Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals

by Harris, Trudier

$41 · Offered by Biblio

First edition

Bloomington. 1984. Indiana University Press. 1st Printing. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0253319951. 222 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literary Criticism Literature African American. DESCRIPTION - Incidents of white people lynching, burning, castrating, raping, and mutilating black people have had a powerful impact on the literary work of black men and women writers since 1853. Black writers from Charles Waddell Chesnutt to Sutton Griggs, from Paul Laurence Dunbar to James Weldon Johnson, from Richard Wright to James Baldwin, and from Langston Hughes to Ralph Ellison have graphically portrayed these tragic scenes in their writings. In doing so, Trudier Harris claims, they seem to be acting out a communal role - a perpetuation of an oral tradition bent on the survival of the race. Reviewing the historic al literature of ritual violence prevalent in Afro-American life and culture, Harris believes white Americans were performing a rite of exorcism designed to eradicate the �black beast' from their midst, or, at the very least, to render him powerless and emasculated. This exorcism was the result of such offenses as daring to look at or speak to a white person, wearing fancy clothes, having too much education, slapping a white person, or killing a white person. However, the most vindictive and gruesome retaliation came for presumed sex crimes by black men - the ultimate taboo. Harris probes the recurrent fear of castration and the various levels of emasculation - psychological, politica

• Edition: First Edition
• Printing: first
• Binding: hardcover

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