Black Tree Play: Learning From Anti-Lynching Ecologies in The ‘Life and Times’ of an American Called Pauli Murray

This article reads the photo album, The ‘Life and Times’ of an American Called Pauli Murray as an archive of anti-lynching pasts and futures. While scholarly discourses have leveraged Murray’s archive for evidence of her ‘true’ gender and sexual orientation, this article uses the reading practice of ‘accompaniment’ to reframe investigations of Murray’s identity into thinking with and learning from the strategies she archived in the album for living in atmospheres of antiblackness. Working with Christina Sharpe’s (2016) concept of ‘weathering’, I read several photographs in Murray’s album as burgeoning ecologies of repair in relation to visual technologies of racial capture, particularly that of lynching photography. Reading passages in which Murray talks about lynching and race as atmospheric from Proud Shoes (1999 [1956]) and Song in a Weary Throat (1987) alongside The ‘Life and Times’, I read Murray’s portraits as rupturing white property relations through turning lynching photography’s scripts inside out.

Palimpsestic Embodiment

This chapter looks at the repetition and performance of antiblack violence over time and the relationship between space, time, the body, and the visual. It analyzes photographs of state violence as archives of black pain and suffering on the one hand, and historical documents that reveal hidden truths on the other. The twentieth-century images examined were published in local newspapers and can be read as part of an image world of black suffering that circulates, producing narratives of the black body in pain across time and space. It is not accidental that these photographs conjure memories of lynching photography in the United States. Spectacular images of the black body in pain reveal the performative, transnational nature of Afro-paradise at the same time that they speak to us about the nature of race and antiblackness in Brazil.

Framed and Shamed

This chapter examines the recoding of images of lynchings that transformed the look from one of private pleasure to one of public disgust. It highlights an example of this counter-look, or look that endeavors to undo and even vilify the initial approving looks that lynching images invited: the look of shame that operates as a kind of social policing mechanism, one that diminishes the possibility for the consumption of lynching imagery as pleasurable and entertaining. The chapter compares a recent exhibition of lynching photography with a mid-century exhibition of antilynching artwork, suggesting that different evaluative criteria—aesthetic, ideological, realist, documentary—imply different political interpretations of lynching imagery. By analyzing the aesthetics of lynching, the chapter shows how a particular kind of looking is privileged and compels the recognition of certain bodies as human. Lynching, as an event, makes obvious the presence and potency of white humanity as it obliterated the possibility of black humanity.

Race and the (Para)Textual Condition

When seen through the lens of the African American freedom struggle, the seemingly minor spaces and places federated by Gérard Genette under the term paratext take on a major role. Entangled throughout the margins and fringes of books and other kinds of texts (especially visual ones), the paratext (e.g., citations, prefaces, typeface) has served as a field through which white supremacy has been transacted indirectly: white-written prefaces to fugitive slave narratives are vivid examples. At the same time, the paratext has also served as a vector through which white power has been resisted. Examining the paratextual issues surrounding Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Without Sanctuary, James Allen's exhibition of lynching photography, this essay explores what is gained and lost when the paratext is used as a means of resisting racialized domination. (BAMcC)