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Full-Text Articles in American Studies
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 …