Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-148).

This dissertation examines the role of the mob in Early American literature, and how the mob continues to be an essential part of American society. Chapter one uses Linebaugh's and Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra to argue that early American authors acted as demagogues attempting to control the mob. These earliest American writers aligned with Federalist-leaning politicians and convey a conservative message to the reading public. For these American authors it was essential to keep the Revolutionary spirit alive, and to point the overeager mob in the direction of worthwhile causes. Just who is deciding whether a cause is a "moral" one or not is the subject of chapter two. Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and "Trials of Arden," and Stephen Burroughs' Memoir reveal attempts by these authors to manipulate and force the reader to wrestle with "reasonable doubt." These authors frame the reader as the mob, and attempt to push the reader to think without "hasty judgment." Building on these ideas, the discussion moves to the "neutral ground" in The Spy, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," "Rip Van Winkle," and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." The neutral ground, a liminal space, is the truest test of Democracy, as it is an area without formal laws and regulations. Mob rule dominates this region, and, though dangerous, it allows for the greatest freedom in the new nation. Chapter four argues that the hope of the "neutral ground" on the frontier is a myth. The sea-novels of Herman Melville, Richard Penn Smith's Col. Crockett, and political cartoons of the 1830s, reveal that corrupt captains are formed wherever Americans look for freedom, whether that be at sea or on the western frontier. The concluding chapter focuses on the current usage of "mob" in American culture--looking at the Tea Party and Occupy movements of the last decade--and asserts that mobs are currently alive and well in American literature and culture.

This thesis examines how secrecy and absence shape the representation of covert counter-terrorism in the public sphere. Contemporary covert practices, from missile strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles to special forces 'kill/capture' operations, have come to exemplify U.S. counter-terrorism in public debate. This is significant because these practices shift the ethical stakes of witnessing state warfare. Previous scholarship on war and news media has argued that public glimpses of state violence, alongside official declarations, can demonise or dehumanise the targets of such violence, and thus prompt witnesses to accept the state's rationalisation of these actions and the use of secrecy. News coverage of contemporary covert action, however, offers no such glimpses. Instead, coverage draws primarily upon residue: the rumours and debris left behind. By applying this concept of residue to drone strikes, the special forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and kidnap rescue efforts in the Sahara-Sahel, the thesis argues that it is all this speculation, rubble, and empty space, rather than the state itself, which signifies to newsreaders the possibility of state secrecy. That suspicion of secrecy then frames the absences in this residue, the conspicuous lack of certain bodies and objects. Secrecy makes those absences appear suggestive, in that the latter cannot publicly corroborate different aspects of these unseen events. This allows residue to intimate – to hint at unverifiable ideas about that which is absent, in a way which can undermine more explicit claims and justifications of what has taken place. To examine how this dynamic reframes the ethics of witnessing, the thesis develops an historical affiliation, a method of linking disparate practices of violence based on similar representational qualities, in order to examine whether witnessing is being shaped by these qualities in obscured or unspoken ways. This affiliation is made between representations of covert counter-terrorism and those of lynching in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite their differences, in both cases unseen violence and absent bodies are represented as significant in their being disconnected from wider society and difficult to comprehend, to understand how and why the violence takes place. This occurs in today's counter-terrorism through hints and allusions from absence, which represent these covert events as physically intangible. As with lynching, violence and its casualties are implicitly represented in their absence as reflecting the public's intellectual and moral distance from the practice. This takes covert counter-terrorism beyond a binary of fostering assent or dissent towards the state. Instead of prompting newsreaders' complicity with state narratives for its actions, residue intimates doubts and unspoken possibilities about these events that curtail their rationalisation. Insodoing, however, these representations marginalise the violence inflicted upon casualties from ethical consideration. They do so while obscuring how that marginalisation occurs, as newsreaders are prompted to see themselves as distanced from these events and to focus upon that distance, rather than on how absences are being given significance in the public sphere. Using the historical affiliation with lynching, the thesis concludes that an ethical witnessing of covert counter-terrorism through its residue cannot be based on an attempt to recognise and 'recover' lived experiences of suffering from rumours and debris. Rather, ethical witnessing would involve an awareness of how distance is constructed through that residue, and how this gives unspoken meaning to absence.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the circulation of photographic postcards depicting lynching events in the United States, as well as the changing contexts and gaze. The initial mailing of the postcards to far away family and friends, some including handwriting on the versos, makes apparent the desire to spread white supremacist ideals across the country. These photographs, often depicting the victim’s suffering body amongst a crowd of people, were then placed in family photo albums, hidden in attics, or sold in flea markets. It was in these locations that collector James Allen found the photographs depicting lynching events that compose the Allen/Littlefield Collection, which toured the United States from 2000-2005 in the exhibition "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America." Through the utilization of the accompanying catalog, I discuss the circulation of multiple mailed photographic postcards with handwritten texts on the versos, the reporting of lynching events in newspapers from varying regions of the United States, and the recent exhibitions of the Allen/Littlefield Collection, as well as art works reappropriating lynching photographs. It is my aim to illustrate the impact of context on the viewing of lynching images and how the gaze of the spectator changes over time.

This work examines the lynching of twelve female victims in Texas from 1885 to 1926.

"Saving White Face: Lynching and Counter Hegemonic Lynching Performances," examines American lynching as hegemonic performances constitutive of discursive and material practices that reinforce a cultural fiction, white supremacy. "Lynching studies" is identified as an interdisciplinary academic project that includes lynching history, analysis and (activist) cultural production. Among other approaches, "Saving White Face" uses psychoanalysis and ethnography to unmask lynching as a site where race- and gender-based identities originate. Lynching's "materialities," such as lynching photographs and souvenirs are examined as the bases of American consumer culture, especially as they relate to football and (the) O.J. Simpson (ordeal). This work also documents the production of my Chamber Theater adaptation of Bebe Moore Campbell's 1992 novel, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (also entitled "Saving White Face"). I also contextualize this counter hegemonic performance as a lynching drama, as well as among radical black feminist activism and blues performance. As such, lynching is identified as an emergent performance practice which not only reinforces white identity, but lynched subjectivities, as well. / text

Die Arbeit nutzt Konzeptionen des „multidirektionalen Erinnern“ in Verbindung mit einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Urbarmachung psychoanalytischer informierter Bildermontagen, um eine Serie von acht Fotos, die der afroamerikanische Soldatenfotograf William A. Scott, III 1945 in und um das Konzentrationslager Buchenwald gemacht hat, mit anderen Bildern rassistischer Gewalt und der Shoah zu konstellieren. Mir ist es einerseits um die eigentümliche (A)Visualität von Verschränkungen und Relationalitäten der 8 Bilder mit rassistischer Gewaltgeschichte und Shoah zu tun, andererseits um einen ästhetischen Möglichkeitsraum von Relationalitäten rassistischer, afroamerikanischer Gewaltgeschichte und Shoah anhand von derlei Bildermontagen. Es tritt also Unsichtbares, ja sogar eine Visualität ohne Sichtbares in den Blick. Zugleich treten die Montagen in ihrem Gemacht-Sein hervor, ihr Konstruktionsprinzip stellen sie so wie die eigentliche Bilderfolge gleich mit zur Disposition. Verbindungsstück der Bilder und ihrer Montagen sind Operationen, die entweder an oder in den Bildern zu sehen sind. Diese Operationen strukturieren die einzelnen Kapitel, je zwei der acht Fotos stehen dabei im Zentrum. In den Montagen leiten mich drei Ideen: die Operationalität der Bilder, genauer die Idee des Sendens im Anschluss an Derrida, das „Meta-Konzept“ Spektralität, insbesondere im Hinblick auf die Konzeption von Avisualität, anknüpfend an die Überlegungen Akira Mizuta Lippits / The work utilizes concepts of "multidirectional memory" in conjunction with a kulturwissenschaftliche reclamation of psychoanalytically informed montages, in order to create a constellation of images of racist violence and the shoah with the eight photographs taken by the African-American soldier photographer William A. Scott, III 1945 in and around the Buchenwald concentration camp. On the one hand, I am concerned with the peculiar (a)visuality of entanglements and relationalities of the eight images with racist history of violence and the Shoah, and on the other with an aesthetic space of possibility of relationalities of racist, African-American history of violence and the Shoah on the basis of such image montages. The invisible, even a visuality without the visible, comes into view. At the same time, the montages emerge in their fabrication, their principle of construction, like the actual sequence of images, is put up for discussion aswell. Connecting the pictures and their montages are operations that can be seen either on or in the pictures. These operations structure the individual chapters, with two of the eight photos at the center of each. Three ideas guide me in the montages: the operationality of the images, more precisely the idea of sending following Jacques Derrida, the "meta-concept" of spectrality, and finally, the concept of avisuality, following on from Akira Mizuta Lippit's considerations.

Many of the Harlem Renaissance anthologies and histories of the movement marginalize and omit women writers who played a significant role in it. They neglect to include them because these women worked outside of socially determined domestic roles and wrote texts that portrayed women as main characters rather than as muses for men or supporting characters. The distorted representation of women of the Renaissance will become clearer through the exploration of the following texts: Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, Caroline Bond Day’s “Pink Hat,” Dorothy West’s “Mammy,” Angelina Grimke’s Rachel and “Goldie,” and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South. In these texts, the themes of passing, motherhood, and lynching are narrated from the consciousness of women, a consciousness that was largely neglected by male writers.

On August 28, 1955, Emmett Louis Till was abducted from the home of his uncle, Mose Wright, near Money, Mississippi. A body was recovered three days later in the nearby Tallahatchie River, which divides Tallahatchie and Leflore Counties, and the body was closer to the Tallahatchie bank of the river. A week later the Grand Jury of Tallahatchie County indicted J. W. Milan and Roy Bryant on separate counts of murder and kidnapping. On September 198, 1955, in Sumner, Mississippi, there began a trial destined to be the most publicized kidnap-murder trial since the Bruno Hauptman case, seventy reporters covered the trial, representing newspapers and magazines from all over the United States and from some foreign countries. Nearly every newspaper in the country gave the case and trial front-page play, as did many of those published in other countries. / Typescript. / A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Summer Semester, 1963. / "August, 1963" / Includes bibliographical references. / Marion D. Irish, Professor Directing Thesis; William W. Rogers, Committee Member; Malcolm B. Parsons, Committee Member.

Scholars of the literary depictions of lynching have given the majority of their attention to the emasculation of the black male, but the representation of the black female lynch victim has been overlooked. My thesis examines the deaths of black women that had the same effect as lynching practices used against men. This specific literary form of lynching will concentrate on two plays: Mary P. Burrill's They That Sit in Darkness (1919) and Marita Bonner's Exit: An Illusion (1929) and two novels by Toni Morrison, Beloved and Sula. Considering the contours of these black female deaths we can expand the traditional definition of lynching to include the black female lynch victim. The aspects that make her death a lynching are encased in more subtleties than a traditional definition of lynching allows for, and less visible. / by Tinea Williams. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.