TY - BOOK AU - Mitchell,Koritha TI - Living with lynching: African American lynching plays, performance, and citizenship, 1890-1930 T2 - The new black studies series AV - PS338.N4 U1 - 812/.509896073 22 PY - 2011/// CY - Urbana PB - University of Illinois Press KW - American drama KW - African American authors KW - History and criticism KW - 20th century KW - 19th century KW - One-act plays, American KW - Lynching in literature KW - African Americans in literature KW - Violence in literature KW - Citizenship in literature KW - Théâtre américain KW - Auteurs noirs américains KW - Histoire et critique KW - 20e siècle KW - 19e siècle KW - Pièces en un acte américaines KW - Lynchage dans la littérature KW - Noirs américains dans la littérature KW - Violence dans la littérature KW - DRAMA KW - American KW - bisacsh KW - PERFORMING ARTS KW - Theater KW - Playwriting KW - fast KW - Electronic book KW - Electronic books KW - Criticism, interpretation, etc N1 - Includes bibliographical references and index; Making lynching drama and its contributions legible. Scenes and scenarios : reading aright -- Redefining "black theater" -- Developing a genre, asserting black citizenship. The black soldier : elevating community conversation -- The black lawyer : preserving testimony -- The black mother/wife : negotiating trauma -- The pimp and coward : offering gendered revisions N2 - "Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynch victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of household being torn from model domestic units by white violence. In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens."--Jacket UR - https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&AN=569759 ER -