Saving White Face: Lynching and Counter-Hegemonic Lynching Performances.

摘要

"Saving White Face: An Examination of Lynching and Counter Hegemonic Lynching Performances," examines American lynching as hegemonic whiteness performances constitutive of discursive and material practices that served to "save white face," or reinforce a cultural fiction, white supremacy. Among other approaches, "Saving White Face" uses performance studies and psychoanalysis to unmask lynching as a site where race- and gender-based identities originate. Lynching is analyzed as (Turner's) social drama and is found to have been established and reinforced through torture and interrogation-based tactics. "Lynching studies" is identified as an interdisciplinary academic project that is made up of lynching history, analysis and (activist) cultural production. Furthermore, lynching's "materialities," such as lynching photographs and souvenirs are examined as the base commodities of American consumer culture, especially as they relate to football and (the) O.J. Simpson (ordeal). As such, lynching is identified as an emergent performance practice which not only reinforces white identity, but lynched subjectivities, as well.nThis work also documents and analyzes the production of my Chamber Theater adaptation of Bebe Moore Campbell's 1992 novel, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (also entitled "Saving White Face"). I contextualize this counter hegemonic performance as a lynching drama, as well as among radical black feminist activism, especially that of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and blues (woman) performance.