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Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 by Koritha Mitchell (review)

Koritha Mitchell’s Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 is the first book-length study of early twentieth-century lynching dramas. Drawing on performance theory, Mitchell offers the lynching drama as a literary counterpoint to lynching photographs: whereas the commonplace circulation of images of charred, dismembered, and mutilated black bodies rehearsed and re-performed lynching’s violence and degradation, Mitchell maintains that lynching dramas represent how African American writers responded to these heinous acts of violence by mobilizing the discursive and performative capacities of theater. Set in black homes, these plays challenged visual representations of racial violence by focusing on black domestic interiority. Furthermore, they were published in a one-act format that amateur performers could stage in domestic and communal spaces. The black home, then, functioned as an alternative staging ground where African Americans could mourn their losses, affirm their identities, and engage in discussions and debates about the profound precariousness of their condition as citizen-subjects. Living with Lynching is divided into two interlocking sections. Part One, comprising the first two chapters, outlines the study’s theoretical and historical framework. In Chapter One, Mitchell elucidates the relationship between lynching, theater, and performance in the early twentieth century, maintaining that lynching was in fact a theatrical event, an “exorcism” whereby mobs used “props, gestures, sounds, and movement . . . to eliminate evil, which they increasingly figured as black and male” (25). At the same time, American theater was becoming an increasingly popular mode of entertainment rife with negative depictions of African Americans. Therefore, black playwrights used lynching drama to fashion a communal theater for the collective expression of black subjectivity and selfrepresentation, at once addressing the violent theatricality of lynching and racist caricatures on the American stage.