Gender and Lynching • The Politics of Memory

Gender and Lynching • The Politics of Memory

Edited by Evelyn M. Simien
The authors probe the reasons and circumstances surrounding the death and torture of African American female victims, relying on such methodological approaches as comparative historical work, content and media analysis, as well as literary criticism.

This volume brings black women to the fore, as victims, martyrs, and heroes, as characters in works of literature and art, as agents, activists, and mythmakers. Gender and Lynching is a fine collection. Taken as a whole, this volume furthers the general literature on black women even beyond the important topic of lynching, while addressing both historical realities and fictionalizations in drama and prose. Lynching was a practice geared to capture the public imagination, the ultimate ugly performance designed to instruct, warn, sexualize, romanticize, and to discipline and frame future behavior. The essays in Evelyn Simien's anthology take a practice almost universally gendered as male - and therefore one in which gender has been almost invisible - and recasts it as primarily gendered. In doing so it invites us to creatively re-imagine the concepts of race, gender, punishment, and liberation." - Kristin Waters, Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, professor of Philosophy at Worcester State University, and co-editor of Black Women's Intellectual Traditions

Palgrave Macmillan, Paperback, english, 200 pages