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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Keep Claiming Space!, Koritha Mitchell
Keep Claiming Space!, Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell
Substantial foreword to the "Hands Up. Don't Shoot!" special issue of CLAJ.
Black-Authored Lynching Drama’S Challenge To Theater History, Koritha Mitchell
Black-Authored Lynching Drama’S Challenge To Theater History, Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell
This essay argues that U.S. theater history is incomplete without considering the theatricality of lynching. Thomas Dixon Jr. was as important as a playwright as the early stage realists William Gillette and William Moody. The essay also demonstrates that African Americans living at the height of mob violence understood that there was a "theater/lynching alliance" that created important parallels between "lynchcraft" and "stagecraft."
No More Shame! Defeating The New Jim Crow With Antilynching Activism's Best Tools, Koritha Mitchell
No More Shame! Defeating The New Jim Crow With Antilynching Activism's Best Tools, Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell
This essay identifies similarities between racial violence of an earlier time period, lynching, and its most efficient form today, mass incarceration, suggesting that today’s racial violence be met with tools used by previous generations. I call for a critical demeanor of shamelessness that allows targeted communities and their allies to avoid taking on the shame that mainstream discourse encourages them to accept. People of color are incarcerated in staggering numbers, but not because they are disproportionately guilty of violent or even nonviolent crimes. Given the extreme racial disparities, being caught by the nation’s criminal (in)justice system is simply not a …
Love In Action: Noting Similarities Between Lynching Then & Anti-Lgbt Violence Now, Koritha Mitchell
Love In Action: Noting Similarities Between Lynching Then & Anti-Lgbt Violence Now, Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell
The more I learn about the violence currently plaguing LGBT communities, the more it reminds me of the brutal practice of lynching, which has been the focus my research for the past 15 years. Ultimately, both forms of violence are designed to deny targeted groups recognition as citizens. Relying on my expertise regarding racial violence as well as the data on anti-LGBT attacks collected by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), this essay notes similarities between lynching at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today. The piece identifies five parallels: 1) the mundane quality of the …
James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings The Blues For Mister Charlie, Koritha Mitchell
James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings The Blues For Mister Charlie, Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell
James Baldwin worked tirelessly to expose the myths that allowed Americans to delude themselves. Scholars have long recognized this as the driving force of his fiction and non-fiction, but this mission was also very much linked to Baldwin's conception of theater. This essay culls Baldwin's theater theory from his non-fiction, especially his seldom-discussed The Devil Finds Work (1976). Baldwin believed that theater could "re-create" people by helping us to re-discover our human connection, and he believed that stage actors could show the way. Baldwin's respect for stage actors develops over time, however. He reaches his conclusions only after realizing—in hindsight—how …
Sisters In Motherhood(?): The Politics Of Race And Gender In Lynching Drama, Koritha Mitchell
Sisters In Motherhood(?): The Politics Of Race And Gender In Lynching Drama, Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell
Chapter analyzing May Miller's Nails and Thorns, a lynching play not discussed in my book LIVING WITH LYNCHING.
Mamie Bradley's Unbearable Burden: Sexual And Aesthetic Politics In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Koritha Mitchell
Mamie Bradley's Unbearable Burden: Sexual And Aesthetic Politics In Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell
This essay offers a reading of Bebe Moore Campbell's 1992 novel Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, which re-imagines the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and its aftermath. I argue that the novel is a tribute to Till and his mother, Mamie Bradley, but that it also illustrates the agony of being the survivor whose pain occasions such tributes. Through Delotha Todd, the character loosely based on Bradley, Campbell imagines the mother's burden to have been especially unbearable because so many strangers, including Campbell herself, claimed to share it. In the process of acknowledging the many facets Delotha's pain, Campbell …
(Anti-)Lynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, And The Evolution Of African American Drama, Koritha Mitchell
(Anti-)Lynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, And The Evolution Of African American Drama, Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell
My initial articulation of the history of black-authored lynching plays and their tendency to avoid portraying physical violence.