives us a behind-the-scenes documentation of lynching – an ‘inside view’ that the
lynching photographs, despite their claimed reliance on a facticist projection of ‘objec-
tive reality’, often fail to do. To the extent that the period’s lynching photographs follow a

*Email: manwer@purdue.edu; megha.anwer@gmail.com

© 2012 Taylor & Francis

 16 M. Anwer

carefully coded if unwritten convention and aesthetics of representation, they tend in fact to
elide and gloss over the ‘whole truth’, to conventionalize and fulfil ‘expectations’, or to oth-
erwise distract from immediate and direct enregisterment of the full and utter horror of the
violence being perpetrated; this, despite the presence of the ‘strange fruit’ that grotesquely
and ominously hangs from the itinerant scaffolds dotting the lynchtime landscape.
In this backdrop of history and representation, Incognegro may be understood as an
interventionist text in the long and innovative narrative of America’s visual culture; a first-
order intervention that dismantles and reconfigures a racist visual archive from within, so
as to unravel and deconstruct the undergirding matrix of ideological, socio-cultural and aes-
thetic values upon which the lynching photographic archive stands. Johnson and Pleece’s
graphic novel is able both to penetrate through (and beneath) the surface opacities of period
photography, and in the process offer a counter-narrative of lynching that rips open the
repressions and concealment on which those period lynching photographs depended for
their hidden ‘ideological’ agenda, so as to lay bare to view, and in full glare, the savage
and hideous ‘inside anatomy’ of those gruesome occurrences. In so doing it more truly and
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exactly tells – ‘graphically’ anatomizes – lynching’s real story.

Amy Louise Wood in her book Lynching and Spectacle suggests that, even though
lynching ‘stood at the centre of a long tradition of American vigilantism’ (Wood 2006,
p. 3), it was around the middle of the nineteenth century that this activity transitioned
‘from a local act of mob vengeance’ (Wood 2006, p. 74) into a ‘modern’ communal event –
a public spectacle. What enabled and precipitated the transformation of a local event into
something ‘more’, into a fixation and national fetish that would continue to grow and find
spectacular representation all the way to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, was the role
played by the markers of modernity: industrialization, technology, trains, national media,
cameras and photographs (Wood 2006, p. 74). ‘It’s possible that lynching thrived not in
spite of but “because of modernity’s effects on the public’s temperament”’ (Goldsby 2006).
Ironically, even though the lynching photographs were an articulation of an emergent mod-
ern mass culture, the world that these photographs recreated for visual consumption was
an agrarian, ‘feudal’ – or more exactly ‘slave-plantocratic’ – one. It was a world of power-
ful white plantation owners, supremely secure in their assumption of economic, social and
moral authority and utterly confident in their ideas of white racial supremacy which legit-
imated a ‘species’ right to enjoy the fruits of chattel slavery. One might suggest that this
contradictory relationship between lynching photography’s genealogical roots – in fast-
paced modernity – and its pre-modern social substance and setting is a symptom of the
rending anxieties of a time that was violently redefining those complacent assumptions
and this blatantly oppressive system’s morally repugnant parasitism.
The pathology of lynching encompasses intricate psychological manoeuvres of denial
and compensative violence on part of displaced Southern elites to offset unfamiliar feelings
of impotence and vanished power and control. The act, and no less the visual representa-
tion of lynching, becomes readable, in part, as a somewhat desperate attempt at salvaging
a sense of safety from the detritus of the old order, a paranoid effort, paradoxically, to hold
change at bay and restore ‘order’ by unboundedly violent means. A wishful nostalgia for
a lost utopia (the fanatical myth of the Old South) turns something as heinous as lynching
into an act of restitutive justice; a means to recover the sentimental-moral picturization of
the dismantled antebellum world that had been rudely savaged by the (from the Confederate
viewpoint) humiliating outcome of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Lynching stands on
this corrosive historic landscape as a nervous and contradictory manifestation of these
‘social dilemmas’ (Goldsby 2006). Viewed in this perspective, lynching becomes a symp-
tom, the most conspicuous and troubling marker of an age of anxiety. It functions as an
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 17

over-compensative savagery, a backlash against the rapid and traumatic breakdown of eco-
nomic, racial and gender certainties and normativities. These photographs articulate, thus,
an absolute denial of the very crises – brought forth by modernity – that produced the
‘cultural logic’ (Goldsby 2006) of lynching and the yearning for its visual memorializing.
Consequently, modernity’s more reassuring and enlightened markers were entirely absent
from these photographs.
This is where Incognegro inserts its epistemic break – by resiliently inserting refer-
ences to ‘modern’ paraphernalia into its account of the arcane proceedings and drawing
alert attention to modernity’s involvement with the programmatic of lynching. Technology
is a big part of this complex mediation. As in Dickens’s Dombey and Son – in which the
railway is the harbinger of modernizing technical development as well as ruthless human
uprooting – here too the railroad is pivotal to the graphic novel’s plot progression, even its
very meaning. In the second plate on page 12 of Incognegro we are confronted with the
inexorable drive and forward charge of the speeding train. The ominous locomotive, plung-
ing headlong and seemingly coming straight at us, divides up the frame into two unequal
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halves. On the right stands the angry lynch mob that has just discovered that Zane is not
the photographer’s assistant but instead is himself the infamous journalist Incognegro – a
negro, but strategically ‘incognito’ as such. Enraged at the outwitting and ‘betrayal’, they
are chasing after him in a kind of primal hunting frenzy: now he, in effect, has become the
target and ‘quarry’ of an incensed lynch mob. On the left side of the railway track stands
another symbol of American mobility and technology, a motorcar – the vehicle that will
bear Zane back to the safety of urban anonymity and the comparative racial equality of
a more ‘liberal’ zone. Together, the train and the automobile thus represent the onward
march both of technology and, purportedly, of modern social-racial ‘progress’.
By contrast, the vast empty space on the right, peopled with incensed men armed with
clubs and pitchforks (undoubtedly primitive and archaic weapons when compared with the
irresistible ‘phallactic’ might of the powerful metallic machines in the frame) seems bare
and pathetic, a scene of historic impotence – an affect reinforced by the diminutive size of
the members of the mob. In as much as the vehicles of transportation and mobility save the
day for Zane, we might see them as insignias of hope – they potentially allow victims of
bigotry to ‘move’ forward and away, escaping the clutches of benighted parochialism and
bailing out to an egalitarian social spatiality; the city in the north.
It would, however, be oversimplifying the complex symbolism here to view the modern
transportation technology arrayed in the graphics solely in terms of a conduit to modernity
and democratic emancipation. After all, if those trains rode out of the rural-conservative
South they also rode into it. One cannot forget that these very trains and railroads made
possible the technology-enabled convergence of thousands of people from across towns and
cities to gawk enthralled at the primitive and vindictive ritual of lynching. In fact, the ease
and pace of rail travel across distances contributed significantly to the morphing of small-
scale lynching occurrences into grand penal spectacles and large-scale ‘social event[s]’
(Jones 1994). Not only did the flocking witnesses to such institutionalized public murders
use trains to reach the appointed sites (implying well-disseminated prior information), but
the victims themselves were often captured and brought by train to the lynch-sites. Using
the testimony of a local resident, P.L. James, who witnessed the lynching of Henry Smith,
accused of murdering the three-year-old daughter of a police officer, in Paris, Texas, Amy
Louise Wood writes:

When word came that the posse was returning with Smith by train so he could meet his fate, the
‘streets of Paris were a busy spectacle’. . . . People from the surrounding county, nearby towns
 18 M. Anwer

and counties, and places as far away as Dallas and Arkansas came by foot, horse, and train into
the town. ‘Every train that arrived from any direction was crowded to suffocation’, enthused
James . . . . By the time Smith and his captors arrived, over 10,000 people had gathered at the
railroad depot to witness Smith’s death (Wood 2009, p. 71).

Clearly then, the radical, progressive imperative of technology is offset by its all too easy
appropriation and recruitment in the service of medievalist rituals of torture and archaic
cruelty. Incognegro evokes this ‘irrational’ underside of the railway. Although we do not
know it at the time, when Carl, Zane’s friend, decides to ride the train following him on
a story, he is really ‘riding’ his own death warrant, as it were. Even though he is going to
the South voluntarily, the journey from the city to the rural provinces, from the north to
the south, undertaken by train, becomes a fateful and surcharged journey towards his own
doom. Carl falls victim to a lynch mob that executes him, mistaking him for his friend (the
journalist Zane), but also to punish him for the cardinal sin of ‘passing’.
Johnson’s foregrounding of railroads in a lynching narrative is a critical move that rup-
tures the fantasy propelled by lynching photographs – namely, that these were impromptu
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erratic events and random incidents, and that the actors taking part were merely local resi-
dents who happened to chance upon a carousing ‘carnivalesque’ gathering that went out of
control. Instead, the correlation established between lynching and the railroad confesses to
a far darker truth: these were carefully planned, premeditated ceremonies, well-organized
events, the dates and venues of which had been broadcast through the grapevine far and
wide, and with a grimly fatal intentionality.
We thus awaken to an unexpected generic insight. A photograph’s propensity to freeze a
moment eclipses the ‘preceding coordinates’ that made it possible for that moment to fruc-
tify, come into being. The photograph, by virtue of its claimed ‘truth value’, naturalizes
and isolates the scene it presents as an autonomous, self-contained ‘cut-out’, what Barthes
(1977) calls découpage; in this case, making the hordes of people visible in these photo-
graph and the lynched body appear ‘normal’, a mere isolated and neutral photographical
‘fact’. Thus, the scene of the photograph becomes ‘purified’, objectified, disengaged from
and independent of the larger context that produces it. As Inconegro reminds us, it is imper-
ative, however, that we recuperate the symbiotic–dialectical relationship between what is
inside the photograph and the world outside it; this alone enables the viewer of modern
graphic representation to challenge this ‘there-ness’ of photographs that give them their
‘incontestable’ evidentiary value, by asking not only what is in the photograph but also:
why is it there, what makes it possible for it to be there, what is left out of the photograph?
For the one thing that the reportage photograph strains to hide is the means of its own
production. In a certain sense there is no reference to the relationship between the photo-
graph and the clicking camera: no traces of the machine and its mode of operation can be
found imprinted upon the final product. All we have is the absolute finality of the image
itself. By repressing its own history of making, the photograph can thus pretend to the
status of an unmediated substitute, a perfect simulacrum of the thing itself; it can claim
to assume the power of the original, the referent, the ‘real thing’. By the same token, to
submit to this ‘pretence of truth’ in the archive of lynching photography, to, in other words,
acquiesce in the subterfuge of the contretemps is to turn a blind eye to the way in which
the camera makes things happen; orients the action of the scene; includes, excludes and
edits out; foreshortens and forefronts; becomes the pivot around which, or rather, in front
of which, the bustling crowd focuses its energies in the enacted unfolding of an imaged
‘rationality’ . . .
Such technicalities are not without a social meaning. Both the notorious photograph
of the two lynched slaves (the 1930 photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 19

Smith in Marion, Indiana) and the opening panel of Incognegro challenge us to confront
the intricate relationship between collective violence and what Appadurai (2006, p. 7) calls
‘an exercise in community-building’. In short, these images make evident the way in which
whites constructed communal solidarity, a sense of togetherness and belonging by lynching
blacks.
In some ways, the panel from the graphic novel seems to replicate several elements
of the photograph – both have a man with a moustache, rather centrally positioned in the
frame, pointing at the body hanging from the tree. Additionally, women are in the fore-
ground of both images, and important looking men in hats seem to dominate the visual
space. There are nevertheless some critical discrepancies between the two which eluci-
date my central argument – that a graphic reproduction of a historical ‘fact’ – a ‘facticist’
event – is able to achieve a whole new level of realism, thereby introducing a hitherto
absent political nuance in the visual representation of racial violence that escapes even
photography. Since Incognegro is able to reveal and critique the hidden ideological sum-
mations of the lynching photographs, the graphic novel ballasts into a metatext, a critical
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meta-commentary, on the lynching photographs.

The photograph’s ‘frontline’ is occupied by several men and women, six of whom –
ranging from the left edge of the frame to the middle – are looking directly into the camera,
albeit with widely varying expressions. The man on the extreme left corner leans a little to
the right in order to be ‘included’ and find ‘representation’ in the photograph’s frame. His
eyes are bright and clear and his lips are pressed together in an attempt to stifle a too-broad
smile – although the proto-traces of one are clearly visible. His hand rests tentatively and
suggestively on his thigh – perhaps in an attempt to buttress his shaky, half-leaning posture.
Compensative machismo and racial aggression in fact, as the history of the Ku Klux Klan’s
bizarre and vicious sectarian adventures bears out, are inevitably co-implicated.
Yet racist aggression is not a male preserve by any means. Right next to this man we
see a group of three, comprising two women and a man who are all gazing into the camera.
The women seem stunned, offended even, by the presence of the camera – as though the
attendance of a documenting apparatus is more ‘vulgar’ than the actual event being docu-
mented. The eyes of the woman in front seem undaunted, confrontational and challenging –
her aggressive stance even more apparent once we notice that the man standing behind her
is holding her back. He has got the thumb of her right hand tightly gripped, which seems to
curb her in her lunge towards the camera. This grabbing of her hand is a restrictive gesture
but also a romantic one. In this sense, the man and the woman enact the loving rituals of
a young bourgeois couple – sharing the ‘awkward moment’ of an exposé – except, what
has been caught on this ‘candid’ camera is not some back-alley necking – the proverbial
‘compromising position’ – but rather a very public and gladly mutual – intimate! – sharing
of communal violence. The man’s toothy grin suggests an indulgent amusement both at
the women’s reaction and the ‘appearance’ of the camera.
I want to return for a moment to the man in the middle – glaring at the camera as
he points to the body of one of the lynched men, hanging from the tree. He seems mad
at the camera, appears to be admonishing it – for what though, we might ask? We can
perhaps read his bold stare as a challenge to the camera to look at him, focus on him and
his ‘private’ relationship to the lynched bodies. The raised hand and pointing finger are his
assertion of his ‘here-ness’ – he was here, present, in attendance. For this man with the
(pre)Hitler-moustache, it is not enough to be just one of the many in this sea of faces. He
needs to stand out, personally claim what is otherwise a very ‘public’ group photo.
The copyright stamp of the photographic studio/photographer, integrated within
the image-regime of many lynching photographs, we might argue, performs the same
 20 M. Anwer

‘pointing’ function as the one enacted by the man at the centre of this photograph. In a
sense, photographers too, although absent from within the photographic frame, were able
obliquely to insert themselves within their artwork. By including these copyright logos
the photographer is not only leaving his mark, his business card, upon the photograph,
hoping that he will be contacted for similar events in the future. Even more, he is distin-
guishing himself from other less efficient photographers who could not make it in time
for this monumental occasion – like the man in the photograph, marking himself out from
the crowd! The spectacular nature of the lynching stands, thus, in an intricate relation-
ship with photography: the camera’s presence validates the event as significant enough
to deserve memorialisation. The photograph turns the lynching into a floating, ‘portable
memory’ (Wood 2009) of a shared collective history – a ratification of one’s whiteness;
one’s approved insertion within the echelons of dominance; one’s claims of power and
moral righteousness – the punisher is always right. He is also the important one. ‘We’ are
the models for the photographer.
Simultaneously, the lynching photographs were variants of period photographic por-
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traits of ruling races – the most popular examples of this genre (notably in the colonies)
depicted white men posing in triumph with/over their vanquished hunting game. This
subgenre of the photographic record was clearly a theatre of power. Similarly, even as
the lynching photographs celebrated the communal context of triumphal white violence,
they concurrently fixated on particular faces, thereby preserving the aesthetic cult of the
superior-special individual, even in the midst of a ‘faceless’ crowd – a special necessity
in this case, to distinguish a righteous gathering of vigilante Southern gentleman from
a bestial demotic ‘rabble’. As a result, the lynching photographs were as much about
constructing intimate, familiar, personalized portraitures of white men, ‘allow[ing] the col-
lector to feel an exclusive connection to the emotive power of the event’ (Wood 2009), as
they were about an immersion in a moment of festive togetherness. These two facets of
the lynching photograph – the undifferentiated spread of the crowd, and the individuation
of the crowd’s specific members – cumulatively worked towards normalizing and making
socially as well as aesthetically acceptable the brutality of lynching; it remained at all times
publicly and acceptably ‘presentable’ (Wood 2009).
What is evident in the camera’s embeddedness within the cultural logic of lynching
is that it could not have functioned as a neutral, detached, ‘objective’ agency à la the
journalistic myth. On the contrary, it was an actor in the catastrophe, one that provoked into
being, or at least actively normalized, a prolonged ritual of violence. As Wood reminds us,
what appears to be only a matter of convention – that most lynching photographs depict
only static posing by models – is an aesthetic practice that actually extended the agony of
the victim: the mob stopped their torture in order to have their pictures taken (clearly a
gesture of pride) with the battered, torn and quartered bodies of their ‘prey’ writhing in
the background. The camera therefore morphs from a mere recorder/witness of violence
into an accomplice, even a dastardly perpetrator – one that nevertheless always eluded
accountability, remained outside the captured frame, successfully maintaining its stance of
‘honesty’ and unimpeachable ‘innocence’.
Incognegro, as agraphic novel, pushes this omission to the point of surface visibility
and recognition, forcing what is bypassed to be named and nailed in its complicity. The
first three pages of text make apparent this barbaric cessation of violence; a stoppage and
interregnum in the proceedings that enables the witnesses to recapitulate and revel in the
visual documentation of what their cruelty has given birth to: a flayed, broken, bloody figure
who screams as he is being castrated by the man in the Klan costume (page 8, plates 1
and 2). The other ritual of photographing only commences once the lynched body has been
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 21

duly defiled, mortified and desecrated – sexually, and also sartorially (by being dressed
in a jester’s costume). The opening page illustrates the chaotic activity of the crowd. The
men surrounding the black man are hectically busy setting up the hanging rope and hurling
clubs in his direction – bringing out into the open the seething will to violence in all its
frenetic energy. Even the people who are not immediately preoccupied with tormenting
the black man are busy doing other things: taking large alcoholic chugs, swapping their
flasks with one another, or (as seen in on page 104 depicting the lynching of Carl), buying
and selling peanuts, gathering around a hot-dog vendor, climbing poles in general festive
preparation for a balcony view of all the ‘action’.
Incognegro is radical in that it brings to light the commercial and economic motivations
underlying racial crimes: everything about lynching is rooted in a slavery-driven economy.
In this zone of transactions – social and economic – the black man’s body is reconfigured
as the ultimate commodity: still in effect available, even after Abolition, to do with it what
you will, up for sale, purchase and extinction, at will. Nothing, thus, asserts this gesture
of ownership as fully as lynching: one has full and absolute ownership of the ‘goods’, can
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string up, cut and quarter, and distribute piecemeal, the no longer intact and unified but dec-
imated body that is thus appropriated through a gesture of brutal commodistic ownership.
In fact, we might argue that the torture unleashed upon Carl is a punishment enacted for
daring to transgress beyond his status as a pure object and property, for being so audacious
as to try and ‘pass’ for a human being – a status reserved exclusively for the white man.
Which is why at the end of this masque macabre, the lynched body will be ripped open,
torn, burnt and butchered to bits, and then ‘passed around’ in a grotesque ritual of prop-
erty division. Bits and pieces of the unrecognizable human flesh – no longer respectable
‘mortal remains’ these, but terrible and pathetic shreds of what once was a man – will
be carried away and taken home as souvenirs – a triumphal ritual act that, in this scar-
ifying and scathing inversion of racial stereotypes of cannibalism, will permanently and
irrecuperably turn the annihilated human being into a repossessed racial trophy. The pho-
tograph of the trophy steps in as the next best thing to the thing itself. Or perhaps, it is an
even better souvenir, in that unlike fleshly remains, it does not offend, offers no affront to
one’s refined sensibilities by ‘choosing’ to rot and stink and undergo biodegradive putre-
faction. The photograph is permanent, indestructible, clean, ‘pure’ – a record of nothing
but a sublimated and purified will to lynching. In truth though, the photograph of the intact
body of the victim acts as a prolonged frisson of incitement and excitation, encouraging a
permanent re-enactment of the violence in the memory bank of the viewer/owner.

Where an actual lynching takes place, from beginning to end, over the course of a measurable
period of time, a photograph of that murder creates its own temporal order in which the vio-
lence remains visible indefinitely. Extended into a never-ending event, lynching murder – as
photographs – placed viewers in a ‘sensory predicament’ . . . from which there was no easy
escape. (Goldsby 2006, p. 247)

The photograph’s power to trigger the imagination, activate the memory of what followed
after, makes it a superlative reward for a racist remembrance of the ‘nigger’-as-commodity.
The opening scene of Incognegro, though, gives us something that the photographs do not –
a pre-photographic world and time of lynching, so to speak. Here, almost everyone has their
back turned towards us – it is clearly not yet time to ‘pose’ in front of the camera. Right
now the stage is being set, the props arranged, and the ambience established. Once the
final rite-initiating flourish – the castration – has been performed, the curtains will go up
and the ‘audience’ will be ready to enter the frame with their practised smiles and intent
poses. On page eight, in the third frame we see the features in profile of a jowly man
 22 M. Anwer

grinning widely. His pleased expression confirms more than his satisfaction at witnessing
the spectacle of pain; we can read this as him practising the perfect smile he’ll preen before
the camera in just a few minutes more. The appearance of the camera on page nine must
not be mistaken merely as an après coup arrival. Instead, the camera is the culmination, the
climax towards which this procedure, this theatre of cruelty, has been geared all along.
The ‘classical’ (in the sense of pre-Senecan) practice of excluding the violence from
the on-view representation – in this case the actual frame of the photograph (unless we
take the photograph itself to be another act of violence) – helped sustain, as Wood argues,
the image of an orderly, respectable gathering (as against an ‘unruly mob’). It established
white Southerners as a cohesive group that needed to be seen, not as succumbing to a
perverse, sordid fascination and morbid inner desire that led to explosive eruptions of bar-
barism, but instead as a methodical, organized collective that kept up its facade of civility
and decency; even as it enjoyed its ‘little’ social pleasures – while reinstating white mas-
culinist pride – decorously. Lynching or no lynching, we still are the proverbial Southern
gentlemen. On page nine, panel three we see a neat queue of men awaiting their turn to
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put in their request for a copy of the lynching photograph. The suited-booted attire of
the men makes these graphic panels and photographs akin to the bourgeois portraits of
high gentry mentioned earlier – and of course ‘gentlemen’ is what the plantation own-
ers as a class would claim to be. The presence of the hanging body in the background,
by contrast, invokes a whole ‘other’ photographic typology – the criminal mugshot that
had increasingly become a part of police work and the development of criminology at this
time (Wood 2009). The lynching photograph therefore conflated two competing photo-
graphic impulses – the voluntary, dignified and ‘majestic’ poses of the white men, and, at
the other extreme, the coerced ‘involuntary posing’ of the designated victim: the person
of colour elected for indignity, shame, demonizing, criminalizing and, finally, liquidation.
The contrast could not be more complete.
Even as the photographs have a place for both classes – the white gentleman as well
as the black ‘criminal’ – these dichotomous images ultimately come together to signify
an unameliorated celebration of white respectability; or, to be more precise, a lauding
of white power erected upon the naming, shaming and overpowering of the ‘Other’. The
respectable white faces, vying for the camera’s attention, successfully manage to distract
‘interest’ away from the ‘deviant’ black man’s body – a horrific presence that, under ordi-
nary circumstances, ought to draw to itself all our attentive energy and mental moral focus.
Consequently, even though the butchered body hangs dramatically in the background of the
photograph, at the end of the day, the photograph epitomizes not a black tragedy, but white
stardom, supremacy and authority. Ironically, the black man’s suffering gets marginalized,
obfuscated and second-placed, pushed into the recesses of darkness, assigned a peripheral
location in the very space that formally has been configured for the spectacle of his hour
of woe.
The limp bodies hanging forlornly in mid air connote a perverse absurdism that cannot
quite capture their pain – because their subject position and experience has been extin-
guished along with their life. The lynching photograph bows reverentially and exclusively
to the affective demands of its white presences. The emotive claims – through moaning,
pleading, shrieking, flailing, twisting, convulsing, struggling, etc. – of the black body that
would impart its owner some vestige of agency and selfhood, on the other hand, are forced
to retreat into the absolute silence that comes with broken necks and burnt flesh: the
outrageous will of the ‘upstart’ cancelled, they are returned to a ‘proper’ passive-object
status. These photographs thus make it redundant for the black man to be identifiable –
beyond an epidermal distinction that clearly marks him out as black. Everything else about
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 23

him is reducible to a type. The white men on the other hand are clearly sorted out from
each other, allowed to be owners of individual faces, facial expressions and other indica-
tors of distinguishable identity: the man with the Hitler moustache, for instance, is entirely
different from every other person in the foreground of this photograph. On the other hand,
there is very little about the two lynched black bodies which could demarcate them from
one another. By being pushed into the background an access to human specificity is made
impossible for these ‘mere bodies’ – an impossibility multiplied by the actuality that the
brutalization of the bodies has in fact reduced them to indistinguishable masses of burnt
and mangled flesh.
Inconegro, the graphic novel, does the unthinkable: it demolishes this faceless inac-
cessibility of lynched subjects by putting on view a range of images of the victims in
close-up. The first panel on page eight gives us a zoom-in of an unnamed lynched man’s
face. We see his bruised eye from which the tears fall, we register the sheer terror and
pain of what is being done to him – the horror conveyed through the one functioning eye.
We notice the broken teeth, the blood, mucus and sweat oozing out from his broken nose
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and jaw. We ‘hear’ a scream emanate from his throttled throat.

In another instance, on page 110, we see Carl’s lynched body being teased and mauled
by ‘innocent’ children – evidently, they have already been trained and indoctrinated by
prejudice and ideology. The little menaces cannot reach his torso, so they batter his legs
with their playtime ‘weapons’: sticks and baseball bats. Carl looks nothing like the earlier
victim. His physical signs of torture are barely visible. Yet, his inner torment and demor-
alization is made explicit by the mournful, ‘pulled-down’ expression of his face. His eyes
are half open but have rolled back, his hair falls over his forehead, his lips are closed in a
downward curve conveying his resigned tragedy. Evidently, he has not protested too hard
at the violence unleashed upon him because he has chosen to sacrifice himself in order to
protect his friend. Incognegro does not add insult to injury by making murdered men iden-
tical. They remain different, identifiable in their distinct modes of suffering, and humanly
foregrounded in their personhood, in this visual narrative. Lynching happens to persons.
Strategically and insidiously, the graphic novel makes a living man resemble a lynched
man and reveals through this convergence a frightening truth. On the page that illustrates
Carl’s lynched body is an inset square panel with a close-up of Zane’s face occupying the
entire frame (p. 110). Zane’s expression here is almost identical to and reminiscent of the
face of the first unnamed lynched man. Zane too, like that man, screams ‘Nooo!!!’ at the
sight of his friend’s hanging body. His mouth is open, and unconcealed terror leaps out
of his eyes. This frame is an excellent exposition of the experiential trauma that lynching
brought for blacks – particularly black men. His cry of shock and disbelief accentuates
the emasculation and social and political helplessness, both of the man, and of the black
community at large. David Marriott (2000) in On Black Men suggests that the temptation
for black men to identify ‘with a dead black body [at] which . . . white men [are] pointing
and laughing’ is nearly irresistible (pp. 4–5). While every lynching image represents a
staged gala to a white audience – at least an audience of supremacist zealots – it conveys
threat, trauma and terror, and eventually profound anger à la Franz Fanon, to the black
viewer. In the first instance though, in Fanonian terms, the black man comes to identify
himself absolutely with the white man’s perverse and sadistic image of him as a negated
man, and becomes little other than ‘the distorted and fantasmatic image of white desire . . .
in which only the shade, or shadow, of the black man can appear. An image of hate, a hated
image. A phobic imago . . .’ (Marriott 2000, p. 12).
Lynching, then, is both fact and metaphor. It is no surprise therefore that Zane’s face
takes on the contours of a lynched man. In witnessing a lynching, he himself, by proxy, is
 24 M. Anwer

lynched. Because the lynched body is not a particular body but a generalized, open-ended
one, a class and type, all black men are invited by it to substitute themselves in place of
the victim – lynching is really meant for ‘them’, a much-needed tutelary object lesson. The
lynched body, thus, is in its way as consuming a fixation for black men as it is for the white
community. As a tactic of white supremacism, its social-iconographic function is to shame
and terrorize: to traumatize survivors into silence and retreat (Goldsby 2006). The black
man is condemned to accept lynching violence as simultaneously shocking and routine,
unexpected and predictable, fantastic and normal, horrifying and banal (Goldsby 2006).
It is understandable that Zane remains transfixed by the ‘sight’, riveted by the strange fas-
cination of the lynching phenomenon, compelled to pursue ad aeternum the unreported,
‘unrevealed’ crimes continuing in the South.
However, Zane also recognizes just as strongly the imperative to move beyond the
lynching scenario to find and define himself, and to fashion his identity outside the permis-
sions of a racist discourse and mythography. He wants to be ‘revealed’ as Zane Pinchback,
rather than be known only as a strange pseudonym – Incognegro; a name that permanently
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fixes him as a man-in-disguise, a man looking to ‘pass’, one going incognito through life.
Incognegro’s paradox is that he wants to break this spell of invisibility and emerge from
‘undercover’. This is one reason why he is keen to give up his risky job for a more settled
editor’s post. Of course, the urge to be ‘famous’ is closely tied up with ambitions of middle-
class black respectability, a desire to be a part of the great Harlem Renaissance. But it just
as much about stepping outside a racist architectonic that controls Zane’s relationship to
himself. Ultimately, he seeks to self-assign an alternative referential frame, both visual and
ontological – a ‘self’ concept outside of lynched bodies and murdered black men.
Fascinatingly, Zane’s self-forming desire in the fictional world of Incognegro had
been historically anticipated in the work of the Harlem photographer James Van Der
Zee who, as Thaggert (2010) argues, contends with the very ‘fact’, the ‘there-ness’
of blackness (pp. 155–156) – an idea enforced unremittingly and relentlessly by the
lynching photographs. His deliberately stylized photographs of black families reveal not
just a strict and decorous ‘concern for propriety’ (Thaggert 2010, p. 156), but also
an active, imaginative refashioning of black subjects that stands apart from a racist
visual construction of ‘coloured races’. If the racist imagery imposed a monolithic
account of black bodies – they were to be read non-differentially through typecast-
ing categories, as nothing but perverts, criminals, hypersexual assaulters, etc. – then
Van Der Zee’s photographs ‘pose each person in such a way as to tell a story’ (Van
Der Zee, quoted in Thaggert 2010, p. 157) – typically, a story of aggressive middle-
class upward mobility. In photographs such as Christmas Morning and Racoon Coats
Zee’s insistence on displaying a formal stylistics that governs the ‘propriety of the
black body’ (Thaggert 2010, p. 161) is a conscious reworking of and distancing from
the minimalistic and ignominious – or therimorphic – black body of the lynching
photograph: ‘His photographs capture a reserve that contradicts every “coon” image’
(Thaggert 2010, p. 161).
Significantly, we encounter this Van Der Zian visual universe peopled with respectable,
upwardly striving middle-class black folk even in Johnson’s novel. At the start of the
graphic novel we are introduced to Zane, his friend Carl and Carl’s fiancé sitting in an
upper class restaurant, sipping wine (Johnson et al. 2008, p. 13). This set of panels along
with those on the next page, once the three exit the restaurant onto a New York street,
invoke Van Der Zee’s photographic corpus – of men and women in fine-dining attires;
a plush world of fur coats, hats, bow ties, motorcars and everything else that connotes
middle-class respectability and ‘arrival’. The whole novel, then, is informed by these two
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 25

possible, yet contradictory, visual worlds that blacks inhabit. Which visual image is a closer
approximation of the ‘real’ Carl – the second panel on page 14 where he proudly exhibits
a polka-dotted bow tie, a fur collar and an easy, self-confident smile? Or the obliterative
image of his lynched body being battered by white children? We might suggest that the
social map of racial politics is such that it is impossible clearly and completely to disen-
tangle the two paths and potentialities. Even the lives of blacks who live in the professedly
more ‘liberal’ North can still be haunted in various ways by vestigial traces of the out-and-
out racist practices that continue to flourish more extensively and virulently in other parts
of the country. The fourth panel on page 14 where Carl lifts his hand to his forehead and
looks aggrieved (about his professional and financial situation) already subtly foreshadows
the future hopelessness of his face during his lynching. In the case of black agents, what
at first had appeared to be two foundationally contrary, irreconcilable images and iconolo-
gies, two wholly variant ontological destinies of the body and self, it turns out, are, in their
potentiality, always profoundly, even inextricably entwined and interlinked – no matter who
and where you are, there is no forgetting. Memorializing implies that one modality always
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carries within it the possibility of becoming, or reverting to the ‘Other’.

It is worth noting that the lynching photographs’ ability to haunt the self-perception
and self-concept of black men lay not just in their immanent representational content but
also in the distributional and disseminational conditions of their ‘unpredictable appearance
and disappearance from general circulation’ (Goldsby 2006, p. 248). Blacks, quite simply,
had no control over when and how they might encounter a lynching photograph. The white
supremacist response to the democratization of public-sphere visual culture was to restrict
and tightly control the dissemination and circulation of this strange class of photographs.
This meant that ‘[t]he right to see and be seen, in one’s own way and under one’s own
terms’ (Goldsby 2006, p. 249) was in effect a social ideal of democracy denied to blacks.
The menacing psychological impact of the lynching photographs on the black community
lay in very considerable measure in the strategic unpredictability of their sporadic appear-
ance and access – in their ability to disappear, only to reappear as and when their white
owners wanted to re-inject the black public sphere with a fresh dose of anxiety and fear.
The lynching photographs wielded power because they forever reminded the black man
of the permanent, lingering and in effect inerasable danger that inhered in being black.
They worked to impose on black members of a supposedly post-slavery democratic society
an unerased awareness of their real lack of control over their self-image and visual repre-
sentation in the expanding print and media culture of modernity, and thus over their own
destiny and Bildungsroman history of self-making. At any time, said the pictures, you can
encounter me; at any time you can revert to mere target and object. Of annihilation; as a per-
son; as a communal or cultural entity. Photography, therefore, was absolutely integral to the
project of lynching as an apparatus that morphed lynching into a free-floating, omnipresent
potentiality through which the fear of racial violence could be visually recruited and circu-
lated in an ongoing way. The photographs ensured the endless visual circulation of terror,
even after the event was over.
In this context, Zane’s act of subversion in printing the lynching photographs and sto-
ries in a daily newspaper is tantamount to taking power back – by wrenching this deadly
power away from the images, which thus are no longer absolutely governed by this econ-
omy of random controls push-buttoned by supremacist whites. By circulating them widely,
freely and regularly, he demolishes their aura of terror, an aura they maintained by remain-
ing elusive and wholly outside black control. The newspaper’s wide-open distribution of
the arcane ensures that lynching photographs lose at least that part of their menace that
 26 M. Anwer

belongs to the ghostly ‘gothical’ terror, which they instil through their arbitrary and inex-
plicable rhythm of intermittent appearance/disappearance. The usurpation and inversion of
white control over ‘black images’ reaches an apogee in Zane’s final act of revenge against
the racist Mr Schmudt – a member of the KKK and the one responsible for all the lynching
crimes in the novel.
By the end of the novel the xenophobic South is vying to lay its hand upon a likeness of
‘Incognegro’ – the journalist – so that he may be hunted down and executed. Zane supplies
them with exactly what they want and publishes Incognegro’s photograph on the front
page of the newspaper. Only, what is meant to be a ‘revelation’ of the wanted man is really
a masterstroke in purposive misleading: the photograph in the newspaper is not Zane’s but
Schmudt’s.
Zane’s revenge is a strategic subversionist move, a gesture of egregious effrontery,
working at multiple levels. First, it permanently shatters the myth of an essential black
identity wholly and hermetically sealed off from whiteness – a myth that Zane’s pass-
ing as white has already undermined – and introduces the idea of race as performance
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and assigned identity. It is precisely this race-as-performance motif that Van Der Zee’s
photographs had sought to explore by their heavy accent on presentation styles and dress
codes, for instance.
Second, by printing a white man’s photograph as a passable substitute for a black
man’s – reversing Zane’s own Inconegro ploy – and that too in a Harlem newspaper, he
destroys not only white control over black images but even white control over the white
world’s production of its own carefully designed self-images. The photographic signs turn
slippery and labile at this point. Suddenly, in a preposterous exchange of parts and assigned
stereotypes, a powerful (and very racist) white man’s photograph doubles up as that of a
career ‘criminal’. And conversely, for the first time a black journalist exercises the power to
determine what images of whiteness will circulate in the public sphere and print journalism.
To a degree, then, Zane recovers a postmodern ‘waywardness’ (Goldsby 2006) inherent
in photography; an unruliness that dangerously commemorates a lack of a fixed order of
meaning – as against the imposition of closed singular meaning by racist discourses.
As a result, the meaning of whiteness – that fixed positivist centre and point of ref-
erence of racist discourses – is rendered plastic and unstable. It is significant that in the
first half of the novel Schmudt, the embodiment of whiteness, had resembled the tradition-
ally all-white, all-American superhero of comic books. On page nine, in the bottom-most
panel, Schmudt dressed in his Klan uniform with its symbol on his chest, belt around his
waist, in fact calls to mind the early sketches of Superman – the definitive (and simulta-
neously Nietzschean and brand-American) white ‘hero’ of modernity. Johnson and Pleece
clearly make a deliberate choice to dent this glorificatory identification by conflating the
memory of an archetypal white-American superhero with a racist murderer. As M. Keith
Booker and Terrence Tucker in the essay ‘Superheroes and comics’ remind us, comics, by
virtue of being a predominantly white artistic format, have a ‘long and baleful legacy . . .
in which African Americans had either been absent from the comics or depicted in largely
demeaning and stereotypical ways’ (Booker and Tucker 2008, p. 161). It is not coinciden-
tal that the villain of Incognegro resembles a white comic-strip superhero: the worlds of
popular culture and reality exhibit similar structures of racist exclusion and demonization.
By the end of the novel, however, Schmudt’s body language – Schmudt, schmuck – has
undergone an unflattering transmogrification: on the last page the KKK member, mistaken
as Incognegro, stands looking plainly panic-stricken as a mob of men begins to close in
on him: life’s payback time for his preceding monstrosities. His clothes, without the KKK
garb and knightly regalia, have lost their authoritative ‘sheen’ and look embarrassingly
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 27

‘ordinary’ – like any black man’s, in fact. His body language, now that he is stripped of
power and faced with danger, is that of a frightened, vulnerable, bewildered little man
who has lost control, and wonders what it is about him that has triggered a white mob
to mobilize itself. He looks pathetic and confused – no different from any marginalized,
subaltern figure, who knows what it means to be a victim of senseless sectarian/racial
violence.
This, then, is Zane’s final act by way of what Gates (1998) calls ‘signifying’ – that is,
a ‘way of rendering powerless through [visual] language an uncompromising oppressor’
(Campbell 1994). It allows Zane to reverse the law through an ‘impossible’ trajectory: by
remaking a white into a black one – thus imparting an unforgettable life lesson in racial
suffering to those who so far have been the masters and administrators of society’s regimes
of violence and degradation.
Incognegro succeeds because it rips the ‘veil drawn over “proceedings too terrible to
relate”’ – an exercise that Morrison (1998) believes is critical ‘for any person who is black,
or who belongs to any marginalized category’ because it is precisely these communities
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that are uninvited to ‘participate in the discourse’ even when they are its topic (p. 191).
Johnson and Pleece’s graphic text joins and extends the archive of alternative visual docu-
mentation produced by black photographers such as Van Der Zee. The graphic novel goes
a step further by including in its narrative frame ‘graphic’ elements that a racist history
has been unwilling to acknowledge and a black historiography has considered as ‘proceed-
ings too terrible to relate’. Van Der Zee’s photographs create a relatively rarefied celluloid
canvas that looks to fashion a black visual identity with little or no engagement with, or ref-
erence to, anything outside this abstracted, secure, middle-class construction. Incognegro,
by contrast, by venturing ‘graphically’ – in both senses of ‘graphic’ – into utterly
uncharted terrain, constructs not just an ‘oppositional black aesthetic’ (hooks 1994) but
also dismantles a distinct white aesthetic idiom erected upon the carcasses of black humans.
The process of unveiling and rereading past traumas of course is something that
requires a reliance on ‘memory’ – both personal and communal. However, ‘memories
and recollections won’t give [us] total access to the unwritten interior life of these
[marginalized] people. Only the act of the imagination can help’ us (Morrison 1998).
Incognegro teaches us that literary and visual productions that belong to imaginary
realms – imaginary homelands – can sometimes open up sedimentations of a historical
past, a ‘live’ communal memory that had been discarded as ‘amiss’ by mechanical, fac-
ticist recorders of events. In that sense, Incognegro offers the ‘possibility of immediate
intervention useful in the production of counter-hegemonic representations even as it [is]
an instrument of pleasure’ (hooks 1994, p. 49).
This act of remembering and rewriting, that is of piecing back together imaginatively
obliterated and silenced memories, experiences and even voices, enables Johnson and
Pleece to create the template of a new black subjectivity; one that escapes the talons of
a prescriptive reading in which blacks are either objectified victims or traumatized wit-
nesses of lynching. If, on the one hand, in the novel white masculinity – which styles itself
as superheroic – is whittled down to (average) size and exposed to dire vulnerabilities, then
black masculinity, conversely, is resurrected from its badgered state and represented as
potentially heroic. Zane, the novel’s protagonist, not only survives lynching, he also solves
a murder mystery, rescues his brother (accused of a crime he did not commit) from prison,
and returns to New York, having emerged as an agent of resourceful resistance and justice.
Unlike white superheroes, he does not rely on ‘alien’, supernatural gifts but on the sheer
tenacity of his skills, professional and material: resourcefulness, ingenuity, courage and a
staunch sense of justice. Here, then, is Johnson and Pleece’s most crucial intervention: that
 28 M. Anwer

their oeuvre inserts itself into a pre-existent visual archive and turns its ‘evidence’ upside-
down and inside-out, revealing therein the true moral anatomy of racial typecasting and
racist violence.

Notes on contributor
Megha Anwer is a second-year PhD candidate in the the English Department at Purdue University.
Her PhD research interests include violence and crime narratives: from the sensation novels of the
nineteenth century to post-9/11 cultural productions (literary, cinematic and graphic texts). She is
also interested in the debates around modernity, cityscapes and post/neo-colonialism. She has pub-
lished essays on the films of Pontecorvo and Alea, Fellini and Luhrman’s filmic adaptations of Romeo
and Juliet, and two articles on popular visual culture during the French Revolution.

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