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This article was downloaded by: [200.222.1.254] On: 31 July 2015, At: 10:50 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG Click for updates Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcom20 Beyond the photograph: a graphic history of lynching Megha Anwera a Department of English, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA Published online: 23 Aug 2012. To cite this article: Megha Anwer (2014) Beyond the photograph: a graphic history of lynching, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5:1, 15-28, DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2012.703960 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2012.703960 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/21504857.2012.703960&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2012-08-23 http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcom20 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/21504857.2012.703960 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2012.703960 Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2014 Vol. 5, No. 1, 15–28, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2012.703960 Beyond the photograph: a graphic history of lynching Megha Anwer* Department of English, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA (Received 20 December 2011; final version received 11 July 2012) This paper studies the 2008 graphic novel Incognegro in conjunction with the sur- viving lynching photographs. It argues that Johnson and Pleece’s work gives us a behind-the-scenes documentation of lynching – an ‘inside view’ that the photographs, despite their claimed reliance on a facticist projection of ‘objective reality’, often fail to do. To the extent that the period’s white-sponsored lynching photographs follow a care- fully coded if unwritten convention and aesthetics of representation, they tend in fact to elide and gloss over the ‘whole truth’, or distract from immediate and direct enreg- isterment of the full and utter horror of the violence being perpetrated; this, despite the presence of the ‘strange fruit’ that grotesquely and ominously hangs from the itinerant scaffolds dotting the lynchtime landscape. In this backdrop of history and representa- tion, Incognegro may be understood as an interventionist text in the long and innovative narrative of America’s visual culture; a first-order intervention that reconfigures a racist visual archive from within, so as to unravel and deconstruct the undergirding matrix of ideological, socio-cultural and aesthetic values upon which the lynching photographic archive stands. Keywords: Incognegro; Matt Johnson; race; lynching photographs; graphic novel The 2008 graphic novel Incognegro, with text by Matt Johnson and illustrations by Warren Pleece, concerns the exploits of an early twentieth-century black journalist from New York whose beat involves the infiltration of lynch mobs. By virtue of the ‘camouflage provided by his genes’ (Johnson et al. 2008), Zane, the novel’s coloured protagonist, is able to pass as a white man, mingle with white southerners at lynchings, talk to them openly as ‘one of them’, to garner their personal views, their affective response to the violence and the extent of their participation in this communal event. With this ‘inside information’ he is able to pen candid exposé accounts of racial crimes that otherwise would go unreported – and in effect unmarked and unnoticed – by national media. This paper studies Incognegro in conjunction with the surviving lynching photographs, the earliest of which were taken in the late nineteenth century. Even though incidents of lynching reduced during the First World War, the majority of these photographs come to us from the first three decades of the twentieth century. I argue that Johnson and Pleece’s work gives us a behind-the-scenes documentation of lynching – an ‘inside view’ that the lynching photographs, despite their claimed reliance on a facticist projection of ‘objec- tive reality’, often fail to do. To the extent that the period’s lynching photographs follow a *Email: manwer@purdue.edu; megha.anwer@gmail.com © 2012 Taylor & Francis D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 mailto:manwer@purdue.edu; 16 M. Anwer carefully coded if unwritten convention and aesthetics of representation, they tend in fact to elide and gloss over the ‘whole truth’, to conventionalize and fulfil ‘expectations’, or to oth- erwise distract from immediate and direct enregisterment of the full and utter horror of the violence being perpetrated; this, despite the presence of the ‘strange fruit’ that grotesquely and ominously hangs from the itinerant scaffolds dotting the lynchtime landscape. In this backdrop of history and representation, Incognegro may be understood as an interventionist text in the long and innovative narrative of America’s visual culture; a first- order intervention that dismantles and reconfigures a racist visual archive from within, so as to unravel and deconstruct the undergirding matrix of ideological, socio-cultural and aes- thetic values upon which the lynching photographic archive stands. Johnson and Pleece’s graphic novel is able both to penetrate through (and beneath) the surface opacities of period photography, and in the process offer a counter-narrative of lynching that rips open the repressions and concealment on which those period lynching photographs depended for their hidden ‘ideological’ agenda, so as to lay bare to view, and in full glare, the savage and hideous ‘inside anatomy’ of those gruesome occurrences. In so doing it more truly and exactly tells – ‘graphically’ anatomizes – lynching’s real story. Amy Louise Wood in her book Lynching and Spectacle suggests that, even though lynching ‘stood at the centre of a long tradition of American vigilantism’ (Wood 2006, p. 3), it was around the middle of the nineteenth century that this activity transitioned ‘from a local act of mob vengeance’ (Wood 2006, p. 74) into a ‘modern’ communal event – a public spectacle. What enabled and precipitated the transformation of a local event into something ‘more’, into a fixation and national fetish that would continue to grow and find spectacular representation all the way to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, was the role played by the markers of modernity: industrialization, technology, trains, national media, cameras and photographs (Wood 2006, p. 74). ‘It’s possible thatlynching thrived not in spite of but “because of modernity’s effects on the public’s temperament”’ (Goldsby 2006). Ironically, even though the lynching photographs were an articulation of an emergent mod- ern mass culture, the world that these photographs recreated for visual consumption was an agrarian, ‘feudal’ – or more exactly ‘slave-plantocratic’ – one. It was a world of power- ful white plantation owners, supremely secure in their assumption of economic, social and moral authority and utterly confident in their ideas of white racial supremacy which legit- imated a ‘species’ right to enjoy the fruits of chattel slavery. One might suggest that this contradictory relationship between lynching photography’s genealogical roots – in fast- paced modernity – and its pre-modern social substance and setting is a symptom of the rending anxieties of a time that was violently redefining those complacent assumptions and this blatantly oppressive system’s morally repugnant parasitism. The pathology of lynching encompasses intricate psychological manoeuvres of denial and compensative violence on part of displaced Southern elites to offset unfamiliar feelings of impotence and vanished power and control. The act, and no less the visual representa- tion of lynching, becomes readable, in part, as a somewhat desperate attempt at salvaging a sense of safety from the detritus of the old order, a paranoid effort, paradoxically, to hold change at bay and restore ‘order’ by unboundedly violent means. A wishful nostalgia for a lost utopia (the fanatical myth of the Old South) turns something as heinous as lynching into an act of restitutive justice; a means to recover the sentimental-moral picturization of the dismantled antebellum world that had been rudely savaged by the (from the Confederate viewpoint) humiliating outcome of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Lynching stands on this corrosive historic landscape as a nervous and contradictory manifestation of these ‘social dilemmas’ (Goldsby 2006). Viewed in this perspective, lynching becomes a symp- tom, the most conspicuous and troubling marker of an age of anxiety. It functions as an D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 17 over-compensative savagery, a backlash against the rapid and traumatic breakdown of eco- nomic, racial and gender certainties and normativities. These photographs articulate, thus, an absolute denial of the very crises – brought forth by modernity – that produced the ‘cultural logic’ (Goldsby 2006) of lynching and the yearning for its visual memorializing. Consequently, modernity’s more reassuring and enlightened markers were entirely absent from these photographs. This is where Incognegro inserts its epistemic break – by resiliently inserting refer- ences to ‘modern’ paraphernalia into its account of the arcane proceedings and drawing alert attention to modernity’s involvement with the programmatic of lynching. Technology is a big part of this complex mediation. As in Dickens’s Dombey and Son – in which the railway is the harbinger of modernizing technical development as well as ruthless human uprooting – here too the railroad is pivotal to the graphic novel’s plot progression, even its very meaning. In the second plate on page 12 of Incognegro we are confronted with the inexorable drive and forward charge of the speeding train. The ominous locomotive, plung- ing headlong and seemingly coming straight at us, divides up the frame into two unequal halves. On the right stands the angry lynch mob that has just discovered that Zane is not the photographer’s assistant but instead is himself the infamous journalist Incognegro – a negro, but strategically ‘incognito’ as such. Enraged at the outwitting and ‘betrayal’, they are chasing after him in a kind of primal hunting frenzy: now he, in effect, has become the target and ‘quarry’ of an incensed lynch mob. On the left side of the railway track stands another symbol of American mobility and technology, a motorcar – the vehicle that will bear Zane back to the safety of urban anonymity and the comparative racial equality of a more ‘liberal’ zone. Together, the train and the automobile thus represent the onward march both of technology and, purportedly, of modern social-racial ‘progress’. By contrast, the vast empty space on the right, peopled with incensed men armed with clubs and pitchforks (undoubtedly primitive and archaic weapons when compared with the irresistible ‘phallactic’ might of the powerful metallic machines in the frame) seems bare and pathetic, a scene of historic impotence – an affect reinforced by the diminutive size of the members of the mob. In as much as the vehicles of transportation and mobility save the day for Zane, we might see them as insignias of hope – they potentially allow victims of bigotry to ‘move’ forward and away, escaping the clutches of benighted parochialism and bailing out to an egalitarian social spatiality; the city in the north. It would, however, be oversimplifying the complex symbolism here to view the modern transportation technology arrayed in the graphics solely in terms of a conduit to modernity and democratic emancipation. After all, if those trains rode out of the rural-conservative South they also rode into it. One cannot forget that these very trains and railroads made possible the technology-enabled convergence of thousands of people from across towns and cities to gawk enthralled at the primitive and vindictive ritual of lynching. In fact, the ease and pace of rail travel across distances contributed significantly to the morphing of small- scale lynching occurrences into grand penal spectacles and large-scale ‘social event[s]’ (Jones 1994). Not only did the flocking witnesses to such institutionalized public murders use trains to reach the appointed sites (implying well-disseminated prior information), but the victims themselves were often captured and brought by train to the lynch-sites. Using the testimony of a local resident, P.L. James, who witnessed the lynching of Henry Smith, accused of murdering the three-year-old daughter of a police officer, in Paris, Texas, Amy Louise Wood writes: When word came that the posse was returning with Smith by train so he could meet his fate, the ‘streets of Paris were a busy spectacle’. . . . People from the surrounding county, nearby towns D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 18 M. Anwer and counties, and places as far away as Dallas and Arkansas came by foot, horse, and train into the town. ‘Every train that arrived from any direction was crowded to suffocation’, enthused James . . . . By the time Smith and his captors arrived, over 10,000 people had gathered at the railroad depot to witness Smith’s death (Wood 2009, p. 71). Clearly then, the radical, progressive imperative of technology is offset by its all too easy appropriation and recruitment in the service of medievalist rituals of torture and archaic cruelty. Incognegro evokes this ‘irrational’ underside of the railway. Although we do not know it at the time, when Carl, Zane’s friend, decides to ride the train following him on a story, he is really ‘riding’ his own death warrant, as it were. Even though he is going to the South voluntarily, the journey from the city to the rural provinces, from the north to the south, undertaken by train, becomes a fateful and surcharged journey towards his own doom. Carl falls victim to a lynch mob that executes him, mistaking him for his friend (the journalist Zane), but also to punish him for the cardinal sin of ‘passing’. Johnson’s foregrounding of railroads in a lynching narrative is a critical move that rup- tures the fantasy propelled by lynching photographs – namely, that these were impromptu erratic events and random incidents, and that the actors taking part were merely local resi- dents who happened to chance upon a carousing ‘carnivalesque’ gatheringthat went out of control. Instead, the correlation established between lynching and the railroad confesses to a far darker truth: these were carefully planned, premeditated ceremonies, well-organized events, the dates and venues of which had been broadcast through the grapevine far and wide, and with a grimly fatal intentionality. We thus awaken to an unexpected generic insight. A photograph’s propensity to freeze a moment eclipses the ‘preceding coordinates’ that made it possible for that moment to fruc- tify, come into being. The photograph, by virtue of its claimed ‘truth value’, naturalizes and isolates the scene it presents as an autonomous, self-contained ‘cut-out’, what Barthes (1977) calls découpage; in this case, making the hordes of people visible in these photo- graph and the lynched body appear ‘normal’, a mere isolated and neutral photographical ‘fact’. Thus, the scene of the photograph becomes ‘purified’, objectified, disengaged from and independent of the larger context that produces it. As Inconegro reminds us, it is imper- ative, however, that we recuperate the symbiotic–dialectical relationship between what is inside the photograph and the world outside it; this alone enables the viewer of modern graphic representation to challenge this ‘there-ness’ of photographs that give them their ‘incontestable’ evidentiary value, by asking not only what is in the photograph but also: why is it there, what makes it possible for it to be there, what is left out of the photograph? For the one thing that the reportage photograph strains to hide is the means of its own production. In a certain sense there is no reference to the relationship between the photo- graph and the clicking camera: no traces of the machine and its mode of operation can be found imprinted upon the final product. All we have is the absolute finality of the image itself. By repressing its own history of making, the photograph can thus pretend to the status of an unmediated substitute, a perfect simulacrum of the thing itself; it can claim to assume the power of the original, the referent, the ‘real thing’. By the same token, to submit to this ‘pretence of truth’ in the archive of lynching photography, to, in other words, acquiesce in the subterfuge of the contretemps is to turn a blind eye to the way in which the camera makes things happen; orients the action of the scene; includes, excludes and edits out; foreshortens and forefronts; becomes the pivot around which, or rather, in front of which, the bustling crowd focuses its energies in the enacted unfolding of an imaged ‘rationality’ . . . Such technicalities are not without a social meaning. Both the notorious photograph of the two lynched slaves (the 1930 photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 19 Smith in Marion, Indiana) and the opening panel of Incognegro challenge us to confront the intricate relationship between collective violence and what Appadurai (2006, p. 7) calls ‘an exercise in community-building’. In short, these images make evident the way in which whites constructed communal solidarity, a sense of togetherness and belonging by lynching blacks. In some ways, the panel from the graphic novel seems to replicate several elements of the photograph – both have a man with a moustache, rather centrally positioned in the frame, pointing at the body hanging from the tree. Additionally, women are in the fore- ground of both images, and important looking men in hats seem to dominate the visual space. There are nevertheless some critical discrepancies between the two which eluci- date my central argument – that a graphic reproduction of a historical ‘fact’ – a ‘facticist’ event – is able to achieve a whole new level of realism, thereby introducing a hitherto absent political nuance in the visual representation of racial violence that escapes even photography. Since Incognegro is able to reveal and critique the hidden ideological sum- mations of the lynching photographs, the graphic novel ballasts into a metatext, a critical meta-commentary, on the lynching photographs. The photograph’s ‘frontline’ is occupied by several men and women, six of whom – ranging from the left edge of the frame to the middle – are looking directly into the camera, albeit with widely varying expressions. The man on the extreme left corner leans a little to the right in order to be ‘included’ and find ‘representation’ in the photograph’s frame. His eyes are bright and clear and his lips are pressed together in an attempt to stifle a too-broad smile – although the proto-traces of one are clearly visible. His hand rests tentatively and suggestively on his thigh – perhaps in an attempt to buttress his shaky, half-leaning posture. Compensative machismo and racial aggression in fact, as the history of the Ku Klux Klan’s bizarre and vicious sectarian adventures bears out, are inevitably co-implicated. Yet racist aggression is not a male preserve by any means. Right next to this man we see a group of three, comprising two women and a man who are all gazing into the camera. The women seem stunned, offended even, by the presence of the camera – as though the attendance of a documenting apparatus is more ‘vulgar’ than the actual event being docu- mented. The eyes of the woman in front seem undaunted, confrontational and challenging – her aggressive stance even more apparent once we notice that the man standing behind her is holding her back. He has got the thumb of her right hand tightly gripped, which seems to curb her in her lunge towards the camera. This grabbing of her hand is a restrictive gesture but also a romantic one. In this sense, the man and the woman enact the loving rituals of a young bourgeois couple – sharing the ‘awkward moment’ of an exposé – except, what has been caught on this ‘candid’ camera is not some back-alley necking – the proverbial ‘compromising position’ – but rather a very public and gladly mutual – intimate! – sharing of communal violence. The man’s toothy grin suggests an indulgent amusement both at the women’s reaction and the ‘appearance’ of the camera. I want to return for a moment to the man in the middle – glaring at the camera as he points to the body of one of the lynched men, hanging from the tree. He seems mad at the camera, appears to be admonishing it – for what though, we might ask? We can perhaps read his bold stare as a challenge to the camera to look at him, focus on him and his ‘private’ relationship to the lynched bodies. The raised hand and pointing finger are his assertion of his ‘here-ness’ – he was here, present, in attendance. For this man with the (pre)Hitler-moustache, it is not enough to be just one of the many in this sea of faces. He needs to stand out, personally claim what is otherwise a very ‘public’ group photo. The copyright stamp of the photographic studio/photographer, integrated within the image-regime of many lynching photographs, we might argue, performs the same D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 20 M. Anwer ‘pointing’ function as the one enacted by the man at the centre of this photograph. In a sense, photographers too, although absent from within the photographic frame, were able obliquely to insert themselves within their artwork. By including these copyright logos the photographer is not only leaving his mark, his business card, upon the photograph, hoping that he will be contacted for similar events in the future. Even more, he is distin- guishing himself from other less efficient photographers who could not make it in time for this monumental occasion – like the man in the photograph, marking himself out from the crowd! The spectacular nature of the lynching stands, thus, in an intricate relation- ship with photography: the camera’s presence validates the event as significant enough to deserve memorialisation. The photographturns the lynching into a floating, ‘portable memory’ (Wood 2009) of a shared collective history – a ratification of one’s whiteness; one’s approved insertion within the echelons of dominance; one’s claims of power and moral righteousness – the punisher is always right. He is also the important one. ‘We’ are the models for the photographer. Simultaneously, the lynching photographs were variants of period photographic por- traits of ruling races – the most popular examples of this genre (notably in the colonies) depicted white men posing in triumph with/over their vanquished hunting game. This subgenre of the photographic record was clearly a theatre of power. Similarly, even as the lynching photographs celebrated the communal context of triumphal white violence, they concurrently fixated on particular faces, thereby preserving the aesthetic cult of the superior-special individual, even in the midst of a ‘faceless’ crowd – a special necessity in this case, to distinguish a righteous gathering of vigilante Southern gentleman from a bestial demotic ‘rabble’. As a result, the lynching photographs were as much about constructing intimate, familiar, personalized portraitures of white men, ‘allow[ing] the col- lector to feel an exclusive connection to the emotive power of the event’ (Wood 2009), as they were about an immersion in a moment of festive togetherness. These two facets of the lynching photograph – the undifferentiated spread of the crowd, and the individuation of the crowd’s specific members – cumulatively worked towards normalizing and making socially as well as aesthetically acceptable the brutality of lynching; it remained at all times publicly and acceptably ‘presentable’ (Wood 2009). What is evident in the camera’s embeddedness within the cultural logic of lynching is that it could not have functioned as a neutral, detached, ‘objective’ agency à la the journalistic myth. On the contrary, it was an actor in the catastrophe, one that provoked into being, or at least actively normalized, a prolonged ritual of violence. As Wood reminds us, what appears to be only a matter of convention – that most lynching photographs depict only static posing by models – is an aesthetic practice that actually extended the agony of the victim: the mob stopped their torture in order to have their pictures taken (clearly a gesture of pride) with the battered, torn and quartered bodies of their ‘prey’ writhing in the background. The camera therefore morphs from a mere recorder/witness of violence into an accomplice, even a dastardly perpetrator – one that nevertheless always eluded accountability, remained outside the captured frame, successfully maintaining its stance of ‘honesty’ and unimpeachable ‘innocence’. Incognegro, as agraphic novel, pushes this omission to the point of surface visibility and recognition, forcing what is bypassed to be named and nailed in its complicity. The first three pages of text make apparent this barbaric cessation of violence; a stoppage and interregnum in the proceedings that enables the witnesses to recapitulate and revel in the visual documentation of what their cruelty has given birth to: a flayed, broken, bloody figure who screams as he is being castrated by the man in the Klan costume (page 8, plates 1 and 2). The other ritual of photographing only commences once the lynched body has been D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 21 duly defiled, mortified and desecrated – sexually, and also sartorially (by being dressed in a jester’s costume). The opening page illustrates the chaotic activity of the crowd. The men surrounding the black man are hectically busy setting up the hanging rope and hurling clubs in his direction – bringing out into the open the seething will to violence in all its frenetic energy. Even the people who are not immediately preoccupied with tormenting the black man are busy doing other things: taking large alcoholic chugs, swapping their flasks with one another, or (as seen in on page 104 depicting the lynching of Carl), buying and selling peanuts, gathering around a hot-dog vendor, climbing poles in general festive preparation for a balcony view of all the ‘action’. Incognegro is radical in that it brings to light the commercial and economic motivations underlying racial crimes: everything about lynching is rooted in a slavery-driven economy. In this zone of transactions – social and economic – the black man’s body is reconfigured as the ultimate commodity: still in effect available, even after Abolition, to do with it what you will, up for sale, purchase and extinction, at will. Nothing, thus, asserts this gesture of ownership as fully as lynching: one has full and absolute ownership of the ‘goods’, can string up, cut and quarter, and distribute piecemeal, the no longer intact and unified but dec- imated body that is thus appropriated through a gesture of brutal commodistic ownership. In fact, we might argue that the torture unleashed upon Carl is a punishment enacted for daring to transgress beyond his status as a pure object and property, for being so audacious as to try and ‘pass’ for a human being – a status reserved exclusively for the white man. Which is why at the end of this masque macabre, the lynched body will be ripped open, torn, burnt and butchered to bits, and then ‘passed around’ in a grotesque ritual of prop- erty division. Bits and pieces of the unrecognizable human flesh – no longer respectable ‘mortal remains’ these, but terrible and pathetic shreds of what once was a man – will be carried away and taken home as souvenirs – a triumphal ritual act that, in this scar- ifying and scathing inversion of racial stereotypes of cannibalism, will permanently and irrecuperably turn the annihilated human being into a repossessed racial trophy. The pho- tograph of the trophy steps in as the next best thing to the thing itself. Or perhaps, it is an even better souvenir, in that unlike fleshly remains, it does not offend, offers no affront to one’s refined sensibilities by ‘choosing’ to rot and stink and undergo biodegradive putre- faction. The photograph is permanent, indestructible, clean, ‘pure’ – a record of nothing but a sublimated and purified will to lynching. In truth though, the photograph of the intact body of the victim acts as a prolonged frisson of incitement and excitation, encouraging a permanent re-enactment of the violence in the memory bank of the viewer/owner. Where an actual lynching takes place, from beginning to end, over the course of a measurable period of time, a photograph of that murder creates its own temporal order in which the vio- lence remains visible indefinitely. Extended into a never-ending event, lynching murder – as photographs – placed viewers in a ‘sensory predicament’ . . . from which there was no easy escape. (Goldsby 2006, p. 247) The photograph’s power to trigger the imagination, activate the memory of what followed after, makes it a superlative reward for a racist remembrance of the ‘nigger’-as-commodity. The opening scene of Incognegro, though, gives us something that the photographs do not – a pre-photographic world and time of lynching, so to speak. Here, almost everyone has their back turned towards us – it is clearly not yet time to ‘pose’ in front of the camera. Right now the stage is being set, the props arranged, and the ambience established. Once the final rite-initiating flourish – the castration – has been performed, the curtains will go up and the ‘audience’ will be ready to enter the frame with their practised smiles and intent poses. On page eight, in the third frame we see the features in profile of a jowly man D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 22 M. Anwer grinning widely. His pleased expression confirms more than his satisfaction at witnessing the spectacle of pain; we can read this as him practising the perfect smile he’ll preenbefore the camera in just a few minutes more. The appearance of the camera on page nine must not be mistaken merely as an après coup arrival. Instead, the camera is the culmination, the climax towards which this procedure, this theatre of cruelty, has been geared all along. The ‘classical’ (in the sense of pre-Senecan) practice of excluding the violence from the on-view representation – in this case the actual frame of the photograph (unless we take the photograph itself to be another act of violence) – helped sustain, as Wood argues, the image of an orderly, respectable gathering (as against an ‘unruly mob’). It established white Southerners as a cohesive group that needed to be seen, not as succumbing to a perverse, sordid fascination and morbid inner desire that led to explosive eruptions of bar- barism, but instead as a methodical, organized collective that kept up its facade of civility and decency; even as it enjoyed its ‘little’ social pleasures – while reinstating white mas- culinist pride – decorously. Lynching or no lynching, we still are the proverbial Southern gentlemen. On page nine, panel three we see a neat queue of men awaiting their turn to put in their request for a copy of the lynching photograph. The suited-booted attire of the men makes these graphic panels and photographs akin to the bourgeois portraits of high gentry mentioned earlier – and of course ‘gentlemen’ is what the plantation own- ers as a class would claim to be. The presence of the hanging body in the background, by contrast, invokes a whole ‘other’ photographic typology – the criminal mugshot that had increasingly become a part of police work and the development of criminology at this time (Wood 2009). The lynching photograph therefore conflated two competing photo- graphic impulses – the voluntary, dignified and ‘majestic’ poses of the white men, and, at the other extreme, the coerced ‘involuntary posing’ of the designated victim: the person of colour elected for indignity, shame, demonizing, criminalizing and, finally, liquidation. The contrast could not be more complete. Even as the photographs have a place for both classes – the white gentleman as well as the black ‘criminal’ – these dichotomous images ultimately come together to signify an unameliorated celebration of white respectability; or, to be more precise, a lauding of white power erected upon the naming, shaming and overpowering of the ‘Other’. The respectable white faces, vying for the camera’s attention, successfully manage to distract ‘interest’ away from the ‘deviant’ black man’s body – a horrific presence that, under ordi- nary circumstances, ought to draw to itself all our attentive energy and mental moral focus. Consequently, even though the butchered body hangs dramatically in the background of the photograph, at the end of the day, the photograph epitomizes not a black tragedy, but white stardom, supremacy and authority. Ironically, the black man’s suffering gets marginalized, obfuscated and second-placed, pushed into the recesses of darkness, assigned a peripheral location in the very space that formally has been configured for the spectacle of his hour of woe. The limp bodies hanging forlornly in mid air connote a perverse absurdism that cannot quite capture their pain – because their subject position and experience has been extin- guished along with their life. The lynching photograph bows reverentially and exclusively to the affective demands of its white presences. The emotive claims – through moaning, pleading, shrieking, flailing, twisting, convulsing, struggling, etc. – of the black body that would impart its owner some vestige of agency and selfhood, on the other hand, are forced to retreat into the absolute silence that comes with broken necks and burnt flesh: the outrageous will of the ‘upstart’ cancelled, they are returned to a ‘proper’ passive-object status. These photographs thus make it redundant for the black man to be identifiable – beyond an epidermal distinction that clearly marks him out as black. Everything else about D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 23 him is reducible to a type. The white men on the other hand are clearly sorted out from each other, allowed to be owners of individual faces, facial expressions and other indica- tors of distinguishable identity: the man with the Hitler moustache, for instance, is entirely different from every other person in the foreground of this photograph. On the other hand, there is very little about the two lynched black bodies which could demarcate them from one another. By being pushed into the background an access to human specificity is made impossible for these ‘mere bodies’ – an impossibility multiplied by the actuality that the brutalization of the bodies has in fact reduced them to indistinguishable masses of burnt and mangled flesh. Inconegro, the graphic novel, does the unthinkable: it demolishes this faceless inac- cessibility of lynched subjects by putting on view a range of images of the victims in close-up. The first panel on page eight gives us a zoom-in of an unnamed lynched man’s face. We see his bruised eye from which the tears fall, we register the sheer terror and pain of what is being done to him – the horror conveyed through the one functioning eye. We notice the broken teeth, the blood, mucus and sweat oozing out from his broken nose and jaw. We ‘hear’ a scream emanate from his throttled throat. In another instance, on page 110, we see Carl’s lynched body being teased and mauled by ‘innocent’ children – evidently, they have already been trained and indoctrinated by prejudice and ideology. The little menaces cannot reach his torso, so they batter his legs with their playtime ‘weapons’: sticks and baseball bats. Carl looks nothing like the earlier victim. His physical signs of torture are barely visible. Yet, his inner torment and demor- alization is made explicit by the mournful, ‘pulled-down’ expression of his face. His eyes are half open but have rolled back, his hair falls over his forehead, his lips are closed in a downward curve conveying his resigned tragedy. Evidently, he has not protested too hard at the violence unleashed upon him because he has chosen to sacrifice himself in order to protect his friend. Incognegro does not add insult to injury by making murdered men iden- tical. They remain different, identifiable in their distinct modes of suffering, and humanly foregrounded in their personhood, in this visual narrative. Lynching happens to persons. Strategically and insidiously, the graphic novel makes a living man resemble a lynched man and reveals through this convergence a frightening truth. On the page that illustrates Carl’s lynched body is an inset square panel with a close-up of Zane’s face occupying the entire frame (p. 110). Zane’s expression here is almost identical to and reminiscent of the face of the first unnamed lynched man. Zane too, like that man, screams ‘Nooo!!!’ at the sight of his friend’s hanging body. His mouth is open, and unconcealed terror leaps out of his eyes. This frame is an excellent exposition of the experiential trauma that lynching brought for blacks – particularly black men. His cry of shock and disbelief accentuates the emasculation and social and political helplessness, both of the man, and of the black community at large. David Marriott (2000) in On Black Men suggests that the temptation for black men to identify ‘with a dead black body [at] which . . . white men [are] pointing and laughing’ is nearly irresistible (pp. 4–5). While every lynching image represents a staged gala to a white audience – at least an audience of supremacist zealots – it conveys threat, trauma and terror, and eventually profound anger à la Franz Fanon, to the black viewer. In the first instance though, in Fanonian terms, the black man comes to identify himself absolutely with the white man’s perverse and sadistic image of him as anegated man, and becomes little other than ‘the distorted and fantasmatic image of white desire . . . in which only the shade, or shadow, of the black man can appear. An image of hate, a hated image. A phobic imago . . .’ (Marriott 2000, p. 12). Lynching, then, is both fact and metaphor. It is no surprise therefore that Zane’s face takes on the contours of a lynched man. In witnessing a lynching, he himself, by proxy, is D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 24 M. Anwer lynched. Because the lynched body is not a particular body but a generalized, open-ended one, a class and type, all black men are invited by it to substitute themselves in place of the victim – lynching is really meant for ‘them’, a much-needed tutelary object lesson. The lynched body, thus, is in its way as consuming a fixation for black men as it is for the white community. As a tactic of white supremacism, its social-iconographic function is to shame and terrorize: to traumatize survivors into silence and retreat (Goldsby 2006). The black man is condemned to accept lynching violence as simultaneously shocking and routine, unexpected and predictable, fantastic and normal, horrifying and banal (Goldsby 2006). It is understandable that Zane remains transfixed by the ‘sight’, riveted by the strange fas- cination of the lynching phenomenon, compelled to pursue ad aeternum the unreported, ‘unrevealed’ crimes continuing in the South. However, Zane also recognizes just as strongly the imperative to move beyond the lynching scenario to find and define himself, and to fashion his identity outside the permis- sions of a racist discourse and mythography. He wants to be ‘revealed’ as Zane Pinchback, rather than be known only as a strange pseudonym – Incognegro; a name that permanently fixes him as a man-in-disguise, a man looking to ‘pass’, one going incognito through life. Incognegro’s paradox is that he wants to break this spell of invisibility and emerge from ‘undercover’. This is one reason why he is keen to give up his risky job for a more settled editor’s post. Of course, the urge to be ‘famous’ is closely tied up with ambitions of middle- class black respectability, a desire to be a part of the great Harlem Renaissance. But it just as much about stepping outside a racist architectonic that controls Zane’s relationship to himself. Ultimately, he seeks to self-assign an alternative referential frame, both visual and ontological – a ‘self’ concept outside of lynched bodies and murdered black men. Fascinatingly, Zane’s self-forming desire in the fictional world of Incognegro had been historically anticipated in the work of the Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee who, as Thaggert (2010) argues, contends with the very ‘fact’, the ‘there-ness’ of blackness (pp. 155–156) – an idea enforced unremittingly and relentlessly by the lynching photographs. His deliberately stylized photographs of black families reveal not just a strict and decorous ‘concern for propriety’ (Thaggert 2010, p. 156), but also an active, imaginative refashioning of black subjects that stands apart from a racist visual construction of ‘coloured races’. If the racist imagery imposed a monolithic account of black bodies – they were to be read non-differentially through typecast- ing categories, as nothing but perverts, criminals, hypersexual assaulters, etc. – then Van Der Zee’s photographs ‘pose each person in such a way as to tell a story’ (Van Der Zee, quoted in Thaggert 2010, p. 157) – typically, a story of aggressive middle- class upward mobility. In photographs such as Christmas Morning and Racoon Coats Zee’s insistence on displaying a formal stylistics that governs the ‘propriety of the black body’ (Thaggert 2010, p. 161) is a conscious reworking of and distancing from the minimalistic and ignominious – or therimorphic – black body of the lynching photograph: ‘His photographs capture a reserve that contradicts every “coon” image’ (Thaggert 2010, p. 161). Significantly, we encounter this Van Der Zian visual universe peopled with respectable, upwardly striving middle-class black folk even in Johnson’s novel. At the start of the graphic novel we are introduced to Zane, his friend Carl and Carl’s fiancé sitting in an upper class restaurant, sipping wine (Johnson et al. 2008, p. 13). This set of panels along with those on the next page, once the three exit the restaurant onto a New York street, invoke Van Der Zee’s photographic corpus – of men and women in fine-dining attires; a plush world of fur coats, hats, bow ties, motorcars and everything else that connotes middle-class respectability and ‘arrival’. The whole novel, then, is informed by these two D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 25 possible, yet contradictory, visual worlds that blacks inhabit. Which visual image is a closer approximation of the ‘real’ Carl – the second panel on page 14 where he proudly exhibits a polka-dotted bow tie, a fur collar and an easy, self-confident smile? Or the obliterative image of his lynched body being battered by white children? We might suggest that the social map of racial politics is such that it is impossible clearly and completely to disen- tangle the two paths and potentialities. Even the lives of blacks who live in the professedly more ‘liberal’ North can still be haunted in various ways by vestigial traces of the out-and- out racist practices that continue to flourish more extensively and virulently in other parts of the country. The fourth panel on page 14 where Carl lifts his hand to his forehead and looks aggrieved (about his professional and financial situation) already subtly foreshadows the future hopelessness of his face during his lynching. In the case of black agents, what at first had appeared to be two foundationally contrary, irreconcilable images and iconolo- gies, two wholly variant ontological destinies of the body and self, it turns out, are, in their potentiality, always profoundly, even inextricably entwined and interlinked – no matter who and where you are, there is no forgetting. Memorializing implies that one modality always carries within it the possibility of becoming, or reverting to the ‘Other’. It is worth noting that the lynching photographs’ ability to haunt the self-perception and self-concept of black men lay not just in their immanent representational content but also in the distributional and disseminational conditions of their ‘unpredictable appearance and disappearance from general circulation’ (Goldsby 2006, p. 248). Blacks, quite simply, had no control over when and how they might encounter a lynching photograph. The white supremacist response to the democratization of public-sphere visual culture was to restrict and tightly control the dissemination and circulation of this strange class of photographs. This meant that ‘[t]he right to see and be seen, in one’s own way and under one’s own terms’ (Goldsby 2006, p. 249) was in effect a social ideal of democracy denied to blacks. The menacing psychological impact of the lynching photographs on the black community lay in very considerable measure in the strategic unpredictability of their sporadic appear- ance and access – in their ability to disappear, only to reappear as and when their white owners wanted to re-inject the black public sphere with a fresh dose of anxiety and fear. The lynching photographs wielded power because they forever reminded the black man of the permanent, lingering and in effect inerasable danger that inhered in being black. They worked to impose on black members of a supposedly post-slavery democratic society an unerased awareness of their real lack of control over their self-image and visual repre- sentation in the expanding print and media culture of modernity, and thus over their own destiny and Bildungsroman history of self-making. At any time, said the pictures, you can encounter me; at any time you canrevert to mere target and object. Of annihilation; as a per- son; as a communal or cultural entity. Photography, therefore, was absolutely integral to the project of lynching as an apparatus that morphed lynching into a free-floating, omnipresent potentiality through which the fear of racial violence could be visually recruited and circu- lated in an ongoing way. The photographs ensured the endless visual circulation of terror, even after the event was over. In this context, Zane’s act of subversion in printing the lynching photographs and sto- ries in a daily newspaper is tantamount to taking power back – by wrenching this deadly power away from the images, which thus are no longer absolutely governed by this econ- omy of random controls push-buttoned by supremacist whites. By circulating them widely, freely and regularly, he demolishes their aura of terror, an aura they maintained by remain- ing elusive and wholly outside black control. The newspaper’s wide-open distribution of the arcane ensures that lynching photographs lose at least that part of their menace that D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 26 M. Anwer belongs to the ghostly ‘gothical’ terror, which they instil through their arbitrary and inex- plicable rhythm of intermittent appearance/disappearance. The usurpation and inversion of white control over ‘black images’ reaches an apogee in Zane’s final act of revenge against the racist Mr Schmudt – a member of the KKK and the one responsible for all the lynching crimes in the novel. By the end of the novel the xenophobic South is vying to lay its hand upon a likeness of ‘Incognegro’ – the journalist – so that he may be hunted down and executed. Zane supplies them with exactly what they want and publishes Incognegro’s photograph on the front page of the newspaper. Only, what is meant to be a ‘revelation’ of the wanted man is really a masterstroke in purposive misleading: the photograph in the newspaper is not Zane’s but Schmudt’s. Zane’s revenge is a strategic subversionist move, a gesture of egregious effrontery, working at multiple levels. First, it permanently shatters the myth of an essential black identity wholly and hermetically sealed off from whiteness – a myth that Zane’s pass- ing as white has already undermined – and introduces the idea of race as performance and assigned identity. It is precisely this race-as-performance motif that Van Der Zee’s photographs had sought to explore by their heavy accent on presentation styles and dress codes, for instance. Second, by printing a white man’s photograph as a passable substitute for a black man’s – reversing Zane’s own Inconegro ploy – and that too in a Harlem newspaper, he destroys not only white control over black images but even white control over the white world’s production of its own carefully designed self-images. The photographic signs turn slippery and labile at this point. Suddenly, in a preposterous exchange of parts and assigned stereotypes, a powerful (and very racist) white man’s photograph doubles up as that of a career ‘criminal’. And conversely, for the first time a black journalist exercises the power to determine what images of whiteness will circulate in the public sphere and print journalism. To a degree, then, Zane recovers a postmodern ‘waywardness’ (Goldsby 2006) inherent in photography; an unruliness that dangerously commemorates a lack of a fixed order of meaning – as against the imposition of closed singular meaning by racist discourses. As a result, the meaning of whiteness – that fixed positivist centre and point of ref- erence of racist discourses – is rendered plastic and unstable. It is significant that in the first half of the novel Schmudt, the embodiment of whiteness, had resembled the tradition- ally all-white, all-American superhero of comic books. On page nine, in the bottom-most panel, Schmudt dressed in his Klan uniform with its symbol on his chest, belt around his waist, in fact calls to mind the early sketches of Superman – the definitive (and simulta- neously Nietzschean and brand-American) white ‘hero’ of modernity. Johnson and Pleece clearly make a deliberate choice to dent this glorificatory identification by conflating the memory of an archetypal white-American superhero with a racist murderer. As M. Keith Booker and Terrence Tucker in the essay ‘Superheroes and comics’ remind us, comics, by virtue of being a predominantly white artistic format, have a ‘long and baleful legacy . . . in which African Americans had either been absent from the comics or depicted in largely demeaning and stereotypical ways’ (Booker and Tucker 2008, p. 161). It is not coinciden- tal that the villain of Incognegro resembles a white comic-strip superhero: the worlds of popular culture and reality exhibit similar structures of racist exclusion and demonization. By the end of the novel, however, Schmudt’s body language – Schmudt, schmuck – has undergone an unflattering transmogrification: on the last page the KKK member, mistaken as Incognegro, stands looking plainly panic-stricken as a mob of men begins to close in on him: life’s payback time for his preceding monstrosities. His clothes, without the KKK garb and knightly regalia, have lost their authoritative ‘sheen’ and look embarrassingly D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 27 ‘ordinary’ – like any black man’s, in fact. His body language, now that he is stripped of power and faced with danger, is that of a frightened, vulnerable, bewildered little man who has lost control, and wonders what it is about him that has triggered a white mob to mobilize itself. He looks pathetic and confused – no different from any marginalized, subaltern figure, who knows what it means to be a victim of senseless sectarian/racial violence. This, then, is Zane’s final act by way of what Gates (1998) calls ‘signifying’ – that is, a ‘way of rendering powerless through [visual] language an uncompromising oppressor’ (Campbell 1994). It allows Zane to reverse the law through an ‘impossible’ trajectory: by remaking a white into a black one – thus imparting an unforgettable life lesson in racial suffering to those who so far have been the masters and administrators of society’s regimes of violence and degradation. Incognegro succeeds because it rips the ‘veil drawn over “proceedings too terrible to relate”’ – an exercise that Morrison (1998) believes is critical ‘for any person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category’ because it is precisely these communities that are uninvited to ‘participate in the discourse’ even when they are its topic (p. 191). Johnson and Pleece’s graphic text joins and extends the archive of alternative visual docu- mentation produced by black photographers such as Van Der Zee. The graphic novel goes a step further by including in its narrative frame ‘graphic’ elements that a racist history has been unwilling to acknowledge and a black historiography has considered as ‘proceed- ings too terrible to relate’. Van Der Zee’s photographs create a relatively rarefied celluloid canvas that looks to fashion a black visual identity with little or no engagement with, or ref- erence to, anything outside this abstracted, secure, middle-class construction. Incognegro, by contrast, by venturing ‘graphically’ – in both senses of ‘graphic’ – into utterly uncharted terrain, constructs not just an ‘oppositional black aesthetic’ (hooks 1994) but also dismantles a distinct white aesthetic idiom erected upon the carcasses of black humans. The process of unveiling and rereading past traumas of course is something that requires a reliance on ‘memory’ – both personal and communal. However, ‘memories and recollections won’t give [us] total access to the unwritten interior life of these [marginalized] people. Only the act of the imagination can help’ us (Morrison 1998). Incognegro teaches us that literary and visualproductions that belong to imaginary realms – imaginary homelands – can sometimes open up sedimentations of a historical past, a ‘live’ communal memory that had been discarded as ‘amiss’ by mechanical, fac- ticist recorders of events. In that sense, Incognegro offers the ‘possibility of immediate intervention useful in the production of counter-hegemonic representations even as it [is] an instrument of pleasure’ (hooks 1994, p. 49). This act of remembering and rewriting, that is of piecing back together imaginatively obliterated and silenced memories, experiences and even voices, enables Johnson and Pleece to create the template of a new black subjectivity; one that escapes the talons of a prescriptive reading in which blacks are either objectified victims or traumatized wit- nesses of lynching. If, on the one hand, in the novel white masculinity – which styles itself as superheroic – is whittled down to (average) size and exposed to dire vulnerabilities, then black masculinity, conversely, is resurrected from its badgered state and represented as potentially heroic. Zane, the novel’s protagonist, not only survives lynching, he also solves a murder mystery, rescues his brother (accused of a crime he did not commit) from prison, and returns to New York, having emerged as an agent of resourceful resistance and justice. Unlike white superheroes, he does not rely on ‘alien’, supernatural gifts but on the sheer tenacity of his skills, professional and material: resourcefulness, ingenuity, courage and a staunch sense of justice. Here, then, is Johnson and Pleece’s most crucial intervention: that D ow nl oa de d by [ 20 0. 22 2. 1. 25 4] a t 1 0: 50 3 1 Ju ly 2 01 5 28 M. Anwer their oeuvre inserts itself into a pre-existent visual archive and turns its ‘evidence’ upside- down and inside-out, revealing therein the true moral anatomy of racial typecasting and racist violence. Notes on contributor Megha Anwer is a second-year PhD candidate in the the English Department at Purdue University. Her PhD research interests include violence and crime narratives: from the sensation novels of the nineteenth century to post-9/11 cultural productions (literary, cinematic and graphic texts). She is also interested in the debates around modernity, cityscapes and post/neo-colonialism. She has pub- lished essays on the films of Pontecorvo and Alea, Fellini and Luhrman’s filmic adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, and two articles on popular visual culture during the French Revolution. References Appadurai, A., 2006. Fear of small numbers: an essay on the geography of anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barthes, R., 1977. Image, music, text. New York: Hill & Wang. Booker, M.K. and Tucker, T., 2008. Superheroes and comics. In: Boyd, Todd, ed. African Americans and popular culture. Volume 3: Music and popular art. Westport, CT: Praeger, 161–182. Campbell, K.E., 1994. The ‘signifying monkey’ revisited: vernacular discourse and African American personal narratives. Journal of Advanced Composition, 14 (2), 463–473. Gates, H.L., Jr, 1988. The signifying monkey: a theory of Afro-American literary criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Goldsby, J.D., 2006. A spectacular secret: lynching in American life and literature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. hooks, b., 1994. In our glory: photography and black life. In: D. Willis, ed. Picturing us: African American identity in photography. New York: New Press/W.W. Norton & Co, 45–54. Johnson, M., Pleece, W. and Robins, C., 2008. Incognegro. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics. Jones, J., 1994. How come nobody told me about the lynching? In: D. Willis, ed. Picturing us: African American identity in photography. New York: New Press/W.W. Norton & Co, 153–158. Marriott, D., 2000. On black men. New York: Columbia University Press. Morrison, T., 1998. The site of memory. In: W.K. Zinsser, ed. Inventing the truth: the art and craft of memoir. New York: Mariner Books, 183–200. Thaggert, M., 2010. Images of Black modernism: verbal and visual strategies of the Harlem Renaissance. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Wood, A.L., 2009. Lynching and spectacle: witnessing racial violence in America, 1890–1940. 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