by Jon Lackman | 17 May 2007 | Conferences, Journals
The most recent issue of Nka (n. 20), devoted to “Lynching, Visuality and Empire,” is drawn from papers delivered at a sympoium at Cornell University. It contains six sections: “Lynching Photographs and the United States,” “Lynching, Visuality, and Empire,” “Exhibiting Lynching,” “Roundtable Discussion,” “Contemporary Artists and Lynching: A Portfolio,” and “Further Readings.” In their introduction, editors Salah M. Hassan, Brett de Bary and Cheryl Finley write: “Visual images of lynching added a sense of immediacy to the horrors of lynching as a spectacle. As we now know, anti-lynching activists appropriated those same images, and in the process endowed them with a totally different meaning far removed from their original ones, which often sanctioned the very mob violence that inspired them. In using these images, including those of torture in Abu Ghraib, as illustrations in this issue, we are aware, as Mieke Bal warns us, that ‘the reproduction, even in enhanced form, of … objectionable images is a gesture of complicity, no matter how critical the text that accompanies them’ … we tried as much as possible to avoid aestheticizing images of lynching and torture.”
