Blackface Minstrelsy and Lynching As Fandoms of the Remediated Black Body Committee: Dr

Home , Blackface, Cyber racism, Lynching of Sam Hose, The Tom Show, Tom show

BUT THE CROWD WAS NOT SATISFIED:

BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND LYNCHING AS FANDOMS OF THE

REMEDIATED BLACK BODY

Evan Jeremy Johnson

APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Shilyh Warren, Co-Chair

______Kim Knight, Co-Chair

______Kimberly Hill

______Olivia Banner

Evan Jeremy Johnson

To the struggle.

BUT THE CROWD WAS NOT SATISFIED:

BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND LYNCHING AS FANDOMS OF THE

REMEDIATED BLACK BODY

EVAN JEREMY JOHNSON, MFA, BFA

DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

The University of Texas at Dallas

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN

HUMANITIES – AESTHETIC STUDIES

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS

August 2017

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If the process of writing a dissertation has taught me anything it’s that the end result is less a product of intellectual rigor than it is having people around you who believe in what you’re doing even when your own will runs dry. Particularly for a project like this, which sees the racial terror of yesterday manifesting in the images of today, academic efficacy would not have been enough to keep the darkness and hatred of racial violence from swallowing me whole. I have been fortunate to have a wealth of people in my life who kept me from giving up, even when that was what I wanted most. I want to thank my two committee chairs, Dr. Shilyh Warren and Dr.

Kim Knight for being patient and diligent mentors. While they each taught me different things both before and during the writing of this dissertation, what I will always carry with me is the respect and dedication they showed me even as I awkwardly stumbled through this process. I say this without hyperbole, had it not been for them I could not have finished this dissertation. I would be remiss if I did not mention the other two members of my dissertation committee, Dr.

Kimberly Hill and Dr. Olivia Banner. Each, in their own unique ways, pushed me to consider the subtler consequences of my scholarship. I also want to thank Dr. Sabrina Starnaman for being generous with her time and her compassion. I walked a peculiar road to get to this point, and she was always available to help guide me along my journey. Being black in a mostly white PhD program can vacillate between frustrating and soul-crushing. I was lucky enough to have a community of other black scholars who understood the turmoil occupying such a position brings.

Rosalyn Mack, LaToya Watkins, Bryan Gillin, and Sanderia Faye were there to laugh, celebrate successes, and share setbacks with.

Many friends and colleagues have also been there to discuss both the broader and finer points of my research. I thank Teri Campbell, Tracey Berry, Elizabeth Ranieri, and Jake Crawford for being thoughtful listeners when my dissertation was in its nascent stage through its current incarnation. Not to mention that they never overtly turned their ears away whenever I would rant about the evils of white supremacy, which was pretty much all the time. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Amal Shafek and Larkin Hiott. Not only did they offer invaluable insight and criticism when needed, but more than once they stood between me and the proverbial ledge. The cost of their emotional labor is one that I can never fully repay.

I also want to thank Rick Brettell and Roger Malina for fellowships in the Edith O’Donnell

Institute of Art History and the ArtSci Lab, respectively. Both experiences expanded my thinking and allowed me to concentrate on writing and research.

Lastly and most passionately, I want to thank my mother, Angela Johnson. There are not enough words to describe how large of an impact she has had on my life. All that I can say is that everything that I have done and will do in the future is because of her sacrifices. This dissertation and whatever comes after it is dedicated to her.

April 2017

BUT THE CROWD WAS NOT SATISFIED:

BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND LYNCHING AS FANDOMS OF THE

REMEDIATED BLACK BODY

Evan Jeremy Johnson, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2017

ABSTRACT

Supervising Professors: Dr. Shilyh Warren and Dr. Kim Knight

But the Crowd was not Satisfied argues that the black body is a remediated textual object, which has inspired the creation of two attendant fandoms: blackface minstrelsy and lynching. Since slavery, images of the black body have been used to cohere together a collective white national identity. Depictions of the black body in blackface minstrelsy performances, lynching artifacts, film, television, and most recently digital culture have signified the black body as an object of pleasure, violence, chaos, and labor—each of which encodes a message of white superiority. And while much necessary work has been done that investigates the role of American culture industries on the images of the black body, this dissertation intertwines fan studies scholarship, critical race theory, film studies and media studies to examine the history of the white spectator of the black body who both consumes these representations, and creates new ones that are even more harmful.

In the first chapter, I analyze the intellectual history of fan studies from its intellectual antecedents to its present day motivations. I illustrate how both the fan, as an idea, and its study

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have and continue to center whiteness. In the second chapter, I take aim at the historical and continuing legacy of the image of the blackface minstrel body. I argue that this fandom has constructed one of the most persistent ways of seeing blackness since its origination in the 1830s.

The third chapter builds off the second in that it argues that the lynching fandom that emerged in the 1870s was a response to the decline of blackface minstrelsy. I also argue that the lynchings and the objects that stem from lynchings (postcards, photographs, body parts as memorabilia) cohered together a white supremacist identity that then manifested in other forms of mediated objects. Chapter 4 analyzes those other mediated objects. I argue that the logic of lynching infiltrated American popular culture mediums such as film and the digital, allowing for the lynching fandom to be active and ongoing in today’s contemporary Internet culture.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…...... v

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………..vii

LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………….x

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1

CHAPTER 1 THE CENTERING OF WHITENESS IN FANDOM AND FAN STUDIES……25

CHAPTER 2 BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AS FANDOM…………………………………...84

CHAPTER 3 LYNCHING AS FANDOM……………………………………………………..140

CHAPTER 4 IMAGISTIC LYNCHING FANDOM IN THE DIGITAL AGE………………..197

APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………………..256

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………...263

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH………………………………………………………...……..276

CURRICULUM VITAE

LIST OF FIGURES

A1 Sheet music from Virginia Serenaders’ “Plantation Melodies,” 1847……………………...256

A2 Sheet music from Old Dan Emmett’s “Original Banjo Melodies,” 1843…………………..257

A3 The lynching of Jesse Washington, Waco, Texas, 1916……………………………………258

A4 Drawing of the lynching of Sam Hose, 1899……………………………………………….259

A5 Drawing of Sam Hose’s alleged crime, 1899…….………………………………………...260

A6 The lynching of Laura Nelson and son, Okemah, Oklahoma, 1911……..…………………261

A7 The Obama “Rope” Meme, 2008…………………………………………………………...262

INTRODUCTION

The title of this dissertation, But the Crowd was not Satisfied, comes from a New York

World article published on December 7, 1899 titled “Roasted Alive,” about the lynching of a twenty year old black man, Richard Coleman, in Maysville, KY. Like many lynching victims before and after him, Coleman was accused of raping and murdering a white woman, his employer’s wife, Mrs. James Lashbrook.1 Coleman confessed to the crime, willfully withdrew his right to a trial, and requested a speedy execution in a neighboring city, Covington, which was denied.2 Why? Because, as Philip Dray alludes to, Coleman’s confession was not necessarily an admission of guilt, but an acknowledgement that being executed by the hands of the state was infinitely preferable to the fate of a black man accused of raping and killing a white woman.

Coleman was right to be afraid, but his efforts to die in relative peace were in vain.

Two months separated Coleman’s alleged crime and his eventual lynching. An article in the Atlanta Constitution dated October 6, 1899 states that a lynch mob had already tried to break into the jail where Coleman was being held, but was fended off by the police.3 In the intervening time between October 5, 1899 and December 7, 1899, the lynchers secured a location, advertised to neighboring towns, and alerted the national media.4 The lynch mob eventually caught up with

Richard Coleman when he was being transported back to Maysville for trial. Upon his seizure,

1 “Roasted Alive,” New York World, December 7, 1899, quoted in 100 Years of Lynching, edited by Ralph Ginzburg (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988), Kindle Edition. 2 Phillip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002), 487. 3 “Kentucky Jail Surrounded by Crowd of Angry Citizens,” The Atlanta Constitution, October 6, 1899, quoted in Strange Fruit and Spanish Moss, December 6, 2014, accessed April 17, 2017, http://strangefruitandspanishmoss.blogspot.com/2014/12/december-6-1899-richard-coleman.html. 4 Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, 487.

Coleman was tortured, maimed, and burned alive in front of thousands of men, women, and children. Of the hundreds, if not thousands, of lynching accounts that I researched for this project, no one line stuck out to me more than the words of this unnamed New York World writer. After describing the violence the lynchers visited upon Coleman in nauseating detail, and transcribing the young man’s final plea for water, the writer states: “Those were the last words he uttered. The next minute he was probably dead, as his head fell forward on his chest. But the crowd was not satisfied. They kept on feeding the flames.”5 Even after life had left Coleman’s charred remains, his body was broken into tiny parts: teeth, fingers, toes, and flesh that collectors then took and, presumably, sold to individuals who either were not present at the lynching, or for those who were there, but desired a keepsake.6 Children danced and played around his burning corpse. Needless to say, while Richard Coleman paid the ultimate price again and again for allegedly committing a crime, not one of the thousands of people who were involved with his lynching faced even the threat of legal ramifications.

This dissertation is called But the Crowd was not Satisfied because it is about America’s dominant culture and how it continues to find intense pleasure in images of the black body as long as that image is inscribed with white supremacy. But black bodies are not black people.

Black people are not blackness. To be black in America, indeed throughout the diaspora, is an identity forged in opposition to personal and systematized oppression. It is the claiming of a humanity that the white supremacist dominant culture has long considered incompatible with our existence. The black body is not something that we black people have created, it was created for

5 “Roasted Alive,” quoted in 100 Years of Lynching, edited by Ralph Ginzburg, Kindle Edition. 6 “Roasted Alive,” quoted in 100 Years of Lynching, edited by Ralph Ginzburg, Kindle Edition.

us in order to justify our enslavement, torture, rape, and murder. Here I am piggybacking off of

Ronald J. Jackson’s definition of the black body as “Black corporeal inscriptions are infused iterations of whiteness ideology embodied as Black corporeal objects, but complicated by the irregularities subsumed in a profound matrix of desire and control.”7 In other words, representations of blackness, indeed blackness itself, are already laden with a contradictory white ideological framework which on one hand uses black bodies as sexual and violent stand-ins for white fantasies, while on the other hand demands that black people be constantly constrained because of the fiction of their libidinal power. When I speak of the black body, I am not referring to the physical existence of black people, but the black body as an idea. In my view, the black body is a creation of the white supremacist culture in that it has been a cypher through which notions of black indulgence and inferiority become fixed in the dominant culture. This is made all the more damaging because black people have had limited access to the technologies and agency needed to counter these narratives.

The lynching of Richard Coleman illustrates what had always and continues to be true about the power of white supremacy. In the moment’s following his murder, Coleman was no longer a person, if the crowd ever considered him to be one; he had no control over his narrative.

He was an object that could be destroyed and re-created with a new ideological purpose: to create and serve white supremacy. The “crowd” that watches and alters black people into black bodies, that turns the lives of black people into texts that uphold the mantra of its own supremacy, can also enjoy the black body under certain, if constrained, circumstances. For

7 Ronald L. Jackson II, Scripting the Black Masculine Body (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 12.

centuries these spectators have spent their money to watch black people sing, dance, and perform daring athletic feats. The problem is not the existence of Beyoncé; the problem is when someone like Beyoncé uses her Super Bowl performance to assert pride in her blackness she pushes back against the constrained performative options afforded to black people.8 They have no issue with

Colin Kaepernick when he scores a touchdown as this act conforms to the white supremacist doctrine of appropriate black behavior, but when he protests police brutality he challenges this doctrine, and they set fire to his jersey and call him a nigger on social media in response.9 United

States Senator Barack Obama is fine, or at least mostly fine, but United States President Barack

Obama enters into a space deemed uninhabitable for non-white men. This is cause enough to tie a rope around a doll made in Obama’s image, and burn it to ash.10 What Beyoncé, Kaepernick, and Obama all have in common, other than their blackness, is that they choose to move into a new frontier that made the avowed spectators of blackness nervous. They moved from negroes who behave to misbehaving niggers. But most importantly, they moved without proper consent from those who still regard black people as slaves. As Wallace Best writes about Levar Jones, who was shot by a police officer in South Carolina: “Because he moved! And historically black

8 Ryan Parker, “Beyoncé’s Super Bowl Halftime Show Criticized by Rudy Giuliani as ‘Attack’ on Police, The Hollywood Reporter, February 8, 2016, accessed March 20, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/beyonces-super-bowl-halftime-show-862947. 9 John Breech, “49ers fan burns Kaepernick Jersey While Playing National Anthem, CBS Sports, August 30, 2016, accessed March 20, 2017, http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/watch-49ers-fan-burns-kaepernick-jersey- while-playing-national-anthem/. 10 Daniel Nasaw, “Barack Obama Effigy Hanged in George, The Guardian, January 4, 2010, accessed March 20, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/04/barack-obama-effigy-hanged-georgia.

bodies in motion in this country have always spelled danger to white power structures.”11 Best may have been writing about physical movement, but similarly explosive responses occur when black people have gained the capacity for any kind of unsupervised movement, and when they have made use of that capacity.

But the Crowd Wasn’t Satisfied is about the scopophilia associated with contained black bodies, and the physical and visual methodologies employed against those black people who refuse containment. Just as I argue that the black body is a textual object, my central argument is that like any textual object the black body is vulnerable to a specific form of participatory spectatorship that not only watches, but also assumes an identity-forming authorial sense of control over its movement.

Since at least the nineteenth century, white supremacist thought has encoded the notion of the black body through images that signify an inherent inferiority. These images, I argue, refer back to two distinct iconographic and ideological models—blackface minstrelsy and lynching—and they continue to live on in blackface minstrelsy and lynching’s many succeeding visual constructions. If that image of the black body does not connect back to the ideologies that cohered together during the rise of blackface minstrelsy as a theatrical genre, if the image of the black body does not reflect the loyalty and love of whiteness of the Uncle Tom and Mammy, the good-natured singing and dancing of the happy-to-be-enslaved Coon, or the fun-loving absurd hijinks of the Jim Crow trickster, then the dominant culture still finds immense pleasure in that

11 Wallace Best, “The Fear of Black Bodies in Motion,” The Huffington Post, December 4, 2014, accessed March 19, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wallace-best-phd/the-fear-of-black-bodies-in- motion_b_6268672.html.

image, as long as that image depicts a disciplining of that black body for not reflecting its original mediated condition. These images, beginning with blackface minstrelsy performances and then moving on to lynching photography, film, television, and now digital culture, have existed at both the margin and center of American cultural logic.

In the case of blackface minstrelsy, the fan desire to own blackness became blatant through the tropes of the medium. White men would, through makeup and performative gestures, occupy what they saw as the performative elements of, mostly, black male identity. Soon after it entered the American popular culture landscape in the 1830s, this performance structure became the country’s most popular form of entertainment. Although the medium declined in popularity post-slavery, that does not mean that the fandom practice went with it. Instead, I argue that blackface minstrelsy became for a time the primary and immensely pleasurable lens through which America looked at and understood black people—so much so that those who did not perform their blackness in ways that adhered to blackface minstrelsy’s coda for black people were vulnerable to physical and imagistic lynching.

But the Crowd Wasn’t Satisfied challenges previous conceptualizations of fandom, first articulated by John Fiske in his 1992 essay, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” as a group of self-selected individuals who engage in a form of participatory spectatorship in which they alter popular culture objects in “immensely pleasurable” ways in order to create and maintain their own group identity.12 While I agree that fans perform activities that construct a view of themselves rooted from within a mediated object, where I disagree is that belonging to a fandom

12 John Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” in Adoring Fans: Fan Culture in Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 30.

requires self-identification. Rather, I see fans as individuals whose behavior dictates their categorization more so than how they choose to identify. Just as Henry Jenkins suggests that the psychological rationale of the fan is found not only in pleasure “but also frustration and antagonism, and it is the combination of the two responses which motivates their active engagement with the media,” I see fans as working under a rubric of desire and control that

Jackson described as being encoded in the black body.13 For the fandom of the black body, blackface minstrelsy illustrates the desire and fetishization of blackness. The performative aesthetics of the theatrical genre activated the white desire to exist as the conceptualized other of blackness where they could be free of their more “worldly” concerns and devote themselves entirely to the id of play, while simultaneously positioning the black body as inherently inferior to white people. The Coon character in blackface minstrelsy was a character so carefree, so stupid, that he would sing and dance because he was a slave and did not have to concern himself with “real” concerns such as working and feeding his family.14

It is the mixture of pleasure, antagonism, and control that led the lynchers of Richard

Coleman to patiently wait for two months for their moment to strike. It was, working backward, an antagonism for the audacity of a black man to not know his place, to not be a slave, to be free to move, and the need to control this misbehaving object. While I certainly have no desire to defend the rape and murder of any woman, like many of the over 4,000 reported lynching victims who were murdered during the era of physical lynching era (1877-1950), Coleman was

13 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poacher: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 24. 14 Jackson, Scripting the Black Masculine Body, 29.

not lynched because of his alleged assault on a white woman, he was lynched because he was perceived as encroaching on white male property.15 In actual fact, Coleman’s very freedom was a source of the antagonism. We can no more separate the history of lynching from the end of slavery than we can the flood that comes after the storm. Lynchers used racialized violence against black communities because black communities existed at all. It was this antagonism, this contention toward free black people, which fed the frustration of the lynchers who murdered

Coleman. It was the frustration with black people for not conforming to the remediated black body evident in blackface minstrelsy. And finally, when nothing else was left, lynchers were motivated by the pleasure of defeating their antagonist, of relieving their frustration, of using a permanent solution to the problem of blackness. The lynching of Richard Coleman illustrates one method by which a black person can be rendered into nothing more than a vehicle for white supremacist ideology, than a black body. The black body is a mediated object in the McLuhan sense in that it is an extension of the white supremacist consciousness regarding black people.

And while the black body has had severe consequences on the lives of actual black people, it is a fiction molded into mediated objects which then shape reality. In other words, just like any other mediated textual object, it has the capacity to be fandomized.

As the field of fan studies has grown, so too has the question of how to categorize the activities of individuals who behave like fans, but are motivated purely out of an antagonism toward text instead of any sort of pleasurable association. This is an identity which has come to be known as the “anti-fan.” In his evaluation of the anti-fan, Jonathan Gray states that “Behind

15 Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015), 5.

dislike, after all, there are always expectations of what a text should be like. . .”16 For Gray, the anti-fan emerges as an identity when a fan becomes disappointed in a text they otherwise enjoy.

Contradictory to Gray’s point, this supposed disappointment already guides much of the fannish content within a fandom. When fans write a piece of fan fiction that focuses on a different character or somehow changes the story, they are expressing a measure of disappointment with the text. When this occurs, this is not considered anti-fan behavior, but simply a fan being a fan.

As such, it is the very concept of the anti-fan itself that I disagree with. Further, Gray uses electrons as a metaphor to describe the differences between the fan and anti-fan. According to

Gray, fans have “positive charges” to a text, while anti-fans have “negative charges.”17 The problem with this metaphor is that even normal and moderate forms of fan engagement do not work on a positive and negative binary. Media fans and sports fans alike often exist on a constantly shifting affective pole with their fandoms. One moment they love something, the next moment they hate it, but the intense feeling is always there—which is to say, there is no anti- fan/fan binary.

In other words, anti-fans and fans have the very same relationship with a text in that their passionate engagement results in an identitarian-like attachment with that object, but with a diametrically opposed governing impulse. In this dissertation, rather than focus on the differences in the motivations between the fan and the anti-fan, I instead think of the two as fundamentally indistinguishable categories. As such, I argue that there is no such thing as an

16 Jonathan Gray,” New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-fans and Non-Fans,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 6(1), 2003: 71. 17 Gray, “New Audiences, New Textualities,” 70.

anti-fan, simply a fan whose level of engagement rests in an antagonism that is equally as identity-forming as the fan whose level of engagement finds its roots in pleasurable positive associations. To be a part of a fandom means that you seek out other like-minded people who share that passionate engagement. A fan space is a physical, textual, or digital location in which fans gather in order to discuss, critique, and share fan-created objects. The comments section of a

YouTube vlog that publishes fan-made videos of superheroes fighting each other is a fan space; a

Twitter hashtag about a television show, political figure, or sporting event is a fan space;

Shitskin.com, a website that purports to be a multicultural site for those who hate black people, is a fan space.

Embedded within the imagistic manifestation of the black body is the presumption that any black body stands in for all black bodies, and that black body can be bartered, sold, and traded. Once a fan has taken the liberty to fandomize, often in fan spaces, she can, as Karen

Hellekson and Kristina Busse suggest, be an “affirmative fan” or a “transformative fan.”18

Affirmative fans “collect, view and play, to discuss, analyze, and critique” that text in such a way that it affirms the text’s obvious ideological position.19 In contrast, transformative fans “take a creative step to make the worlds and characters their own, be it by telling stories, cosplaying the characters, creating artwork, or engaging in any of the many other forms active fan participation can take.”20 Hellekson and Busse, like the vast majority of fan studies scholars, view the ability of the fan to wrestle control away from corporate media as an emancipatory move in which the

18 Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Introduction: Why a Fan Studies Reader Now?” in The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 3. 19 Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction,” 3-4. 20 Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction,” 4.

participant-consumer challenges the authority of the regressive content creator and manufacturer.

In most instances this might very well be true; however, when the textual object being altered represents the very real interests of an already marginalized group of people the consequences can be dire. At best, fandomizations of the black body led to a de-stabilization of authority in which black people have limited control over how their imagistic and textualized bodies are encoded with meaning throughout mass media culture. At worst, it leads to a violent participatory culture in which the images of the black body are used either as a justification to terrorize, or as the terror itself.

The Black Body as a Textual and Remediated Object

Allow me to clarify two important terms before moving forward. First, by textual object I mean a thing that can be written and read but whose meaning is less signified by its form (the bodily structure of blackness, in this case), than by its white-dominated presumed content (the character of blackness itself). The black body, in the American context, is an idea formed during the encounter of enslaved black people, the white desire to justify slavery, and the burgeoning mediated culture of the nineteenth century. More than just in blackface minstrelsy, remediations of black people were found in visual advertisements throughout the nineteenth century to sell a variety of products such as cigarettes, syrup, and gator bait.21 While it is difficult to track down the exact historical lineage of these images, one imagines that advertisements for slaves who were either for sale or had escaped were one visual antecedent.22 Even in the antebellum South, much less the North, these images would have been the primary way that most people

21 Jackson, Scripting the Black Masculine Body, 27. 22 Jackson, Scripting the Black Masculine Body, 15.

encountered the black body on any level. The dominant culture continues to see black people within this remediated textual condition.

The second term that requires further explication is remediation. For the creators of the term, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, a remediation is “the representation of one medium in another.”23 In other words, when a piece of media (a book, film, song, etc.) is removed from the trappings of its initial mediation and placed into another mediation it is a remediation. Bolter and Grusin consider remediation an almost grand unifying theory of digital culture in that nearly everything displayed through digital means belongs, initially, to a different medium.24 In fact, for them, “all mediation is remediation. We are not claiming this as an a priori truth, but rather arguing that at this extended historical moment, all current media function as remediators and that remediation offers us a means of interpreting earlier media as well.”25 At stake for Bolter and Grusin is more than just a conceptualization of the aesthetic and industrial conventions found within contemporary media, but an almost teleological evolution of media into a hybridized state of convergence. Although their book was published in 2000, their concept of remediation has proven to be prescient. Internet memes, YouTube videos, and shared articles and photos proliferated through social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter are all examples of remediation in action.

We can, of course, trace the intellectual history of Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation to Marshall McLuhan, who famously stated “the content of any medium is another

23 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 45. 24 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 45. 25 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 55.

medium.”26 McLuhan and to some degree Bolter and Grusin believe that the initial site of mediation is never an object, but the thought of the creator of that object.27 To illustrate, when writing about the content of speech, McLuhan states, “It is an actual process of thought, which is always nonverbal.” He goes on to argue that the “message” of a technology seeks to increase the speed and efficacy of a previous, but similar, technology. The wheel and the airplane exist on the same family tree and have similar goals but with much different rates of travel. Unlike Bolter and Grusin, McLuhan has little interest in the Cartesian duality between mind and body, so when he suggests that the various forms of media are the extensions of our senses, there is an implication of the human capacity to alter the world based on our own desires. Or as Mark B.N.

Hansen states: “For McLuhan, the development of media technology (up to then- contemporary electronic technologies) has operated as an externalization of the nervous system, which in today's terms we might describe as a technical distribution of human cognitive capacities into the environment.”28 In other words, all mediations start prior to the text's construction. They begin in the domain of the real and are constructed into mediated form, or as Bolter and Grusin explicitly state: “all mediations are mediations of the real.”29 So while Bolter and Grusin's conceptualization of remediation centered on digital media, I build off of the idea to suggest that this idea can also apply to idea of black bodies.30

26 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Electronic Edition (Berkeley, Gingko Press, 2013), Kindle Edition. 27 McLuhan, Understanding Media, Kindle Edition. 28 Mark BN Hansen, “New Media,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, eds. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 175. 29 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 56. 30 It should be noted that Bolter and Grusin are themselves interested in the body, particularly in regards to how bodies interact with virtual technology. Where I differ from Bolter and Grusin is that they see virtual

As I said, the black body was at its onset a mediation of enslaved black people, the remediated objects that stemmed from those encounters (advertisements, blackface minstrelsy performances, and eventually lynchings), encoded with the contradictory impulses of desire and control that Jackson speaks on, proliferated throughout American mass culture defining blackness for people of all races and ethnicities. These remediations informed and formed the black body. Since slavery the black body has been a perpetual work in progress, particularly as black people have gained increased authorial control over how over the way our remediations are mediated. However, the objects remediated from the conditional responses that slavery imposed onto black people were far from benign. In fact, they were fundamental to the spread of a white supremacist ideology. In this sense, the black body is the fandom But the Crowd Wasn’t Satisfied investigates, with blackface minstrelsy and lynching being the fan activities most commonly used to express desire and control, respectively.

The Permanency of Racialized Violence in Fandom

But the Crowd was not Satisfied is about the methodologies of this sometimes violent cultural phenomenon called fandom. It is about the early fan studies scholars of the 1990s, such as Constance Penley, Henry Jenkins, Camille Bacon-Smith, and others, and how their scholarship ignored the push toward diversity in the academic cultures around them. It is about how these well-meaning white men and women built fan studies as a field of inquiry in a white feminist model, but paid no heed to the already established critiques of that model made by black feminists such as Audre Lorde, Angela Y. Davis, and Kimberle Crenshaw in the 1970s and

technologies as remediating the Cartesian self, while being unable to deny the significance of the body. I examine the remediation of black bodies that are denied a self.

1980s. Fan studies scholars did not just center whiteness, they also conceptualized the fan as a marginalized entity. In doing so, they unwittingly enabled a beast that they could not control—a beast with no sense of accountability or culpability. This beast, imbued by white supremacy and ultimately led by avowed “Internet trolls” such as Chuck Johnson and Milo Yiannopoulos, have engaged in a number fandom campaigns (#GamerGate, Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies,

#BoycottStarWarsVII, etc.) of digital assault that target men, women, and texts that either embody diversity or embrace it.

While these white supremacist, capitalist and patriarchal movements within fandom will no doubt one day soon inspire their own in-depth analysis, this dissertation is not about them, but something larger. It is about how the uncovering of white supremacist ideologies should always be centered when discussing the participatory engagement of American cultural products.

Because, as critical race theorists have been saying for over four decades, racism in America is an everyday fact of life for people of color of all economic and social levels.31 There is not a single institution, culture, or individual that it has not, in some way, tainted. In a fictional

America where white academics truly care about the systems of oppression that continue to assault and dehumanize the marginalized, fan studies, which seeks to examine the relationship between a cultural product and group identity, would have done its best to place anti-racism and social justice at the core of its theories. Scholars would not have ignored the black women who had been sounding the alarm of white supremacy within feminist spaces for decades before the announcement of contemporary media fan studies. But we do not live in that world. We live in

31 Ricardo Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 11.

this world, and because we live in this world, I am writing about two separate fandoms that dehumanize, denigrate, and imagistically destroy the black body.

This dissertation is an analysis of that destruction. It is about the process through which a black person like Richard Coleman is transformed into a mediated object, a game, and a site of pleasure so that his burning body had more value to his lynchers than his life did. This dissertation is about how the image of blackness, when gazed upon through the eyes of the white supremacist dominant culture, gets created, altered, consumed, created again, altered again, and consumed again. It is how Richard Coleman could appear to be a person one moment, the smoldering centerpiece for a picnic the next, and finally dismembered and disembodied keepsakes that get collected as mementos. It is about how the black body has been fandomized, and what that fandomization means. It is, as Afro-Pessimists argue, about the ways that the lives of black people are never actually lives because black people are always already slaves. But the

Crowd was not Satisfied is about how enslaved black people had their performative acts of resistance taken from them and rendered into a supposedly mimetic theatrical genre known as blackface minstrelsy, and how that medium, itself a participatory fandom, bled into the consciousness of media culture and became the initially preferred mode of public engagement for all black people after the end of slavery. It is about how, when black people challenge or subvert the blackface minstrelsy mode, they become vulnerable to physical and imagistic lynching.

An imagistic lynching—the fundamental unit of grammar in the contemporary lynching fandom—is any racialized cultural product that displays a violent assault against a black person who does not perform her blackness in ways that reflect the white supremacist dominant

culture’s preferred mode of engagement. Not every critique of a black person is an imagistic lynching, nor is every racist utterance. The purpose behind an imagistic lynching is to reenact the desired result of a physical lynching; it is, for the lyncher, to celebrate the act of destroying blackness, while also, possibly, instilling fear in black people. Imagistic lynching arose out of a white fan passion to control and dominate all black people. In the early twentieth century, white fans of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, would regularly yell out “lynch the nigger” during his fights and hang homemade effigies of his body on street corners.32 Johnson’s crime was being a proud black man with a white woman on his arm. Unfortunately for his white fans, he was also outside of their reach. Yelling racial slurs and burning dolls made in his honor were the closest they were going to come to lynching Johnson, so that's what his white fans did.

Similarly, in 2016, Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder decided to leave the team that he spent his entire career with and go to the Golden State Warriors. His white fans, also lacking in physical access to Durant, posted pictures on the Internet where they burned his jersey in a grill and riddled a dummy wearing his jersey full of bullets.33 It was a scene similar to what happened to LeBron James when he left the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010.34 There too a stand-in his body, the jersey, was burned in effigy. And then there is President Barack Obama. For the

32 Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3. 33Shaun King, “King: In Oklahoma, Angry White Men with Assault Rifles Simulate a Brutal Lynching of Kevin Durant,” The New York Daily News, July 5, 2016, accessed March 20, 2017, http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/king-white-men-assault-rifles-simulate-lynching-durant-article- 1.2699588. 34 Peter Slevin, “Cleveland Reacts Unhappily to James’ Departure,” Washington Post, July 10, 2010, accessed March 20, 2017, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/07/09/AR2010070905248.html.

entirety of his eight years as President of the United States, Obama was the victim of imagistic lynching through countless images and memes. In a plurality of these images, Obama was transformed into an ape, a stereotypical version of a terrorist, and had his speech slurred to resemble the white supremacist understanding of African American Vernacular English

(AAVE).

Moreover, the assaults on Obama reveal two important issues at stake in this dissertation and digital cultural writ large. The first is that over time the white supremacist understanding and employment of blackface minstrelsy has changed. In the early part of film history, variations of blackface minstrel characters were shown to be “acceptable” forms of black identity as evident in some of the medium’s most famous products, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Porter 1903), The Birth of a Nation (Griffith 1914), The Jazz Singer (Crossland 1927), Swing Time (Stevens 1936), Gone with the Wind (Fleming 1939), and Casablanca (Curtiz 1942). However, beginning in the 1970s, but not really taking hold until the 2000s, perhaps because of the election of President Obama, the acceptable form of black behavior in the white supremacist mind was one who did not demonstrate any aspect of black identity at all. As such, in the lynching fandom, blackface minstrelsy characteristics became weaponized against black people. During his time in office, it was not uncommon to see memes of Obama that portrayed him in some stereotypically blackface presentation.

The second issue that the imagistic assaults on Obama reveal is something that has always been true, but has been made clearer by the internal logics of digital culture: all bodies, but in particular black bodies, are capable of being fandomized at a moment’s notice. The users of contemporary digital culture found on social media applications such as Twitter, Facebook,

Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, and more do not differentiate between a television show, film, celebrity soundbite, political speech, or the person-on-the-street being interviewed on a local news channel. For them, all of these objects can be read, discussed, and remediated into new textual objects that cohere together a particular identity, a manifestation of how the spectator sees and understands herself within a larger mediated environment. At some point in the early twenty first century, fan culture merged with what digital culture theorists call “remix culture.”

Abigail De Kosnik states that remix culture is “the appropriation and transformation of mass media texts (including films, television episodes, recorded music, video games, comic books, novels, and so on) into alternative versions, with traces of the ‘source’ texts lingering in the new

‘takes,’ the remixes.”35 If anything that can be seen, heard, or read can be transformed into a new version through an intertextual process that imbues the new object with an existing ideology, as is the case with the Obama memes, then anything can be fandomized.

In this sense, the remix culture of the twenty-first century is paradoxically much the same as the lynching and blackface minstrelsy fandoms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Blackface minstrelsy began as an appropriation of the performative resistance acts of enslaved people and merged with the popular music forms of the day. Physical lynchings superimposed the fictional realities of blackface minstrelsy and the formal aesthetics of plays and film onto their black victims. Contemporary digital culture has only made the tendency to occupy blackness more evident through the amalgamations of more recent black images with the historic racialized representations of the past. This dissertation argues the cultures that created the

35Abigail De Koenig, Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), Kindle Edition.

blackface minstrelsy and lynchings did not fall out of favor, they simply shifted into other mediated forms in order to achieve similar goals.

Which is to say, But the Crowd was not Satisfied suggests that the black body has always been a participatory culture. It has always been vulnerable to the constant alteration and sharing endemic to Web 2.0 applications. It has always been a site of interest and intrigue through which battles are fought over identity and control. When writing on the subject of race and the Internet,

Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White argue that, “Race itself has become a digital medium, a distinctive set of informatics codes, networked mediated narratives, maps, images, visualizations that index identity.”36 Nakamura and Chow’s words imply that race was not always an idea formed through a combination of linguistic and imagistic symbols. And yet, as

Afro-Pessimist theorists, Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson III, David Marriott, and others argue, the material conditions of black life in the United States can be traced directly to the rubric of oppressions found within slavery. There is literally nothing that racism on the Internet has done to black people that slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration have not already done. To put it plainly, this dissertation is not about black people. It is about the failures of the not-as-racist white people within and outside the academy to confront the obvious and avowed racists. It is about an oppressive digital culture that in every way resembles the oppressive systems found in the material world.

The Chapters

36 Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White, “Digital Technology: Code, the Color-Line, and Information Society,” in Race After the Internet (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 5.

In the four chapters that follow, I offer a new way to think of and analyze a number of mediated objects (blackface minstrelsy performance, lynching photographs, films, and memes on the Internet, just to name a few) to illustrate that the fans of blackface minstrelsy and lynching are not limited to amateur artistic works, but are in nearly every element of American popular culture. In doing so, I critically intervene in several established topics of inquiry: fan studies scholarship, blackface minstrelsy, and lynching. In the case of fan studies scholarship, I break down the arbitrary walls between amateur and professionally produced content. I do not think of fandom texts as objects that resist the dominant culture but as texts that inhabit an incomparably large culture dedicated to surveilling and controlling blackness. I also intertwine methodologies and histories which have seldom, if ever, been used in conjunction. For academic inquiries into blackface minstrelsy and fan studies, I offer a new way of examining the racist practice. Perhaps most importantly, for lynching, I not only reconsider the practice from a mediated culture standpoint, but I argue that lynching never actually ended, instead it merely shifted forms into the visual realm which not only allowed it to become a respectable practice, but a common one that continues on to this day.

In the first chapter, “The Mediated Black Body in the White Fandom Imaginary,” I map the development of academic fan scholarship in the academy, and how its formation ultimately ignored of racial oppression within fandom spaces, even as it was created during a push for greater inclusion for people of color inside of the academic realm. In particular, I focus on fan studies scholarship’s intellectual antecedent, the Birmingham Centre Cultural Studies, the role of political correctness on the larger mediated culture, and the work of early and later fan scholars

(Camille Bacon-Smith, John Fiske, and Henry Jenkins, to name a few). Lastly, through the

analysis of two separate fandom movements, I argue that fan studies scholarship has centered whiteness so completely that it has failed to acknowledge the white supremacist ideology percolating through fan spaces, which has allowed for the flourishing of a violent digital culture that employs fandom methodology.

Chapter 2, “Blackface Minstrelsy as Fandom,” argues that blackface minstrelsy is the first national articulation of the fandom of the remediated black body. I argue that the texts created through the blackface minstrelsy tradition rest on an intentional misreading of blackness in order to cohere together a white nationalist fandom identity. And yet, when the medium was at its height, this misreading was fueled by the articulations of blackface minstrelsy performers who connected the value and quality of their respective performances to their ability to capture and then remediate blackness. In other words, it was not enough for blackface minstrel performers to position black bodies as inherently inferior in their artistic renditions, they also had to be faithful representations. Thus, the internal logic of blackface minstrelsy traffics on the presumed authenticity of black inhumanity.

I then chart the history of this fandom through mediated objects that borrow blackface minstrelsy tropes and images as a means of controlling mediated and physical black performance, which then proliferated them to even wider audiences. From the beginning of film as an artistic and commercial medium to the present, the tools used to imagistically and ideologically represent blackness in minstrel plays have found a home within the cinematic image. In investigating this visual domain, I argue that the fandom of blackface minstrelsy permeates through more contemporary filmic and televisual images of blackness.

In Chapter 3, “Lynching as Fandom,” I argue that lynching itself is a remediation of the black body in that physical black bodies are turned into textual objects created for enjoyment and the further creation of white national identity. I challenge the positions of many lynching historians who situate the violent activities within either a quasi-legal paradigm or as a push against modernity. Through an examination of the participatory activities surrounding lynched black bodies, I posit that lynching is a fandom activity whose ideological origins stem initially from a desire to control the political and sexual movement of black people, in particular men.

Additionally, I open up the boundaries of lynching to include the sexual violence perpetrated against black women to show how the dynamics of lynching had little to do with crime, and more to do with the dominant culture’s perception of blackness as a slaveness.

Chapter 4, “Imagistic Lynchings and the Fandom of the Black Body,” argues that the logic of lynching never truly ended. Instead, as America’s mass media culture began to proliferate throughout the country, it evolved within the internal logic of the culture industries.

Filmic, televisual, and digital images represent black people, both iconically and symbolically, in ways that reflect the histories of blackface minstrelsy and lynching culture. “Appropriate” black performances are placed within a metaphoric positionality that reflects the idea of blackness found within blackface minstrelsy, while misbehaving images of black bodies are deemed worthy of lynching. Within the logic of film and television industries, the black bodies who are lynched are ones who symbolically represent black bodies, such as King Kong and Jar Jar Binks.

This chapter analyzes the history of fan participatory consumption of blackness in digital spaces to argue that, if Henry Jenkins is correct and fan culture is digital culture writ large, then the strategies within lynching fandom have become status quo within contemporary digital culture.

When I first began writing this dissertation, a Donald Trump presidency was little more than a joke. For a long time I have thought that most forms of participatory engagement, including politics, could be analyzed as fandom. Fandom, while having its positive benefits, fundamentally alters how one sees the world. When a person’s identity becomes bound up with a textual object, be it a film star, television show, series of novels, sports team, musician, or politician all challenges and critiques, even valid ones, to that textual object must be defended against with the voracity of a person trying to save their own life. Because that’s what it is. One way to read this dissertation is as a critique of the logic of white supremacy within fan studies scholarship, another is as an investigation of a way of thinking and acting that reveals the permeability of white supremacy. Trump’s election means there is a third reading: the fandomized identity-politics within media, entertainment, and politics have always been evident to careful enough investigators, but what we can now see is that the digital environment has folded these ideas onto one another. A former reality star who espouses misogynistic, racist, anti- immigrant, islamophobic, ableist, and white supremacist rhetoric ran a campaign based on creating a fandom and became president. But the Crowd was not Satisfied is about why.

CHAPTER 1

THE CENTERING OF WHITENESS IN FANDOM AND FAN STUDIES

Introduction

The visibility of the fan and its study have seen a dramatic increase over the last two decades. What was once an area of fringe scholarship that analyzed people on the behavioral margins, fan studies has emerged as a growing field of inquiry. It is tasked with theorizing a generation of media consumers who, through proliferation of conferences that celebrate fans and fandom, have quite literally taken over the media marketplace. During the 1980s and into the

1990s, the people who actively identified as fans were seen as pathological by the scholars who were interested in the ways that popular culture was impacting society. As Henry Jenkins writes,

“Academics were studying fans and fandom before fan studies. There was a small but significant body of pre-existing scholarship that pathologized fannish enthusiasms and participations.”37

What has become obvious since then, thanks to writers like Camille Bacon-Smith and

John Fiske, is that the relationship between spectators and the objects they consume is not, as

Theodore Adorno or Anthony Elliott might state, unidirectional. For those cultural critics, the popular cultural object, embedded with all the ideological codes of the dominant culture, merely dominates the consumer and transfers whatever nefarious message of the world that the creators of the object desire. Instead, for the critics who created what we now call fan studies, this relationship is far more complex. The consumer of the image has agency to either agree with the

37 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers, Television Fans and Participatory Cultures: Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York; London: Routledge, 2013) ix.

messages encoded in the media, or alter the objects’ ideological positioning in order to suit their own needs. As such, fandom and participatory culture scholars such as Henry Jenkins, Karen

Hellekson, Matt Hills, Cornel Sandvoss, and many others, have all attempted to render the fan as an active decoder of the messages within media. Following in the tradition of the Birmingham

Centre for Cultural Studies of the 1960s, these thinkers have understood fans as individuals who attempt to thwart the capitalist regime inherent to the industrial media complex by subverting its values through creating and reading content in a way that applies new cultural and ideological codes into the system.

Despite this radical re-thinking, fandom scholars have failed to acknowledge the ways that fandom, fans, and their own scholarship have reinforced the values of the dominant culture.

Part of the reason they have done this was as a defense against the steady stream of attacks fans and fandom faced from psychoanalytic theorists twenty and thirty years ago. However, there also exists a larger, theoretical flaw in theories and practices of fan studies scholarship. Fan studies scholars have been primarily interested in the ways that groups of fans have engaged with texts, fostered their own identity, and created communities with other self-identified fans, all with the goal of protecting fans from attackers. The first three major works of media fandom scholarship—the Lisa A. Lewis edited anthology: Adoring Audiences: Fan Culture and Popular

Media, Camille Bacon Smith’s Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of

Popular Myth, and Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, all published in 1992—are each primarily interested in one, or more, of these goals. Being the first formative text in contemporary fan scholarship, Adoring Audiences is largely concerned with establishing a theoretical foundation for understanding the complex and, at times,

contradictory interplay between fans, a text, and the cultures that come from that encounter. To

Lewis’ credit, the anthology’s four sections—Defining Fandom, Fandom and Gender, Fans and

Industry, and Production by Fans—reflect the state of the field over twenty years later.38 And yet, none of the articles in the anthology are interested in critiquing the oppressive attitudes of fans themselves, preferring instead to offer a reading of fandom that venerates the fan. To this point, Lewis states this exactly in the introduction to Adoring Audiences: “Fandom has been so delegitimized as an area of study . . . If we approach fandom as a serious and complicated arena of study right from the beginning, perhaps we will be less inclined to trivialize the fan behaviors described in later sections.”39 Lewis’ desire to defend the field is intertwined with her stated goal of taking the fan seriously. While I do not disagree with Lewis that the study of fandom is a serious and complicated area of study, scholars have tended to ignore that fans are not merely individuals whose intense interest with a text has led to them being dismissed, they are also individuals who hold ideas and positions that denigrate and dehumanize others.

In their focus on these individuals, fan scholars analyze fans who do alter and deconstruct heteronormativity, gender binaries, and patriarchal positioning. However, this focus on small groups of individuals has fundamentally constrained the ways that fan scholars have approach larger systemic forces and institutions that interpolate subjects. For example, in a chapter in Adoring Audiences, Stephen Hinerman investigates the ‘fantasy accounts’ of women who had encounters with Elvis Presley well after his death. While Hinerman’s article is useful in

38 Lisa A. Lewis, Adoring Fans: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London; New York: Routledge, 1992). 39 Lisa A. Lewis, “Introduction,” In Adoring Fans: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 2.

that it offers a way to perform psychoanalytic fan studies scholarship that does not ‘overstep’ its bounds, it treats all women who have fantasies without taking into account race, age, or class differences. We have no way of knowing the subject positions of the women Hinerman analyzes, an odd oversight considering the women are fantasizing about a musician who, in Hinerman’s own words, was “visibly lower class and symbolically black (as the bearer of black music to white youth).”40 By not providing the demographics of the women he interviews, Hinerman makes a mistake made time and again by fan studies scholars: presenting all fans as white. This has been a persistent issue within fan studies scholarship that has only recently started being remediated. I argue that although fan studies scholars have been more than willing to investigate the intersections of fandom with patriarchy, sexuality, and capitalism, they have, with a few notable exceptions, been negligent in their analysis on race.

Fan studies scholarship sits at the junction of popular media audiences and the American university system. Both of these groups have illustrated a historical and continuous trend toward the inclusion of black people in their ranks. A 2013 study conducted by the National Center for

Education Statistics finds that black professors make up roughly 6% of full-time faculty in state and top-tier private universities.41 Fan studies scholarship has done more than just fail to acknowledge the inherent racism found within its two institutional antecedents, as evidenced by the historic lack of inclusion in both Hollywood and the academy; it has refused to bring attention to these forces, even when the fight against them, through the culture wars of the 1960s,

40 Stephen Hinerman, In Adoring Fans: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 100. 41 National Center for Education Statistics, “Fast Facts: Race/ethnicity of college faculty,” National Center for Education Statistics, accessed January 14, 2017, https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61.

has given fan studies scholarship the space to create institutional frameworks that allow for the study of fan communities, as will be discussed more thoroughly below. I am not merely making an argument for a historiography of fan studies scholarship that has little to no impact on the current media landscape.

Fandom has become a more significant force in the operational strategies of media corporations, and fan studies scholars such as Paul Booth, Louisa Ellen Stein, and Kristina

Busse, have critiqued the growing trend of these corporations intentionally utilizing free fan labor as a means to minimize costs so that they can maximize profits. What has been so far unremarked, however, are the ways that fan studies scholars, in announcing the fan as an oppressed other, have given license to media fandoms to attack the so-called “PC culture” that dares to imagine a world that, even if only momentarily, does not center whiteness, as was the case in the Internet movements “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies.” The two ideologically conjoined movements began in 2013 when a subset of science fiction fans angry over what they saw as the unnecessary attempts at diversifying nominees for the Hugo Awards, the most prestigious award in the genre, stuffed the ballot box with a mixture of absurd choices and

“traditional” science fiction authors whose work did not directly address identity politics (Cain,

“George RR Martin: Rabid Puppies are ‘big winners’”).42 Evident in “If You Were an Award,

My Love,” one of the short stories the Rabid Puppies helped nominate in 2016, it is clear that the

Rabid Puppies are a conservative pushback against the institutional recognition of women,

42 Sian Cain, “George RR Martin: Rabid Puppies are ‘big winners’ in Hugo shortlists,” The Guardian, (assessed January 15, 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/27/george-rr-martin-rabid-puppies-are- big-winners-in-hugo-shortlists.

LGBTQIA, and people of color by a genre that has historically been dominated by white men.

For instance, one line from the story, which mockingly compares a loved one to a Hugo, reads:

“You’d stand for everything progressive and PETA and transgender and carbon-neutral and

GMO/peanut free and latina and pro-Palestine and LGBT friendly and you’d miss the Soviet

Union in a melancholy kind of way.”43 Given the increased frequency of these movements in this century’s second decade, and the complex relationship between fans, fan studies scholars, aca- fans, and texts, I argue in this chapter that fan studies scholarship should be much less concerned with fans, and more concerned with the ways in which fandom behavior mirrors the systems, objects, and institutions that produce fandoms themselves. Existing fan studies scholarship is understood as both a product of fandom, in that much of the fan studies scholarship I will discuss is produced by self-identified fans who have a clear purpose in writing in the way that they do, and an institution that allows for the existence of fandom. Through a rhetorical strategy that allowed fans within a fandom to feel free to occupy a space of political and social marginality, fan studies scholars, with a few notable exceptions, have given space to sub-fandom movements such as #BoycottStarWarsVii, and #AbbieMillsDeservesBetter that center whiteness at all costs.

A Brief Genealogy of Fandom

In 1992, John Fiske published “The Cultural Economy of Fandom.” Fiske does the necessary legwork of situating fandom as an always already existent feature within developed markets when in the first paragraph of the article he states:

Fandom is a common feature of popular culture in industrial societies. It selects from the repertoire of mass-produced and mass-distributed entertainment certain performers,

43 Juan Tabo and S. Harris, “If You Were an Award, My Love,” Vox Popoli, accessed January 15, 2017, http://voxday.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/if-you-were-award-my-love.html.

narratives or genres and takes them into the culture of a self-selected fraction of the people. They are then reworked into an intensely pleasurable, intensely signifying popular culture that is both to, yet significantly different from, the culture of more ‘normal’ popular audiences.44 As the intellectual father of fan studies, Fiske here effectively defines fandom for many of the scholars of the future who would come to be more intimately familiar with Jenkins. In defining fandom as the cultures of a “self-selected fraction of people,” Fiske creates the problems in fan studies that scholars continue to enact until this day. I will more thoroughly engage with the misconceived notion of fans as “self-selected” and that their works are “intensely pleasurable” in a later chapter, but for now I want to concentrate on who Fiske means by ‘people,’ and how his own limited definition allowed for the centering of whiteness within fan studies scholarship.

In the final sentence of that same paragraph, Fiske tells us about the groups of people who are most commonly interested in constructing fandoms: “It is thus associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly with those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race.”45 Fiske seemingly understands that a study of fandom must include an investigation of those who are most vulnerable to systemic disadvantage, including the racially oppressed. However, two pages later, after critiquing Pierre

Bourdieu’s own critical analysis of social oppression for being too focused on class, and not enough on race or gender, Fiske states that he will center his political economy of fandom on class, gender, and age because: “I regret being unable to devote the attention to race which it deserves, but I have not found studies of non-white fandom.”46 Let us take a minute to fully

44 John Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” In Adoring Fans: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 30. 45 Fiske, “Cultural Economy,” 30. 46 Fiske, “Cultural Economy,” 32.

understand what Fiske has done in this article. At the onset: Fiske asserts that fandom is a specific group of people who engage with and rework texts for specific cultural purposes. He then argues that fandom is most strongly found within the ranks of the marginalized. He then ends by saying that will not focus on race because he cannot find studies of non-white fandoms.

This is to say that, according to Fiske, fans are the marginalized white people of the world. And so with a whimper begins two of the more persistent flaws within fan studies scholarship: the simultaneous centering and perceived marginalization of white fans.

In Jenkins’ landmark text, Textual Poachers: Television Fans, and Participatory Culture, these two flaws are not truly addressed. Instead Jenkins, challenges previous scholars that sought to reduce the fan to, at best, an overly obsessed person with identification issues, and at worst, a fanatic. Jenkins desires to reclaim the fan, not as a singular entity capable of harm, or as some of the psychoanalytic renderings of the fan suggested, but as an active member of a community of generally good people.47 Jenkins contrasts this model against the deviant one that had been in vogue since the 1970s. He posits that early understandings of male fans slightly differed from early notions of the female fan. For instance, he states that the early psychoanalytic perspective of the male fan was as creepy, over-invested, and lost in a fictional word without much hope for release.48 On the other hand, the female was “an erotic spectacle for mundane male spectators.”49

Subtextually, these two distinctions seem to reveal for Jenkins the means by which societal renderings of the differentiations between male fans and female fans reflect dominant

47 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 1. 48 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 14. 49 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 15.

understandings of gender performance. The male fan does not achieve the level of full man because he does not fully embrace his individualism and instead falls prey to a textual reordering of reality that infects his higher-thinking. On the other hand, the female fan actually reinforces the cultural positioning of women as overly emotional and as an object for sexual gratification, but to a perverse degree. In either instance, the cultural reading of the fan up until that point, at least according to Jenkins, is infused with both lust and danger, arousal and fear.50 As such,

Jenkins posits that previous examinations of fan activity situate the fan on the fringes of normative society due to their willingness to encode themselves within the text, and thus lose sight of reality, to which his book acts as a counter-narrative to that positioning.

Jenkins uses Michel de Certeau to illustrate the capacity for a reader to resist the ideological codes embedded within a text, including those that the text may state about the reader themselves, and positions de Certeau against Stuart Hall’s more cynical approach to the same project to argue that the fans “assert their own right to form interpretations, to offer evaluations, and to construct cultural canons.”51 Here then fans essentially reorder the cultural hierarchies within a text and reconstruct them to fit their own particular needs.52 This, according to Jenkins, serves as an omnipresent threat to the dominant, corporate media culture’s stranglehold on the authorship of the text.53 Consequently, Jenkins argues that part of the dominant culture’s distaste for the fan stems from the fan’s desire to reconsider ownership of a text. Jenkins, in an effort to

50 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 15. 51 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 18. 52 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 18. 53 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 19.

maintain control over the majority of cultural readers, claims that the regulation of fans to a marginalized position is to deter others from taking similar ownership of a greater number of texts.54 However, Jenkins, who considers himself a fan, limits Fiske’s taxonomy of the fan by negating any kind of connection to systemic oppressions, but still regarding the fan as other:

Like the poachers of old, fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness… Fans must beg with networks to keep their favorite on the air, must lobby producers to provide desired plot developments or to protect the integrity of favorite characters. Within the cultural economy, fans are peasants, not proprietors, a recognition which much contextualize our celebration of strategies of popular resistance.55 Contemporary fandom studies scholarship began with Fiske as the marginalized collective assault against the dogma of the corporate media, became under Jenkins about the fans’ lack of control over which television show gets canceled, or whether or not a beloved character gets screen-time. Although, at least in regards to that last point, when a character representing a marginalized group does not get enough screen-time or a decent storyline, this might be enough to cause fandom ire. However, Jenkins was not making that point because, for him, all fans are marginalized.

In the first chapter of Textual Poachers, Jenkins argues for the validity of writing from within the position of the fan. And while Jenkins’ point is all well and good, something invidious occurs throughout Textual Poachers, and is taken on by others who carry the mantle of the aca- fan. In pre-supposing that the academic fan will be condemned by traditional academics, Jenkins moves the aca-fan, as well as the fan writ large, to the status of other. Consider this: Jenkins

54 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 19. 55 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 26.

posits that a group of people, who are by his own admission all white and middle class, should be thought of as marginalized. Although, from within the perspective of the academy, Jenkins is somewhat correct, there are myriad problems with fan studies scholarship and fandom as it has been employed, and much of this chapter will attempt to thoroughly investigate the way that lack of proper theorization in the first has helped hide the problems of the second, but they all in some ways stem from the fact that the so-called “first wave” of fan scholars thought of themselves as others. While more contemporary fan scholars, including those like Jenkins who are still very active in the field, have evolved their theoretical methodologies and expanded the parameters for where they see fandom engagement, they have never quite shaken off the blind spots of that first wave.

While the actual rendering of fan behavior as pathological can be traced back to the assassination of John Lennon and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan during the

1980s, the actual theoretical impulse begins in the 1970s with critiques regarding psychoanalysis and film spectatorship. Laura Mulvey’s essential “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema,” and work done by other feminist film theorists unlocked the Pandora’s box of psychoanalyzing the holder of the gaze, the viewer.56 This eventually led to popular cultural theorists like Anthony

Elliott to describe fandom as a violence in which the fan willfully splits him- or herself into two through the identification with an object or person.57 Much of the scholarship surrounding fans in the 1980s and 1990s restates these judgmental positions. Given that intellectual environment, it makes sense that fan scholars coming of intellectual age in the 80s, 90s, and 00s would read this

56 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 65. 57 Hills, Fan Cultures, 66.

work and feel defensive. Unlike early critics of fandom, the fandom scholars, most notably

Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith, who began writing throughout the 1990s were also self-described fans. This dual identification of fan scholar and fan has led to a slew of problems in terms of properly delimiting the goals and purposes of the supposedly separate categories.

In his book, Understanding Fandom, Mark Duffett furthers the investigation of fandom by creating a distinction between fan studies and fandom research. Duffett states that fandom research is a larger academic activity with interlocking disciplines that use fandom as its base.58

In contrast, fan studies is rooted in the cultural studies field, and the academics participating in fan studies do so in order to, as I have already suggested, reclaim the fan from the pathological representation that persisted from the 1970s until very recently.59 Furthermore, Duffett’s brief taxonomy of a fandom also uncovers another problem embedded within fan studies scholarship, the lack of a proper critical understanding of how systems and institutions enforce power dynamics and oppression. Duffett states that “A focus on fandom uncovers social attitudes to class, gender and other shared dimensions of identity . . . Crucially, its study can expose the operation of power in the cultural field.”60 The problem with Duffett’s definition is that he says that fandom is interested in “shared dimensions of identity,” whatever that actually means, but his own project ignores a field of fandom that would give insight into how fandom understands issues such as race, class, masculinity, and representations of power: sports fandom.

58 Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture (New York; London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 24. 59 Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 24. 60 Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 24.

Duffett decides to split media fandom from sports fandom and does not discuss sports fandom at all. Even as Duffett acknowledges the ways that sports fandoms and media fandoms are similar, he states that sports fandoms, unlike media fandoms, involve “drunken bravado and mass violence,” and such differences are enough to qualify it for an entirely different regime.61

Even if we were to ignore the classist stratification lurking beneath the surface in the words

“drunken bravado and mass violence,” plus the reality of how media fandoms actually function

(anyone who has been to a large fan convention such as the San Diego Comic Con knows that drunken bravado is present, if not rampant within media fandoms as well) Duffett’s words reflect a larger fandom tendency towards only seeing media fans and fandom through a positive lens.

It is a lens that continues to instill much confusion as ever over what constitutes fandom.

This confusion does not necessarily stem from a hotly contested theoretical grounding that is rooted in an intellectual tradition, in fact it is just the opposite. While fandom does have a long historical epistemology that can be traced to antiquity, the reasons that definitions of fandoms are up for debate is because, as we further understand the increasing contours of fandom, the ontologies of the objects and their participatory cultures entering into these borders create disruptions for the objects and participatory cultures already within the borders. For example, how do media fandoms, traditionally constructed, inhabited, and maintained by women—in fact,

Henry Jenkins argues that the intertwining of the academic and the fan is a “fundamentally feminist project”—cohere with similar fandoms like sports fandoms that are absolutely “media- esque” in that the fans of each have corresponding, if not similar, behavior, such as cosplay,

61 Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 25.

textual remediations (fan fiction, fan viding, meme construction, etc.), and ongoing discussions that construct and deconstruct moments that help to reassert fandom identity?62 What then is the difference between a sports fandom and a media fandom if the fans of each consume, discuss, and recreate the text in the same way? For fan scholars, the answer has been, as Mark Duffett puts it, “. . . sports fans are normalized as a prime embodiment of acceptable spectatorship, media fans are sometimes represented as an eccentric faction with interests beyond the comprehension of the ordinary media audience.”63 Oddly, most members and scholars of sports fandoms and media fandoms seem to acknowledge that the other is a fandom, simply not engaged in the same activities, even if any objective analysis of either proves that they are far more similar than they are different. In fact, recent scholarship on sports fandom has tended to position sports fans as media fans. In contrast, Duffett’s words reveal the difficulty in defining fandom seems to stem primarily from a desire to think of fans as those who are marginalized because of their passions. Which is to say, in Duffett’s view, a wealthy cishet white man is somewhat marginalized if he is also an avid Dungeons & Dragons player. The more subtle claim that the fan holds a marginalized status in Duffett’s suggestion from 2013 that fans are eccentrics with abnormal passions are more obvious in the words of Joli Jenson. Writing twenty years earlier than Duffett, Jenson, regarding previous academic notions of the fan, states: “The literature implies that ‘normal’ fans are constantly in danger of becoming ‘obsessive loners’ or

62 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers, Television Fans and Participatory Cultures: Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 2002), xi. 63 Duffett, Understanding Fandom, 94.

‘frenzied crowd members.’”64 Although separated by two decades, Duffett and Jenson both offer a persistent problem in fan studies scholarship that I alluded to earlier. For them, and so many other fan scholars, those who participate in mediated fandoms hold the marginalized status of

“other.” This problem begins and ends with Henry Jenkins.

Jenkins somehow broadens the scope that Fiske articulates, while also continuing the tradition of positioning the fan within a marginalized status. This tendency to argue for the capacity of the fan to alter the meaning of a text due, in part, to their subject positioning as a political “other,” seems to ignore the actual lives of actual subaltern people, and the difficulty those individuals face in deconstructing the meaning imposed on them by a dominant culture.

For his part, Jenkins, first in an article written in 2002, and then in an interview on his blog with

Sarah N. Gatson in 2008, came to understand that fan studies had been negligent in incorporating race into its theoretical toolbox, particularly critical race studies.65 Unfortunately, even in these moments, Jenkins reveals his own misunderstanding of critical race theory. For instance, in the

2002 article, entitled “Race in Cyberspace,” Jenkins states: “Like many white liberals, I had viewed the absence of explicit racial markers in cyberspace with some optimism-seeing the emerging “virtual communities” as perhaps our best hope ever of achieving a truly color-blind society.”66 He then goes on to state, regarding the failure of the web in creating this racial utopia,

64 Joli Jenson, “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization” In Adoring Fans: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 18. 65 Henry Jenkins and Sarah N. Gatson, “Race in Digital Space (Revisited): An Interview with Sarah N. Gatson” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, accessed January 15, 2017, http://henryjenkins.org/2008/12/what_fan_studies_has_to_learn.html. 66 Henry Jenkins, “Cyberspace and Race” MIT Technology Review, (accessed January 15, 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401404/cyberspace-and-race/.

that “perhaps when early white Netizens were arguing that cyberspace was “color-blind,” what they really meant was that they desperately wanted a place where they didn’t have to think about, look at or talk about racial differences. Unfortunately, none of us knows how to live in a race- free society.”67 Jenkins’ fantasy of a post-racial society uncovers the problems with any thinking of this sort. As many critical race scholars have argued, a post-racial society is not truly a world in which there is no racism, but a world that ignores the very different sets of experiences that people of color face. It is a world where people of color are expected to “move beyond” both the historic and present systemic and personal violences that have violated their bodies and minds.68

It is a world that pays no attention to the privileges that whiteness brings. In other words, to want a post-racial world is to already be desperate for a place where one does not have to deal with the ramifications racialized oppression and white supremacy have had on all of us.

Later in that article Jenkins seems to understand this very point when he writes, “we will need to give up any lingering fantasies of a color-blind Web and focus on building a space where we recognize, discuss, and celebrate racial and cultural diversity.69 Even as he attempts to move away from his own desire for a post-racial world, Jenkins frames his call to action as something

“we” should do. This “we” can only be interpreted as him speaking directly to other white people, ignoring the fact that black spaces (such as Black Planet) have been online since the popularization of the Internet. It has long been a mistake to assume that black people were not visible online because of the “digital divide.” However, a 2016 Nielsen report shows that black

67 Jenkins, “Cyberspace and Race.” 68 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012), 30. 69 Jenkins, “Cyberspace and Race.”

people have been instrumental in shaping digital culture, particularly since the advent of Web 2.0 applications, with the most notable example being Black Twitter’s emergence as a site for cultural change.70 Jenkins’ words indicate he wants the Internet to be a World’s Fair where white people can sample the variety of cultural products the Internet makes readily available. What is more is that while Jenkins understands fan studies has had little interest in critical race theory, he reveals that he does not know that one of critical race theory’s most fundamental tenets is that racism is a normative factor in everyday life. The opposite of a color-blind society is not one where we (all of us) celebrate diversity, but one where we realize that racism shapes every

American’s experience with the world, whether they realize it or not. In short, fan scholars have done worse than simply ignore the way that systemic oppressions have worked to render the lives and thoughts of marginalized people, even when they try to understand, they still fall short.

Theories on Race and Fandom

While most academic analysis—including monographs, anthologies, and journals—can somehow exist without any meaningful discussion on race, much less blackness, in many respects, it is unfair to state that contemporary fan studies scholars have completely ignored race.

With mixed results, over the last several years, fan scholars of all racial and ethnic categories have begun to push back against the white supremacist domination within the field. In her article,

“Doing fandom, (mis)doing fandom whiteness: Heteronormativity, racialization, and the discursive construction of fandom,” Mel Stanfill argues that white fans have been racialized as non-white within popular mediated texts even as fandom itself is illustrated as exclusively

70 The Nielsen Company, Young, Connected, and Black: African American Millennials are Driving Social Change and Leading Digital Advancement (New York: Nielsen Holdings, 2016), 14.

belonging to white bodies.71 Stanfill takes issue with the lack of investigation on whiteness in media fan studies scholars, when research on the impact of whiteness in music fandom and sports fandom are more plentiful.72 In her evaluation of three films (two documentaries and one fictional comedy) that depict white fans—Trekkies (Nygard, 1997), Horror Fans (Schwartz,

2006), and Fanboys (Newman, 2009). Stanfill argues that each film renders the white fan as in effect de-racializing their subjects as white in that they show the fans as overweight, unsuccessful, and behaving in ways that fall outside of the white masculine paradigm. Stanfill claims to want to deconstruct whiteness and fandom at the moment of separation, when the fan is stigmatized as something other than fully white. She writes: “I contend that it is vital to figure out what the whiteness of fandom does when fandom is constructed as nonnormative.”73 In other words, Stanfill takes issue with white fans being reduced to not quite white in the sense that they perform their whiteness in ways that do not live up to the white supremacist standard of represented excellence.

Stanfill seems to understand race as a purely linguistic metaphor in which a less privileged white person manifests as less white when they are not depicted as embodying white heteronormative ideal. Where Stanfill seems to misunderstand how bodies are racialized is that she focuses purely on how the white fans are depicted, and not that they are depicted at all. The primary tenant of white supremacy is not that all white people are depicted as gods amongst

71 Mel Stanfill, “Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization, and the Discursive Construction of Fandom,” In “Race and Ethnicity in Fandom, eds. Robin Anne Reid and Sarah Gatson, special issue, Transformative Works and Digital Cultures, no. 8, 2011. 72 Stanfill, “Doing Fandom,” 2.8. 73 Stanfill, “Doing Fandom,” 2.8.

men, but that every story that involves a white person, in particular a white man, is worthy of telling. She falls short in a similar way as did Jenkins when describing his desire for a post-racial society in that she does exhibit an understanding of how racialized oppression and white supremacy function. Moreover, she theoretically attaches herself to the historical positioning of fan studies scholarship that attempts to render the fan as marginalized. The difference between

Stanfill and Henry Jenkins is that Jenkins sees the fan as being a member of a self-selected under-class, while Stanfill critiques the representation of the fan within corporatized mediated environments. Both have their issues for reasons already stated, but Stanfill’s article does take on race, even if just to state that the already privileged are not receiving all of their racialized benefits.

In stark contrast, Rebecca Wanzo’s “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers:

New Genealogies of Fan Studies” counters John Fiske’s argument that there were no non-white fandoms to be found through a brief analysis of Afro-Punk fandom.74 She also performs a broad taxonomy of black fandom behavior and activity. Most interestingly, however, she argues that black aca-fans have positioned themselves within the other fields of study, but have largely been ignored by fan studies scholars, despite fan studies scholarship intellectual tradition stemming from the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, which considered race a fundamental aspect of cultural practice. Wanzo’s article, published in 2015, is a significant intervention in fan studies in that she addresses that fan studies rarely addresses the hypervisibility of blackness within

74 Rebecca Wanzo, “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies,” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 20, 2015.

popular media, in particular how black bodies become sites of fan cultures.75 Where she and I differ is that she sees the designation of ‘fan’ as being inherently rooted in a self-selected process. As will be argued much more rigorously in later chapters, purely assigning the status of fan to those who wish to be positioned there ignores how behavioral modalities of individuals who would self-identify as fans mirrors the actions and passions of those who do not. Still, her much needed analysis of fan studies scholarship unearths many of the same concerns permeating this discussion.

Similarly, Dominique Deidre Johnson critiques the representation of black women in fan communities through a misogynoir lens. Johnson focuses her analysis on the character of

Michonne, from the comic book series, The Walking Dead, and its televisual adaptation. Johnson argues that the representation of Michonne’s identity as a black woman remediates the grammar of suffering posited by afro-pessimists.76 However, within this articulation of Critical Fandom

Studies, Johnson does not follow the codified understanding of the media object/fan binary formation; instead, she sees this relationship which dualistically creates the Michonne character as one of co-production wherein the creators of the show depict a character based, in part, on an understanding of that character.77 Unlike Stanfill and Wanzo, Johnson’s work is able to complicate the dynamic of fan studies scholarship because she does not rely on situating herself within the already established fan studies canon. Johnson performs the kind of fan studies work

75 Wanzo, “African American Acafandom,” 1.6. 76 Dominique Deidre Johnson, “Misogynoir and antiblack racism: What the Walking Dead teaches us about the limits of Speculative Fiction fandom,” Journal of Fandom Studies, Volume 3: Issue 3, September 2015, 282. 77 Johnson, “Misogynoir and antiblack racism,” 261.

that Wanzo sees as necessary. Johnson creates new conceptualization of fan studies scholarship that removes whiteness as the structural center; it may rest in completely disavowing prior fan studies scholarship. I say this even as I admit that my own investigation does not accomplish this task.

In this sense, I agree with Stanfill’s notion that the fan identity is synonymous with whiteness. Since fan studies derives so much of its logic from the fan identity and the fandoms that they serve, and because the rhetoric used by fans is so often borrowed from fan scholars, who borrowed it from scholars, it is not altogether possible to separate these identities.

Moreover, each of these identities is supported by internal and external white supremacist power structures that naturalize whiteness as the center and defends that centering at nearly all costs.

My goal with this dissertation is an unearthing of what already exists to illustrate that fan studies scholarship, and the fandoms that were created by it, exist within a larger institutional and systemic landscape that does more than just erase black fandom; instead, it actively remediates the behaviors and attitudes that inflict violence upon the black body. This kind of thinking simultaneously influences and stems from the interior logic of fan communities, and its consequences are far from benign. It emerged when white male gamers thought they were being oppressed when women inside and outside of the gaming industry demanded better treatment and representation. This thinking further manifested itself when fans of Marvel Comics complained about tokenism and political correctness when Marvel finally made a semi-serious attempt to add diversity to their characters when they made Thor a woman and Captain America black. It is also the same kind of thinking that led to the “Culture Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s.

Fan Studies and the Culture Wars

Since its inception, the American higher educational system propagated and amplified the racist dogma found within every other aspect of American society. Except, even to say that the

American academy comports its racial violence toward black bodies in similar ways to that of the American body public at large would run the risk of offering too light a touch on the system that grants me my meager income. No American institution—with one notable exception that I will come back to later—holds whiteness in higher, more laudatory terms than the American university. Even in today’s cultural moment which has recently witnessed the first black

President of the United States and several black deans of major institutions of higher learning, the scholarship, the thoughts, and the feelings of white people are not just placed on a pedestal above all others, but employed as weapons against blackness. Take, for instance, the recent attack of many liberals on the culture of political correctness on university campuses. Individuals from as far afield as comedian Jerry Seinfeld to the aforementioned President Barack Obama to noted liberal columnist, Jonathan Chait have dismissed students’ criticisms of people who direct incendiary language and behavior toward people belonging to marginalized groups. In President

Obama’s own words, students are ‘coddled’ because they find alternate avenues of expression when universities across the nation have been hesitant to address use of racist rhetoric and iconography.78 For instance, in 2015, students at Yale called for the resignation of a staff member, Erika Christakis, when she glibly compared the requests by students to ban racist

Halloween costumes that either appropriate or denigrate the cultures of people of color to those

78 Janell Ross, “Obama says liberal college students should not be ‘coddled.’ Are we really surprised?” Washington Post, September 15, accessed January 14, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- fix/wp/2015/09/15/obama-says-liberal-college-students-should-not-be-coddled-are-we-really- surprised/?utm_term=.22a373f3beba.

of religious people who are offended by costumes that reveal too much skin for their sensibilities.79 Now, this is perhaps not the space to illustrate the absurdity of that particular example, but it does seem appropriate that many of the thinkers who have taken up the mantle against PC culture—which is often the same argument that those within the #gamergate and

#BoycottStarWarsVii movements use—seem more interested and invested in protecting people’s right to offend than the rights of those offended.

This leads us back to the problem of anti-blackness within the academy. Political correctness—as an idea—has always been hard to define due to the sheer multiplicity of its purposeful uses since it entered the dominant culture at some point in the mid-1980s. According to Geoffrey Hughes, the term’s most likely theoretical origins stem from Mao Tse-tung’s desire to correct the wayward thoughts and behaviors of members within his Fourth Red Army.80

Naturally, this view of the ontology of political correctness is most alive when Conservative pundits hack at the idea like they were engaging in tee-ball batting practice. However, while the

New Left’s use of the term in the 1960s may have in some ways borrowed from Chairman Mao’s ideological witch hunt, once academics got a hold of it in the 1970s, it was employed as a corrective against those whose racist and sexist behavior did not coincide with their inclusive rhetoric. Toni Cade, who first used ‘politically correct’ to sanction the behavior of a young man

79 Anemona Hartcollis, “Yale Lecturer Resigns After Email on Halloween Costumes,” The New York Times, December 7, 2015, January 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/us/yale-lecturer-resigns-after- email-on-halloween-costumes.html?_r=0. 80 Geoffrey Hughes, Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 62.

who was not “fully woke,” wrote: “a man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist too.”81

Cade’s use of politically correct here presupposes that those who occupy a noticeable status of privilege (as most of us inevitably do) have a responsibility to treat those who do not have access to that privilege with at least a modicum of respect. Somehow, the performativity of such a public resistance against linguistic dehumanization—which, considering America’s history of manipulating language as a means to maintain and enforce unequal power dynamics, is the least a marginalized person can ask for—has become framed as a totalitarian instantiation of the privileges of the victim.

And yet, as always, there is more at stake here than just terminology. The history of political correctness culture, insofar as it exists, intertwines with movements from within and outside of the American university to destabilize the hierarchy of white men. Beginning in the late 1960s the creation of majors and fields of study that center women, black people, brown people, queer people, and Trans people—and the various ways any of those subject positions intersect—took shape in what we now call “the culture wars.” How one defines the culture wars depends largely on which side of the fight you are on, your placement within the academy, your academic field of study, and, seemingly, your genitalia. For renowned black literary critic and theorist Henry Louis Gates, the culture wars were a fight over the academic canon. For women like bell hooks, the culture wars were about unfettered access to an institution who met their very existence with hostility.82 However, for fan studies scholars the culture wars meant situating

81 Toni Cade, “On the Role of Issues,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed, Toni Cade Bambara, (New York: Washington State Press, 1970), Kindle Edition. 82 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).

themselves within an open fissure that was not intended for them, at least not initially. In the

1970s, 1980s and 1990s, university programs in black studies, feminist theory, gender studies, queer studies, and women studies began popping up in liberal arts colleges and major universities around the country, even as they were introduced among battles for funding. Fan studies scholarship, along with media studies and film studies, rode the wave of these hard- fought battles as a means to increase its legitimacy within academic circles. While fan studies scholarship has not risen to the level of notoriety that media studies or film studies has, in part because many fan studies scholars are media studies scholars by training, its increased significance over the last few years comes, at least in part, off of the backs of the aforementioned identity politics programs – which have always been under attack from right wing local governments.

Before the various battles that centered the philosophical dictum of diversifying the curriculum within higher education were grouped together as a war on and for culture, skirmishes over the politicization of academic life had been ongoing for over half a century.

According to Henry Louis Gates, a veteran of the culture wars, there was an attempt to clearly demarcate/defend against the political elements at work within early twentieth century academic thought and professorship.83 These battles, just as the ones that would take over American consciousness in the 1980s, fixated on higher education’s project of constructing productive

American citizens. The question of what or who has access to American citizenship is of course a larger, still contestable, query that dictates everything from immigration to the over-policing of

83 Henry Louis Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford Up, 1993), xiv.

minority communities. Or, as Gates asks: “What does it mean to be an American? Must academic inquiry be subordinated to the requirements of national identity? Should scholarship and education reflect our actual diversity, or should they, rather forge a communal identity that may not yet have been achieved?”84 To Gates’ credit, when he wrote, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars in 1992, he considered himself something of an agnostic on whether an academic field of inquiry could really impact American identity to that great an extent.85

However, even that admission seems more like lip service than anything else since he managed to muster up enough gumption to publish a book on the battle between multiculturalists who seek to diversify curricula and traditionalists who wish to maintain the status quo. And yet, this battle was over more than just the subject position of the person who teaches students English or

History. For the individuals who lobbed the first grenades in the war over culture, what was at stake was the reimagining of the racial calculus of the American ideology.

During the 1960s, a rising band of multiculturalists, led by Afrocentrists, began to challenge the still open question of black citizenship inside the halls of the American university.86 It was their view that in order to fight against an American public identity rooted in white supremacist eurocentrism, Americans ought to be formally trained in modalities of thinking that factor in the cultural and intellectual exigencies of non-European people.87 In short, the only way to combat this particular invasion of the white supremacist power structure was to

84 Gates, Loose Canons, xiv. 85 Gates, Loose Canons, xii. 86 Martell Teasley and Edgar Tyson, “Cultural Wars and the Attack on Multiculturalism: An Afrocentric Critique,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 37, no. 3 (Jan, 2007): 391. 87 Teasley and Tyson, “Culture Wars,” 390.

actively thwart its domination through counter-narrative. The Afrocentrists saw education, in particular higher education, as the most efficacious site to challenge what Carole Boyce Davies calls unicentricity. According to Davies, unicentricity is “a logic which demands a single center

(intellectual, economic, political, cultural, geographic) from which all emanates.”88 The unicentricity of eurocentrism did more than just negate non-Europeans’ access into the public domains of intellectual thought, although it certainly did that too; it also functioned as a hierarchy of humanity and value, which was used post-facto to cover the genocidal and colonialist projects of European-descended peoples.89 Eurocentrism did not just destroy and/or colonize bodies, it also erased the intellectual and cultural exploits of non-Europeans as a way of privileging the proliferation of white, western ideology and theory. In her article, Davies traces the dominance of eurocentrism all the way up to the rise of “US-centrism.” If the eurocentrist project erases and destroys until the point of extinction, then the US-centrist imbibes and enfolds cultures until they are completely assimilated when a culture’s output can be used to support US- centrism, or annihilated when it cannot90

Afrocentrists in the mid-twentieth century attempted to push against this paradigm. They understood the value of de-centering the intellectual tradition, in not privileging one geographical mode of discourse and thought over another. The rise of “black studies” as an academic field of thought was explicitly intended to create spaces of inclusion for “African agency” and black students in a post Brown vs. Board of Education integrated university

88 Carole Boyce Davies, “Beyond Unicentricity: Transcultural Black Presences,” vol. 30, No. 2, Summer 1999. 89 Davies, “Beyond Unicentricity,” 100. 90 Davies, “Beyond Unicentricity,” 101.

system.91 Somewhat naturally then, it was the history departments that first began to include elements of black studies into their curriculum, with literature soon following.92 It makes sense that the historical study of a country founded and built off of the backs of enslaved black people would be the first field to inquire about the “half that’s never been told.” This, of course, was a marked departure from how history, as a field, developed in this country from the nineteenth century onward. After the Civil War ended, rather than attempt to understand the ways that slavery shaped America economically, socially, and culturally, U.S. historians asserted that slavery was an antiquated system that hindered the progress of the country’s path toward industrialization and modernization.93 Additionally, these historians framed the legal and extra- legal assault on black bodies known respectively as Jim Crow and the Lynching Era as necessary acts of maintaining white supremacy, which for them was a common good.94 In the 1960s and

1970s, academic historians’ move to integrate lack perspectives into the paradigmatic notion of

‘great white man’ history, while somewhat ironic, was absolutely understandable.

And yet, today, college students around the country still read Greek, French, British, and

German philosophy and literature in their core humanities courses. They still learn the history of

Native American genocide and slavery from the perspective of the violent perpetrators. Even within African American literary studies, which Gates claims became the “glamour” field within black studies, black and white academics in the late 1990s began arguing for the allowance of

91 Teasley and Tyson, “Culture Wars,” 392. 92 Gates, Loose Canons, 93. 93 Edward E. Baptist, The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic, 2014), xvi. 94 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, xvi

white scholars, particularly white women, into the field.95 And while I do not wish to make the argument that white scholars cannot teach African American literature, or any class surrounding the work and bodies of racially and ethnically marginalized groups, we ought not forget that black professors make up a paltry sum of tenure track faculty. Of those very few black scholars who get tenure track positions, 96 percent of them work at Historically Black Colleges and

Universities (HBCUs).96 If black people cannot gain entrance into the academy, what hope does the study of non-white people have in a field of inquiry such as fan studies scholarship which, seemingly, has always been universally white? This question, while rhetorical, has an answer that completely alters the framework of the interrogative: fan studies scholarship has its roots in an academic tradition which understood the significance of race from its very inception: The

Birmingham Centre of Cultural Studies.

The Birmingham Centre of Cultural Studies developed out of a larger academic zeitgeist called “cultural Marxism” in post-World War II Britain. Cultural Marxism, which conservative critics often use interchangeably with political correctness, expands upon traditional Marxist theory that presupposes a universality in the relationship between the working class and the state.97 Rather than purely focus on the disparity in economic power dynamics, these thinkers saw culture itself as a site for contestation between the state and an expanded conceptualization

95 Lisa A. Long, White Scholars/African American Texts, (New Brunswick; London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 1. 96 Valerie Strauss, “It’s 2015. Where are all the black college faculty?” The Washington Post. November 12, 2015, accessed January 15, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/12/its-2015- where-are-all-the-black-college-faculty/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.5199cb378431. 97 Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism and Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Dunham; London: Duke University Press, 1997), 3.

of the proletariat. Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, and many others developed an avowed interdisciplinary set of methodologies in order to examine the intersecting avenues of cultural production, consumer agency, and mediated ideology.98 Fan studies scholarship borrowed much of its methodological approaches from cultural Marxists. But perhaps more importantly, the early cultural theorists created a space for a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing texts that were previously considered non-academic. Their rigorous engagement with popular culture and those who consume it gave future fan studies scholars license to study who and what they wanted. And yet, it is important to note that fan studies scholarship does not really get going for several decades after the development of cultural

Marxism in Britain. I believe there are two reasons for that. The first is that it was not until the culture wars, which expanded the terrains of the academy, that it would have been possible for fan studies scholars in America to really find a foothold. And the second is because it was not until the development of media fandom that fan studies scholarship developed a structure and found a point of entry.

In particular, the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, led by Stuart Hall, was significant in considering race as a fundamental unit of grammar within the individuation of systemic oppressions. For Hall and his disciples, mediated objects did not exist separately from these systems but they were an active force in perpetuating the marginalization of specific groups. However, Hall was nowhere near as negative in his analysis as someone such as

98 Dworkin, Cultural Marxism, 2.

Theodore Adorno, who suggested that the culture industries brainwashed the public through insemination of negative ideologies.

In his, most influential article, “Encoding/Decoding,” Hall argues that media consumers have the capacity to intentionally “misread” a text in ways that configure to their own existing ideological perspective. However, this process of decoding is not absolute. Depending on their subject positions—namely, race, gender, or class—media consumers can only decode a text to a certain degree. “Encoding/Decoding” has become one of the formative texts within fan studies scholarship, except for that last part. This is because John Fiske, in Understanding Popular

Culture, his monograph that led to his article on fandom, expanded upon Hall’s view of encoding/decoding when he states: “Popular culture is made up by the people, not produced by the culture industry. All culture industries can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture.”99 Here Fiske is obviously taking a shot at Adorno, but more importantly pushes against the boundaries Hall set for what media consumers (fans) can do with a text.100 And yet, considering Fiske’s own inability to “find work on non-white fans,” his theories call into question just how little influence the dominant ideologies within a culture, as manifested within the mediated texts created by culture industries, has on its consumers. If John

Fiske, in his day one of the most prominent media scholars in the world, could not find work on non-white fans, then what hope would his successors have?

99 John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 24. 100 David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, Second Edition (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 27.

Let me be clear: even using Fiske’s somewhat narrow definition of fandom, there have been fandoms created by non-white fans and academic scholarship on non-white fans decades before John Fiske helped build the foundation for fan studies scholarship. For instance, Donald

Bogle’s seminal monograph on the representation of black people in film, Toms, Coons,

Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films is perhaps the most widely cited and influential fan scholarly text ever written. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes,

Mammies & Bucks was originally published in 1973 and is currently in its fifth edition. By the time Fiske published Understanding Popular Culture, Bogle’s book had been in publication for sixteen years, and was on its second printing. Throughout the text, Bogle cements himself as an early aca-fan through an evaluation of black actors who he thought brought a particular level of inspiration toward otherwise racially denigrating filmic characters. And while Bogle’s book is most notable for its taxonomy of racist caricatures that have permeated black filmic representations since quite literally the creation of the medium, what seems most interesting for this discussion is how Bogle characterizes himself in relationship to these representations. In the introduction of the book, Bogle describes the intense pleasure he felt as a child when watching the films of Stepin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, and Bojangles.101 He goes on to state how he prefers these often maligned figures to more favored stars such as Ozzie Davis and Sidney

Poitier.102 Unfortunately for him, he could find very little information on the stars that he loved:

“Eventually in the age of great conformity, I learned to keep my mouth shut about any black

101 Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, Fourth Edition, (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001), xx. 102 Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks, xx.

actor I really did not care about.”103 Bogle goes on to state that he wrote the first edition of Toms,

Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks not just to make it up to any young black children who feel like he felt, but as a way to reclaim the identity of the actors and actresses who gave stellar performances and brought life and meaning to characters that were only meant to reassure white audiences of their own superiority.104 Bogle does not specifically analyze other fans, but there is almost no way to understand Bogle’s text as anything other than a scholarly fan text. John Fiske paid no attention to this book, or others like it. Even if Bogle was more interested in his own fandom rather than a group of fans of stereotypical black characters, Jacqueline Bobo’s work, which also predates contemporary fan studies scholarship, was doing very similar work as early fan scholars.

In Bobo’s “Black Women’s Responses to The Color Purple,” she investigates the rationale of working-class black women who were able to identify with The Color Purple

(Spielberg, 1985), a film famous for its racist and sexist stereotypes against black women.105

Bobo articulated her interests in black women’s responses to the film and the methodologies she employed to analyze those responses:

From my research on the range of potential responses that can be given a work— dominant, negotiated and/or oppositional—I added the concept of cultural competency (that specific viewers interpret a cultural product according to the specific cultural backgrounds). I was able to incorporate these theories into a model which explained how Black women constructed their own meanings from the film The Color Purple. That

103 Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks, xx. 104 Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks, xxi. 105 Jacqueline Bobo, “Black Women’s Responses to The Color Purple,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 33, Feb. 1988.

Black women formed a favorable attachment was significant. More important to me was how they were able to use the film to empower themselves in other areas of their lives. I used the theory of articulation, as explained by Stuart Hall (1980c, 1986) to show how members of an oppressed group not only resisted the dominant ideology encoded within the film, but were able to put their reconstructed meanings to use productively.106 Bobo’s methodological combination of interviews and critical theory illustrates how the encounter between a piece of media and its spectators can lead to profound results when filtered through an oppositional framework. Bobo’s results are what fan studies scholars have been trying to argue about fans since 1992.

And yet, from the very beginning, fan studies scholarship of so-called media fandoms was negligent in its examination of non-white fandoms through an active refusal to see their existence. And while it is impossible to suggest exactly what caused Fiske’s racial blind spot, it no doubt had serious impact on the development of fan studies scholarship. Still, fan studies scholarship’s erasure of non-white perspectives should not solely be blamed on John Fiske. At the same time that Fiske was creating the theoretical groundwork for the field and inspiring

Henry Jenkins to go down a similarly contentious route, there were luminaries studying fans who also largely ignored race, but from a different perspective.

Infinite Diversity is Infinitely Consumable

Unlike Jenkins and Fiske, who are media scholars, Camille Bacon-Smith is a trained sociologist. Her Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth explores the history of how science fiction fandoms, created by male writers trying to find a

106 Jacqueline Bobo, “Jacqueline Bobo,” Camera Obscura, vol. 7 no. 2-3 20-21, May/September (1989): 100-101.

structure accessible enough so that publishers would purchase their work, eventually evolved into media fandom in the 1960s.107 Bacon-Smith suggests that participants in media fandoms, through the use of various forms of fandom activities such as fan fiction, songs, drama, and so forth, create their own specific identity through their engagement with, and creation of, fanonical texts. According to Bacon-Smith, while men were the primary creators and readers of science fiction fanonical texts, with the shift towards media fandom, it was women who created the communities, rules, and content for media fandoms, beginning with Star Trek and Blake’s 7.

Bacon-Smith posits that the reason women were particularly invested in creating fandom texts was because they were overtly rebelling against both a patriarchal society intent on silencing women’s work and voices as well as a media institutional system that kept tight reins on their intellectual property. Bacon-Smith argues that for the women who participate in acts of fandom it is sex that is the principle language that linguistically forms that foundation for their fan identity.108 This is particularly true in the more “risky” fanonical activities and identities, such as slash fiction or K/S (Kirk/Spock) fiction. And while there is certainly more to explore in

Bacon-Smith’s book as it relates to how sex, or other libidinal energies, functions as a means to ground the self-imposed identity of the fan, accounts such as hers, Constance Penley’s

Nasa/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America, and Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers ignore the messier relationships that bodily desires can sometimes create, particularly when those bodies are being “borrowed” from marginalized groups. Bacon-Smith’s argument also

107 Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 108 Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women, 6.

singularizes fan activity by women to those of presumably similar racial, class, or bodily positionality and construction. This is not to suggest that Smith is incorrect in her claim that women fans construct their identity as a means of resistance; however, in my view, these positions and resistances must be understood within a broader social context and how fandoms can, and do, reflect other modes of hierarchical oppression. For instance, I suggest that while

Kirk/Spock fanfiction, or any male/male slash fiction, does de-center the male gaze, it also re- instills a fetishization of queer sexual practices and relationships, while also reifying the sexual power of white men. Occupying the sexual positions of queer/gay men in order to create instances of your own sexual agency might be liberating for you, but it runs the risk of fetishizing the identities of those whose bodies become the focal point for your written fantasies.

Bacon-Smith’s argument makes a space for the significance of the positionality of the text- creator, but only to a point. Women, one imagines white women, can use sex that subverts the heteronormative hierarchy, but what about black women, or Latina women, or trans-women?

These positions, and their specific intersectional positions, are left disregarded except for a brief mention in Appendix B at the end of the book where one (white) fan gushes over the fact that so many non-white people are in attendance at a Star Trek convention in Baltimore. Smith interviewed a white woman at the 1984 ClipperCon Convention in Baltimore, MD, who was concerned with the lack of diversity within the Star Trek fandom. According to the woman, the demographics within the Star Trek fandom should reflect the social ideals embedded within the show. These “ideals” were commonly called IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations).

And while the woman was generally unhappy with the diversity within the fandom, she was

pleased with the diversity at that particular convention: “about 30 percent.”109 Indulge me as I do some quick number crunching here. According to FanLore, one of the preeminent sites that document fan history, the largest number of people to ever attend ClipperCon was 900 people.110

Even if the convention in question was not the highest attended, and we cut that number by one- third to six hundred, thirty percent of non-white people would be roughly 200 non-white fans in attendance. For comparison’s sake, in 1990 (the closest census year), Baltimore City’s population was over 60% non-white, and 59% black.111 Also, one of the guests of honor for

ClipperCon that year was Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura, the only black regular character on the original Star Trek television series. In other words, the fact that a conference in a primarily black city, whose guest of honor was a black icon, was only able to get around 200 non-white fans illustrates how white fan spaces can be.

For her part, Bacon-Smith is, seemingly, not overly interested in the racial demographics of conferences or those who participate in the Star Trek fandom. She does not, after all, publish any interviews with those few non-white people in attendance. She did not ask them what it was like to be a person of color in a mostly white space; she did not inquire if being a person of color and a Star Trek fan in any way contradict each other due to Star Trek’s less than stellar reputation for depicting people of color. The significance of Bacon-Smith’s blind spot towards race mirrors that of Star Trek the series, the Star Trek fandom, and fan studies writ large. In my

109 Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women, 321. 110 Fanlore, “Clippercon,” accessed January 15, 2017, https://fanlore.org/wiki/ClipperCon.. 111 United States Census Bureau, “Comparison between Census 2010, Census 2000, and Census 1990 Profiles,” Department of Planning: Maryland State Data Center accessed January 15, 2017, http://planning.maryland.gov/msdc/census/cen2010/sf1/sumyprof/comparison/baci.pdf.

view, the original Star Trek series is little more than a post-racial fantasy of the highest order where racial and ethnic difference are only highlighted in order to turn characters in caricatures.

The Japanese man was a Samurai. The Irish man was a drunk. The black woman was the switchboard operator in a short skirt. And the non-, or less ethnicized white men were in command. Captain Kirk was the cowboy in space who met uncivilized aliens and busty other- worldly indigenous women with punches and kisses in equal measure. Even Commander Spock, in his near Victorian approach to the sanctity of logic and reason, exemplifies a past, if preferred, performance of white masculinity. Indeed, IDIC could have stood for Infinite Diversity is

Infinitely Consumable. Star Trek fed viewers diversity in name only. In the aptly titled, Star Trek and History: Race-ing toward a White Future, Daniel Bernardi states, “despite Star Trek’s well established history of including a wide swath of characters and actors from different cultures, the original show depicts an “Earth where there is no poverty, no crime, and… no racial discrimination.”112 He later argues that Star Trek does break new ground because “Hollywood consistently constructs whiteness as the norm in comparison to which all ‘Others’ necessarily fail. In what amounts to a paradox of assimilation, white film and television tries to be expansive and incorporate Others… but ends up ultimately pushing those Others aside because of presumed innate difference.”113 This is not to suggest that Star Trek and its fandom reify Theodore

Adorno’s idea of a top-down binary formation of media objects and its consumers. Star Trek did not manipulate its mostly white fandom; it gave them exactly the kind of diversity that they

112 Daniel Bernardi, Star Trek and History: Race-ing toward a White Future (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999), 2. 113 Bernardi, Star Trek and History, 21.

desired: black and less-white faces all proudly and willingly serving under the banner of white supremacy as signified by the leadership of the Starship Enterprise.

And while many within the Star Trek fandom, even in the 1960s, were fully aware of the show’s somewhat toxic masculine depiction—exemplified in the creation of Kirk/Spock slash fan fiction—it did nothing to actively counter the inherent white supremacy within their beloved text. In fact, Star Trek fandom has woven its own ideology matrix: the myth of post-racial multiculturalism. As Matt Hills states when explicating the internalized rationality of fan behavior: “If Dr. Who fandom relies on the justification of a ‘cult phrase’ stressing the format’s flexibility, then an equivalent defence of Star Trek fans would concern the progressive politics and multiculturalism of the original crew.”114 Hence, while the aforementioned fan was so happy to find the blink-and-you-miss-it diversity at the Star Trek convention, she in many respects epitomizes the kind of self-reflexive diversity—inclusion that only exists to make the people doing the including feel better— that many fandoms seem comfortable with, and that fan studies scholars have taken on in their own work.

Over the last several decades, diversity and multiculturalism often entail the studying of all bodies from white perspectives. As Jared Sexton argues: “I suggest that multiracialism arbitrates neoconservative racial politics as an indispensable libidinal accompaniment to an advancing neoliberalism that is itself oscillating between official (liberal) multiculturalism and the (conservative) posture of colorblindness.”115 In this quote, and throughout his book, Sexton

114 Hills, Fan Cultures, 39. 115 Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis; London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2008), Kindle Edition.

critiques multiracialism—the desire for a society that privileges diversity—because, as he puts it,

“the principal political effects of multiracialism are neither a fundamental challenge to the living legacies of white supremacy nor a defiance of sexual racism in particular but rather the reinforcement of longstanding tenets of antiblackness and the promotion of normative sexuality.”116 Diversity, both within fan and academic spaces (and thus, subsequently, aca-fan spaces) is a faux-gestalt; a closed system operating under the guise of an open one. And while in literary studies this meant a wave of white scholars focusing their attention on black cultural objects, fan studies scholarship has not even moved that far.

The Fan Pushback against Diversity

As I have shown, this is because fan studies scholarship has already found their marginalized group to study: the fans themselves. At the same time that black and Chicano and

Chicana scholars were protesting for their right to exist on university campuses, fan studies scholars were mostly invested in the consumption habits of middle-class white women.

Regardless of how significant those early investigations were—and their importance should not be discredited—we are now more than twenty years removed from the rise of fan studies scholarship that fought back against the notion that the fan was a pathological figure. And yet, many fan studies scholars are still fighting a battle they won a long time ago. If the earliest fan studies scholarship was mostly interested in how white women who actively engage with and remediate television shows differ from the white men who history has wrongly suggested created science fiction fandom, then someone was asleep at the wheel when those white men borrowed

116 Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, Kindle Edition.

the methodologies, rhetoric, and practices of those women and reintroduced themselves into conversations surrounding media fandoms. Naturally, those men also began to think of themselves as an oppressed group too. So oppressed are these men that in 2015, when the first trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015) debuted online and it was revealed that one of the heroes of the film would be a black man, some Star Wars fans started an online campaign to #BoycottStarWarsVii!

The #BoycottStarWarsVii movement emerged on October 15, 2015, after the trailer for the then upcoming Star Wars film revealed that the film contained a black stormtrooper, Finn, played by John Bodega, in one of the lead roles. This led individuals to post their textual and imagistic (in the way of memes—which has become the primary unit of grammar for fandom utterances) thoughts on social media platforms such as Tumblr and Twitter through the hashtag

#BoycottStarWarsVii. The primary concern for those individuals was that Star Wars was engaging in a form of “white genocide” through positioning a black man and a white woman in roles that would in the past have gone to white men. As is always the case when overt racism rears its head on social media, the backlash was much larger than the response. According to a

Mashable article, 94% of the people who hashtagged #BoycottStarWarsVii were people decrying the obvious racism of those who would post such a thing in the first place.117 In fact, that same

Mashable article reveals that the entire “movement” was a hoax started by trolls from the infamous forums Redditt and 4Chan.118 Their goal, seemingly, was to get SJWs (Social Justice

117 Josh Dickey, “Don’t give in to your anger. That #BoycottStarWarsVII hashtag was the work of trolls,” Mashable, October 20, 2015, accessed January 15, 2017, http://mashable.com/2015/10/20/boycott-star-wars- hashtag-trolling/#jLPQ25AgLGqJ. 118 Dickey, “Don’t give in to your anger.”

Warriors) in an uproar because, well, there is no because. As fandom has moved into, and largely influenced, digital cultural spaces, who or what counts as a ‘fan’ has become increasingly inscrutable. Similarly, when someone on the Internet starts a racist hashtag in order to get people upset, does that not still make them racist? Dismissing the creators of the #BoycottStarWarsVii hashtag as trolls seems to imply that these people are neither racist, nor sincere in their motivation. This seems like, at best, a leap of faith. Regardless, my interest with the

#BoycottStarWarsVii movement is not whether or not it was created by trolls; it seems plausible enough even if there is not a lot of hard evidence either way. Instead, I am interested in the after effects of the hashtag’s popularity, and how it correlates with actual conversations had around the casting of people of color and white women.

While the #BoycottStarWarsVii hashtag may have been created to troll people online (it worked so well that articles were written about the hashtag on major news outlets such as CNN,

The Hollywood Reporter, and Variety), it also succeeded in trolling overtly racist fans to begin seriously questioning whether or not Star Wars was anti-white. Infamous Internet troll, or conservative anti-hero (take your pick), Chuck Johnson, in an article entitled “Analysis: Why

#BoycottStarWarsVii Movement Trends on Twitter & They’re Right” argues that Star Wars: The

Force Awakens goes against its American white male roots by casting British people, women, and people of color as heroes.119 #BoycottStarWarsVii and Johnson’s article exemplify the anger

119 Chuck Johnson, “Analysis: #BoycottStarWarsVii Movement Trends on Twitter & They’re Right,” Gotnews, October 20, 2015, accessed January 14, 2015 http://gotnews.com/analysis-why-boycottstarwarsvii- movement-trends-on-twitter-theyre-right/.

of white men throughout “democratized” and anonymous digital spaces. This movement illustrates the problems of the unchecked white supremacy endemic within fandom spaces.

While there are numerous racist memes depicting the Finn character spread throughout social media sites and forums, the one mentioned above highlights the impact that fan studies scholarship’s erasure and denial of non-white fandoms has had on contemporary digital fan cultures. Many fans who would never openly claim overtly racist positions, and certainly not boycott a film because it had a black man in the lead, feel that casting non-white actors in once white-casted roles is only for the sake of political correctness or tokenism.

Attached to the concept of #BoycottStarWarsVii was the notion that Star Wars: The

Force Awakens, of all films, supports “white genocide” and anti-whiteness. These fans state that changing the race of the character somehow damages the purity of the original text. Thus, it is as if for the fan that any character originally represented as white must remain white, even if their racial background has little to do with their overall characterization. Within this concept of the purity of fidelity the backlash against political correctness and cultural Marxism gets smuggled in. For fans such as Chuck Johnson and his followers, popular culture is white culture. Fandom functions as an off-shoot of popular culture, where fans can critique and remediate textual objects in order to include ideas and concepts which are either not included or deemed inappropriate within mainstream textual practices. In fact, fandom is itself the domain of and for normative white evaluations of their own cultural products. Thus, seemingly for these fans, the introduction of non-white characters (either through general casting or racebending) divorces the object from its intended, original, and preferred context. Fandom continues to operate under a similar rubric as the American university system prior to Brown vs. Board of Education.

Separate but equal fandoms are not just the rule of law, but an a priori truth. And yet, that truth has been and continues to be unidirectional.

But these are just trolls, right? Certainly, we can label Johnson a troll, along with those who started the hashtag, but what about the tweets he cites? Or the people who posted the 138 comments on the article that largely agree with him?120 Are they all trolls? What of the somewhat popular meme that circulated for months after the movie had already been released which compares the character Finn to the white comic book character who inspired the filmic representation? Underneath the picture there is a caption that reads: “Anti-white Jewish Director

JJ Abrams Changed Finn Galfridian into a black man because he said he was fucking sick of white people #BoycottStarWarsVii.” Even if the original creator of the meme was a troll, are all the people who retweeted, shared, liked, and favorited the meme across social media platforms trolls? What is commonly considered trolling may, by another name, be considered the incitation of the wrath of white fans embracing their racist privilege. Fan studies scholars obviously did not intend this kind of response, but through the avid celebration of all things fan-related, fan studies scholarship did nothing to thwart the toxic white male masculinity from creeping into fandom cultures. To be fair, there may have been very little that fan studies scholars could do to stop this, but the fact that so little has been done to research the issue places some of the onus squarely on the nascent field.

Black Fan/White Mask

120 Somewhat horrifyingly, according to multiple news reports following the election of Donald Trump, Johnson was hired to work on the then President-Elect’s transition team to vet potential picks for Trump’s cabinet. Brendan Gauthier, “Alt-right troll Chuck C. Johnson is “working behind the scenes” to vet Donald Trump’s cabinet picks: report,” Salon, January 10, 2017, accessed January 21, 2017, http://www.salon.com/2017/01/10/alt-right-troll- chuck-c-johnson-is-working-behind-the-scenes-to-vet-donald-trumps-cabinet-picks-report/.

In a cultural moment when media corporations organize their yearly catalogs in order to appeal to the ever-growing base of individuals who qualify as fans, properties that have previously inspired the passionate engagement with a text that fandom requires have become increasingly valuable. Of the top ten highest grossing films in North America, eight of them belong to what we would now consider cross-platform media universes. The bulk of these universes are remediated from older science fiction texts, such as Star Wars, or filmic adaptations of comic book franchises, like The Avengers (Whedon, 2012). In all cases, the heroes of these stories are predominantly white men, which only adds to the historic erasure of black and brown bodies within popular mediated texts. The overwhelming whiteness of fan-friendly texts feeds some white fans’ view that any non-white bodies presented in lead roles of a show or film they might care about equates to an attack on whiteness. This erasure is more than just experiential; it has been systematized into the industrial and creative legacies of Hollywood produced filmic and televisual objects. People of color are underrepresented in every possible categorical designation within Hollywood-produced films. Writers, directors, agency representation, studio leadership, and producers are all disproportionately white and male. Most importantly, according to the UCLA commissioned “2016 Hollywood Diversity Report,” minorities were underrepresented in lead roles; minorities were cast as leads in just 12.9% of feature films, 8.1% of scripted broadcast television shows, and 16.6% of scripted cable shows, despite being 37.9% of the overall American population.121 And yet, minority populations disproportionately consume Hollywood produced media, especially for those films that were

121 Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, “2016 Hollywood Diversity Report,” 11-14.

made from existing “fannish” franchises. According to Mel Stanfill, “fans are culturally understood to be white people, especially men.”122 This perception has not just infected the fans who see their activity as a place of safety for the purity of white supremacist views, but it has also had major implications for the media objects which are overwhelmingly produced by and for white audiences. And yet, the actual audiences who consume “fannish” texts differ from this perception. In 2014, some of the highest grossing films had over 50%, or close to, minority audiences: Transformers: Age of Extinction (Bay 2014) (59%), X-Men: Days of Future Past

(Singer 2014) (51%), Captain America: Winter Soldier (Anthony Russo and Jay Russo 2014)

(47%), and The Amazing Spiderman 2 (Webb 2014) (59%).123 These numbers go against the common-sense notion that blockbuster Hollywood films must have white stars in order for studios to see a return on their investment. Instead, they suggest that these types of films would be more successful if they had greater diversity.

When the creators of the newer variants of these texts make new versions that focus on women or people of color, some within these fandoms reject the imposition of diversity. The problem with this idea relies on a concept of popular visual image that has never quite existed.

This act, called “racebending,” is more commonly seen under one of its categorical sub-headers, whitewashing. For over a century, Hollywood films and television shows have used white actors to play real life and fictional characters that were originally people of color. For instance, the practice itself has been prevalent within Hollywood films since the very first Hollywood blockbuster, Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1914), and has only persisted in the century since

122 Stanfill, “Doing Fandom,” 1.1. 123 Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, “Hollywood Diversity,” 51.

Griffith’s film was released. There are distinctions in how this practice gets utilized within the mise-en-scène of a film. Some films “racialize” white actors so that they appear closer to the racial or ethnic category of the character they are playing, as is the case with Birth of a Nation where white actors dressed in “blackface” in order to depict black characters. Other films simply cast a white actor in a role that was originally written for a person of color, but without making any mention of that character’s original racial and ethnic origins. However, in part because fan studies scholarship has been negligent in its analysis of the racist cultures existent within fandoms and the mediated texts that are fandomized, the history of this practice and its ramifications for fans who are ignorant or hostile toward the discussion of systemic racism have largely gone unremarked, up until very recently. Even today, where it is perfectly common to see these issues discussed in the comments sections of notable fan-friendly websites such as io9.com and aintitcool.com, the logic of many fans in regards to racebending rests on the notion that if it is fair for an actor of color to be cast as a white character then it ought to be fair for a white actor to be cast as a character of color. This attachment to equality belies the reality that what is equal is not always fair. As the numbers above suggest, people of color continue to be marginalized within popular visual media texts. Casting an actor of color in a traditionally white role creates opportunities for inclusion within texts that often embrace white supremacy through the erasure of black and brown bodies. Casting a white actor to play what was originally written as a person of color replicates the disproportionate marginalization that has always existed. This issue mimics the ideologies found within other areas of the society that systemic racism has touched— which is to say all of them. For instance, those who argue against colleges and universities using race as a determining factor in admissions employ a similar logic as fans who take issue with

inclusive racebending. Indeed, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, has famously stated: “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”124 Roberts’ argument, which he seems to share with many fans and aca-fans, suggests that if we treat race as a non-existent entity, as a fiction, then the system will invariably return to its race-neutral, meritorious ontology.

Within the scope of Hollywood-produced mediated objects, this ontology, which frankly has never and likely will never exist, has been challenged within the digital terrain by movements such as #OscarsSoWhite. In January 2015, the creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, April Reign, tweeted: “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair,” after only white people were nominated in the acting categories for the 2014 Academy Awards.125 In 2015 the hashtag gained a modicum of attention, but it would take another year of people of color not being nominated until it really immersed itself within the public consciousness. In response to the movement, the first black president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,

Cheryl Boone Isaacs, announced a dramatic reconfiguration that would increase the diversity of the Academy’s voting bloc. Presumably, this change would allow for films made for and by people of color to enter into the gates of prestige that the Oscars signify.126 But white supremacy does what it does. After the 2016 Oscars’ host, Chris Rock, spent four laborious hours

124 Garrett Epps, “On Race and Voter ID, John Roberts Wants it Both Ways,” The Atlantic, October 24, 2014, accessed January 15, 2017, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/on-race-and-voter-id-john- roberts-wants-it-both-ways/381868/. 125 April Reign, Twitter Post, Jan 15, 2015, 7:56 AM, https://twitter.com/ReignOfApril/status/555725291512168448 126 Scott Feinberg, “After #OscarsSoWhite, the Academy Struggles with Diversity, Age, Relevance,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 27, 2016, accessed January 21, 2017 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/oscarssowhite-academy-struggles-diversity-age-885633.

repudiating the awards show and Hollywood itself for intensive racism, the existing members of the Academy struck back against Boon Isaacs’ call for diversity. Amongst other things, the

Academy voters were upset at being labeled racist and accused Boone Isaacs and the Academy leadership of ageism in a successful effort to dismantle the proposed changes that would diversify their ranks before they even got started. Michelle Alexander’s endlessly necessary, The

New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, thoroughly details white supremacist institutions’ alacrity and agility at reframing themselves as the victim whenever attacked. As such, Reign’s work should not be considered a failure because white supremacy wins again. Instead, we can examine #OscarsSoWhite as an example of a way to reconsider the possibilities and delimitations of fandom. Reign may not actively consider herself a member of any sort of fandom, least not Hollywood cinema, but she no doubt engages in the sort of work that fan scholars argue fandoms ought to be undertaking. Reign and those individuals who picked up the shield and fought by her side, through active discussion and engagement with texts, attempted to fight the culture industry’s systemic erasure of non-white people. But although her work clearly belongs in discussions of how fandom can alter larger industrial conversations, it currently is not, in part because she does not actively engage with fan studies scholarship. Instead, one can only wonder if some minuscule portion of Reign’s success can be attributed to the fact that she did not build upon the insular discourse so often found within fan studies scholarship and fandoms. She is not alone. Many writers of color who do consider themselves fans do not prescribe methodologically or rhetorically to fan studies scholarship.

Blog sites such as Black Girl Nerds, Black Nerd Problems, Fandoms Hate People of Color, Just

Add Color, Nerds of Color, and many others, create spaces for the discussion of fan objects

through various critical lenses, but not fan studies scholarship. In fact, when the television show

Sleepy Hollow killed off its black female lead, Abbie Mills, played by Nicole Beharie, it was a writer for Black Girl Nerds and Just Add Color, Monique Jones, who used black feminist theoretical discourse to lead the charge against what many within the Sleepy Hollow fandom felt was the unfair treatment and ultimate destruction of the character.

Adapted almost incidentally from the famous Washington Irving short story, “The

Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Sleepy Hollow premiered in January of 2013. The show centers on its two leads: Lieutenant Abbie Mills, a police officer training to be an FBI agent, and Ichabod

Crane, a former soldier during the Revolutionary War who is resurrected to help prevent the biblical apocalypse from taking place. Along the way, Abbie and Ichabod discover that they are the prophesized “witnesses” who are destined to save the world from evil. Despite it being a dramatic departure in terms of genre, Sleepy Hollow followed the trail set eight months earlier by

Scandal in that it starred a black woman who dedicated her life to the service of others, but not in servitude. Furthermore, Scandal and Sleepy Hollow both feature black women who critics and fans praised for not falling prey to the “strong black woman” trope that has been used to dehumanize black women for decades. Both Abbie Mills and Olivia Pope were, at least in the beginning, depicted as equally capable as they are vulnerable. Prior to Scandal, which premiered in April of 2012, no black woman had starred in a primetime broadcast television show since the

1970s. Beyond their leads, each show boasts a level of diversity uncommon in any era of television. The diversity within these television shows helped both separate themselves from and inculcate themselves into the contemporary critical conceptualization of the televisual moment: what is now often called peak TV.

Briefly, peak TV describes the genius of television during the second decade of the twenty-first century, and the horror of how hyperbolic the praise towards television has gotten.

Although there are other tertiary elements associated with the era, if there is a singular characteristic amongst the shows considered canonical within the peak TV movement, other than being binge-worthy, it would be white men behaving badly. Shows like Breaking Bad, The

Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, etc. each embody this formulation perfectly. What these shows have in common are not just white male leads, but also that they normalize the frailties and strength of white masculinity without being self-aware or honest enough to admit it. Even a show like The Wire, which investigates the overlapping not-quite dualities of drug dealers and police officers in majority black Baltimore, was mostly interested in the moral turpitude of its white male lead. Through its sheer popularity and gumption, Scandal managed to crack open a space for black women to enter into the white male dominated landscape of peak TV. Scandal and Sleepy Hollow, on the surface, distinguish themselves from other peak TV shows which, according to noted television critic, Emily Nussbaum, are “suggestively diverse” in that their commitment to diversity feels more paradigmatic than superficial. Or, in the case of Sleepy

Hollow, felt more paradigmatic.127

Where Sleepy Hollow differs from Scandal, which has its own robust fandom, is that it placed a black woman lead in the realm of the speculative. Abbie was not the first black woman character to have a prominent role within a science fiction and fantasy show, but she remains one of the few. Prior to her, there was Lieutenant Uhura in Star Trek and Martha Jones from Dr.

127 Emily Nussbaum, Twitter Post, August 9, 2015 1:42 PM, https://twitter.com/emilynussbaum/status/630479344138260480

Who. In the case of the latter, Jones was immediately loathed within the Dr. Who fandom, as indicated by the Tumblr tag “I-Hate-Martha-Jones,” which still maintains popularity even though she has been gone from the show for years. Abbie’s centrality toward the narrative of Sleepy

Hollow seemingly distinguished her from her contemporaries. At the show’s onset, she was not merely a passenger on Ichabod Crane’s journey, she was every bit the intellectual and narrative force that he was. As is a common occurrence in any contemporary media product, fans of the show quickly began to “ship” Abbie and Ichabod together. To ship is when fans fantasize, discuss, and create texts about a potential romantic relationship between, typically, two characters. Also unlike Scandal, which embraced its own interracial coupling, Sleepy Hollow trafficked on the tried and true “will they/won’t they” format which seemingly tired out fans during the show’s second season as the ratings dropped 40% from the first season to the second season.128 The lack of clarity in the relationship status of its two lead characters had even more of an impact than would normally be true because according to many within the fandom Ichabod took a central role in the progression of the story, leaving Abbie relegated to second-class status.129 Moreover, to ship a black woman with a white man in a media landscape that still privileges white masculinity over oxygen runs the risk of attaching that black woman character’s value to the sexual primacy imbued onto her by the gazes held by the white man on the screen and the white men inevitably running the show behind the scenes.

128 TV Series Finale, “Sleepy Hollow: Season 2 Ratings,” TV Series Finale: Cancelled & Renewed TV Shows, March 18, 2015, accessed March 29, 2017, http://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/sleepy-hollow-season-two- ratings-33996/. 129 Jones, “Sleepy Hollow.”

Even for the black women fans who shipped Ichabod and Abbie, the values and opinions of white men become central to their appreciation of the character and, because of the function of fandom, themselves. Just about all fandoms, regardless of the type, operate under a kind of deferred libidinal agency. Representations matter because fans insert themselves into the mediated bodies of characters, athletes, politicians, and celebrities. When people of color do not see themselves represented, they are forced to occupy a body dislocated from their own cultural experience, which has historically led to people of color identifying with their oppressors, and denigrating their own ethnic and racial backgrounds. Shipping governs so many fandom communities because it does not just allow for fans to enter into the bodies of those who they have imprinted on, but also because shipping permits the opportunity for emotional and physical fulfillment. When a portion of a fandom self-segregates through the selection of a particular ship, whether canonized or non-canonized, they in effect become a sub-fandom that has its own set of values, practices, readings, and ideological methodologies that may or may not adhere to the larger fandom, or to the original text. Naturally, shipping within this sub-fandom does not remove the political status of the fandomized body. In fact, it heightens any disparity in access to autonomy. As such, when black women ship black women characters with white men, there exists the potential for the politically marginalized body of the black woman to be colonized by the white male character. With Abbie and Ichabod, her value for the fans became intertwined with their potential relationship. As Ichabod’s journey grew in stature within the show, Abbie’s shrunk, furthering the problematic depiction as her agency tied directly into his narrative arc. To illustrate this: in the third season finale, after her death Abbie tells Ichabod that it was destiny to

“carry him forward.” As I have already discussed, it is possible for fans to use what bell hooks

would call “oppositional reading” to renegotiate the ideological terms of a text in order replace the dehumanizing canonical utterance with one that centers the fan’s understanding of her own identity. However, as Hall points out, that is only possible given certain parameters. Sleepy

Hollow negated any other possible reading of Abbie and Ichabod’s relationship that did not privilege his white male identity over her black woman identity.

The Twitter hashtag movement, #AbbieMillsDeservesBetter actually began about a year and a half before the death of the character. It started as both an indictment of the treatment of

Abbie Mills and as a larger fan referendum on the gradual erasure of characters of color on

Sleepy Hollow. In its first season, Sleepy Hollow boasted four characters of color in their main cast. By the end of the third season, that number had effectively been reduced to one but, more than that, fans accused the show of sidelining the characters of color, in particular Abbie Mills, in order to highlight the two main white characters: Ichabod and his time-traveling wife, Katrina.

Much of the show’s second season surrounded the efforts of Ichabod and Katrina to redeem their son, Henry, who had fallen in league with the devil. The show’s focus on what the Sleepy Hollow fandom, at least those active on Twitter, called the #CraneWrecks, displaced Abbie as a central character on the show. As the hashtag began to take on the specific plight of the visual rendering of Abbie Mills, another hashtag, #KatrinaRuinedSleepyHollow, developed that illustrated a prevalent issue in this discussion: the sexual validation of the white male lead. Seemingly, the tension that arose within the fandom was not just about the lack of narrative time dedicated to

Abbie, but also for the time that Ichabod dedicated to Katrina. Many fan blog posts argued that writers of Sleepy Hollow betrayed its Ichabbie shippers through their refusal to fully consummate the relationship. According to a Rose Maura Lorre, a fan recapper for Vulture, the show ruined

Abbie and Ichabod’s “insanely delicious chemistry” through its “careless disregard for its

Ichabbie ‘shippers.”130 In the case of the Sleepy Hollow fandom, the introduction of Katrina in a central role of the show directly correlates to the erasure of Abbie. This illustrates how even in the digital age, the historic centering of white masculinity still dictates how women are valued, even fictional ones.

For both black women and white women depicted in visual texts, value often originates through the gaze of the white men who want to sleep with them. Ship wars within fandoms— wherein two, or more, sub-fandoms emerge inside of a larger fandom oriented by differing desires to see certain characters romantically linked— are not new or even particularly interesting. The most famous, in recent memory, was the Team Jacob versus Team Edward plot device which became a primary tool used in promoting the film adaptations of the Twilight series. Still, for many within the Ichabbie fandom, Katrina’s inclusion into the narrative, which negated Abbie’s access to Ichabod, to some degree reflected a larger contestation happening within social media and digital culture: black feminism vs. white feminism. And yet, neither

#AbbieMillsDeservesBetter nor #KatrinaRuinedSleepyHollow were sites of conflict between black women fans and white women fans. The treatment of the show’s characters of color created a consensus amongst fans, at least those active on social media platforms and blog sites.

And yet, the visual and rhetorical tools employed to argue against Abbie’s depiction were rooted in an increasingly common digital black feminist mode of discourse which includes blogs and memes. Let me be clear: digital black feminist discourse was not used as a means to attack white

130 Rose Maura Lorre, “Sleepy Hollow Recap: Can I Get a Witness Back?” Vulture, April 9, 2016, accessed January 22, 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2016/04/sleepy-hollow-recap-season-3-episode-18.html.

women but enacted in order to associate the criticisms of Sleepy Hollow with the institutional issues that black women face in various aspects of life, much of which finds its source in white feminism. In one fan blog written at the end of season two, Monique Jones states that the show allows Katrina’s character to effectively turn Abbie into a mammy because “she seems to look at

Abbie as nothing more than a fixture or a means to an end instead of a person.”131 This behavior coincides with historical accounts in which white women would look at black women as little more than servants and not individuals with their own feelings, wants, and desires. In the same blog, Jones discusses the issue of white feminism’s disregard for black women in no uncertain terms when she writes: “Abbie was made to be a house slave for Witchy White Feminist

Katrina.”132 That said, we still must not forget that in many instances within the Sleepy Hollow fandom, the anger directed at Abbie’s treatment stems from her ignored relationship with

Ichabod. Even as black women fight for black women characters to be treated with integrity, we cannot ignore that some of this is in service toward Abbie gaining the acceptance that comes with a white male character valuing her existence.

This should not be taken as an absolute. Black women, and anyone else, can ship black women with white men, but only if the show creates the space for a healthy power dynamic. As

Scandal has evolved, it has become hyper-aware of the political identity of the show’s protagonist, Olivia Pope. Olivia occupies the dual position of being the most competent person alive as well as being the metaphorical Helen of Troy. In one series of episodes her on-again/off- again lover, Fitz, who also happens to be the President of the United States, actually does go to

131 Jones, “Sleepy Hollow.” 132 Jones, “Sleepy Hollow.”

war in order to get her back after she has been kidnapped. Thus any man that the show presents as a possible suitor for Olivia’s intentions must first be forced to acknowledge that they are beneath her in every measurable way. This might seem like an extreme move for a television show to engage in just so they can encourage their viewers to ship a couple. But, as the Afro- centrists knew, and Chief Justice Roberts does not, the white supremacist system will not correct itself.

Henry Jenkins’ claim that the academic investigation of fandoms by self-identified fans is a feminist project still holds significant value. Early fan scholars offered a needed distinction between how presumably straight white male fans read and recreated texts and how white women of various sexual orientations and gendered identities engaged in similar forms of fannish behavior. Later fan scholars built off the first wave to address the challenges that capitalism and the market have placed upon fans. However, as this chapter has attempted to prove, those same early fan studies scholars engaged in a particular feminist activity that did not consider the ways that people of color are mediated and read differently across the racialized boundaries. It did not, in other words, take the words of noted feminist scholar Kimberle

Crenshaw to heart in their construction of the field.

For Crenshaw, the violences visited upon people of color and women should not be separated, but fully deconstructed in order to understand the specific set of circumstances that women of color face because of their double marginalization. In her second article announcing intersectionality as a needed lens through which to see racial and sexual oppression, she writes:

“When one discourse fails to acknowledge the significance of the other, the power relations that

each attempts to challenge are strengthened.”133 Failure to acknowledge that all women are not white and all black people (for instance) are not men, not only negates the quality of the arguments made by feminists and those black men fighting against anti-black racism, it helps to support the patriarchy and white supremacy. Crenshaw does not just see this problem as permeating throughout legal, economic, and political systems, but also through popular culture as well. To counter this problem, Crenshaw offers a critical approach that she calls

“representational intersectionality,” which analyzes the ways that racism and sexism connect to further marginalize women of color, while also offering an intervention into ideas that challenge racist and misogynistic notions, but fail to address their correlation.134 It should be noted,

Crenshaw wrote her first article on intersectionality in 1989, the second in 1991. Fan studies scholars already had access to this notion prior to the reclaiming of the field away from the psychoanalysts. By not including Crenshaw’s theories, a more correct description of the aca-fan project would be to call it white feminism. In other words, aca-fan studies and fan studies are an inherently white supremacist project.

If Ibram X. Kendi is correct, and we can think of racist individuals as belonging to two categories: segregationists—who see the historical and contemporaneous disparity between white prosperity and black prosperity as the fault of black people—and assimilationists—who see those disparities as being caused by both anti-black racism and black cultural pathology—

133 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review vol. 43, 1241 (1993): 1282. 134 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1241.

then white supremacy functions as the catalyst for both.135 White supremacy does not only mean that white people are inherently better than every other group. It does not only hold sway with hate groups, those white people who use racial slurs against people of color, and a system that incarcerates black men and women at a much higher rate than white men and women who do the same crime. It also means the continued privileging of white views, culture, thought, agency, and bodies no matter the circumstance. For fan studies scholars, like John Fiske, it means ignoring the black cultures created around black objects, it means using the tenets of the Birmingham

Centre for Cultural Studies but ignoring its goals, it means ignoring scholars like Jacqueline

Bobo and sports like the Negro Leagues because he did not know where to look. For Henry

Jenkins, white supremacy means wanting a world where the historic legacy of slavery, Jim

Crow, and lynching are not discussed because those were days of the past. It means occupying a position of marginalization because sometimes people make fun of fans. White supremacy means being mad at your favorite movie franchise for not centering a white person, for even a single instance . Upholding white supremacy is not simply the goal of racist white people; black people can believe in it, support it, and live by it too, even if they are simultaneously being shunned by it. White supremacy can cause otherwise acute and thoughtful black women cultural critics to feel into a beloved character being denied the acceptance that comes with being loved by a white man.

My words here are not meant to assault or demean, rather they are meant to suggest that another way is possible, but that can only come with an honest accounting of past failures. Just

135 Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 2.

as cisgender straight people owe it to LGBTQIA people to acknowledge the damage caused by heteronormativity, and black men must admit to our role in the systemic and personal violence that black women continue to face, so too must fan studies scholars see that, like other fields of inquiry, theirs has been derelict in addressing racism in mediated texts, fans, fan objects, and fandoms. This chapter has been an attempt to uncover just some of the ways that white supremacy infects the work of otherwise socially conscious fan studies scholars. The chapters that follow will take on some of these fandoms directly. In all cases, I believe we should not be afraid to see the white supremacy that is all around us. Because, if we do not, then we can never properly work to stamp out its pernicious legacy.

CHAPTER 2

BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AS FANDOM

Introduction

This chapter focuses on what I see as one of the most prominent visual exemplars of the historic and contemporaneous fandomization of the black body: blackface minstrelsy. By fandomization of the black body, itself a product of its own fandomization, I mean the capacity for the white supremacist dominant culture to understand millions of black people as a singular entity and then construct, for itself, a participatory reading of those people, of black existence.

This is an essentialist narrative of who and what black people are that became codified into imagistic and discursive textual objects that proliferate throughout the culture, spreading and taking hold in nearly every corner of American culture. The white supremacist dominant culture that has always been at the core of the American consciousness created the various permutations of blackness through all forms of literary and visual media objects. I argue that these creations and the spectator responses to them constitute a fandom of the black body. This fandom has since gone on to create more blackface minstrelsy fan texts that litter the history of American popular and amateur media.

Blackface minstrelsy proliferated and popularized a number of racist stereotypes about black people that continue to linger in the American imaginary, and have been encoded into the identity of blackness itself. They are the tom, the coon, the mammy, the sapphire, the buck, and the jezebel. I am borrowing heavily here from Bogle’s taxonomy of black stereotypes and

Melissa Harris-Perry’s version which focuses on the negative myths perpetuated against black

women.136 Each blackface minstrel formation of blackness can be placed into one of two categories: appropriate or desirable and inappropriate or in need of control. The appropriate mediations of blackness are those characters who knowingly exist to serve whiteness and are accepting of that fate. These constructions of blackness create, for their white audiences, the impression that black people are better off under white domination. They are the tom, the coon, and the mammy. The tom is the loyal and stalwart defender of his master’s (whiteness) interests and his own condition as a slave. The coon is the happy-go-lucky dancing and singing trickster who also loves being a slave. The mammy is the maternal and nurturing slave who lives for little more than to care for her master’s children. On the other hand, the characters who perform their blackness inappropriately illustrate to the white spectator the dangers of autonomous blackness.

They are the buck, the sapphire, and the jezebel. The buck is the over-sexualized and criminal black man who is obsessed with white women. The sapphire is the aggressive and angry black woman. Lastly, the jezebel is the over-sexualized black woman. In the case of all blackface minstrelsy archetypes, their fandomized depictions do not stop at the murky border that separates fiction from reality, they latch onto and alter the way that the American imaginary perceives black people and how black people see themselves. They simultaneously mediate an inferior black body and one that coheres together a white supremacist identity.

Blackface minstrelsy completed the work that the institution of slavery began. Through its participatory methodologies, the theatrical genre created images, performances, and songs that

136 Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, New Expanded Edition (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, (New Haven and London; Yale University Press, 2011).

conjoined the idea of blackness with the plantation milieu. Blackface minstrelsy’s fandom

(active in the genre’s spectators and creators) seeped into the American imaginary and inspired further mediated texts in advertisements, comic strips, music, television shows, films, and digital culture. These participatory acts of fandom illustrate how representations of black inferiority create and inform white supremacy. Where this chapter differs from other investigations of blackface minstrelsy is that I look at the fandom and its ongoing relevance as the primary prism through which the American imaginary has examined and understood blackness.

At its most basic level, blackface minstrelsy is cosplay of the black body. The recreation and re-performatization of black existence was intended for, initially, white consumption, although black people also attended blackface minstrelsy performances as early as the 1830s.

The history of white performers painting their faces black has been traced back to Ancient

Greece, and then again found favor in Shakespearian theater when actors portraying Othello would darken their skin in order to fully embody the troubled Moor.137 The aesthetic practice did not fully begin to merge into a coherent genre until the eighteenth century when “Negro” songs became a popular form of paternalistic argument on behalf of enslaved people.138 Thus, before

Dan Emmett and the Virginia Minstrels performed in New York with a full band and in full makeup, the concept of blackface minstrelsy had already been a persistent idea within the early-

137 Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen, Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop (New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 36. 138 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 36.

American imaginary.139 Blackface minstrelsy also constructed for the first time a national understanding of racial distinction.140

The History of Blackface Minstrelsy

Beginning in the seventeenth century, but finding its legs as a specific mode of theatrical performance in the late 1820s, and finally cohering into its own genre and international popular culture spectacle in the 1840s, blackface minstrelsy was, during its heyday, America’s most popular entertainment genre.141 Almost two centuries later, it is impossible to fully contextualize the influence of the so-called “art form” even after its popularity waned in the late nineteenth century, its aesthetic trappings have since influenced nearly every mode of American popular entertainment. What makes the legacy of blackface minstrelsy so persistent is not simply that we can see its imprint on American music, film, and television, but that it was the first authoring of black identity within nascent American popular culture, particularly for antebellum Northerners who had little access to the horrors of the institution of slavery.

Long is the history of white appropriation of black culture. From jazz, to rock n’ roll, and hip hop, the aesthetic and artistic labor of black people has been, sometimes willingly and other times less so, ripped from their hands, painted white, and sold to white audiences who love the cultural artifacts associated with blackness, but not the bodies who perform them. As such, it should come as no surprise that blackface minstrelsy was patient zero for this condition. T.D.

139 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 37. 140 Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy & the American Working Class, 20th Anniversary Edition (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4. 141 John Springhall, The Genesis of Mass Culture: Show Business Live in America, 1840-1940 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 57; Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 4.

Rice, better known as his stage persona, Jim Crow, is considered by many, including blackface minstrelsy historian and Rice biographer, W.T. Lhamon Jr., “the most popular actor in his era,” primarily because of the Jim Crow character.142 According to Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen,

Rice borrowed, if not outright stole, many of his famous song and dance routines from enslaved people he met through his travel of the American South. While many historians, such as

Lhamon, seem to have an oddly favorable view of Rice, there is no doubt that he deconstructed what he saw as black existence and re-authored it into a racist, and thus accessible, form of popular culture that activated the white American poor during the early part of the nineteenth century.143 Not only that, but according to Lhamon, Rice did so through the valence of enslaved people's attempt to use the customs, ceremonies, and traditions native to their tribes. To illustrate, he writes: “After their middle passage, they built ‘black’ identities to compound and articulate Ibo, Yoruba, and Hausa self-concepts. In doing so, African Americans presented themselves to themselves, as to others, in ways that could travel and endure. These new self- hoods…were attractive to others.”144 He goes on to argue that remediations of black identity were so popular amongst the poor white working class because white people found the suffering inherent within being an enslaved person identifiable. Thus, the pleasures that came from seeing enslaved people sing, dance, and make jovial fools of themselves activated a latent desire within poor whites that their lives could be and should be better. The capacity of a text to enrich and cohere together a gazer’s identity is the very nucleus of fandom. What Lhamon fails to remark

142 W.T. Lhamon, Jr., Jump Jim Crow, Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1. 143 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 4. 144 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 4.

upon is the explicit dehumanization involved in viewing the slave object’s suffering as being valuable to the poor white subject’s (however mediated) idea of himself.

Blackface minstrelsy was a visual and ideological assault on a black population who, at the time, had little to no means of access—aesthetic, physical, or otherwise— to refute the imposition of America’s first true culture industry. And its white working-class fans loved it!

From 1843, with the emergence of America’s first troupe dedicated to blackface minstrelsy, Dan

Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels, to the 1850s, blackface minstrelsy gained dozens of troupes dedicated to its proliferation, spread across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. Regardless of the genre’s mobility throughout the westernized world, in many respects it has always found its most ardent fans in the space of its creation: the American Northeast.

George Washington Dixon’s “Zip Coon,” Dan Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels, T.D. Rice’s

Jim Crow, were all first performed and most successful in New York City. Minstrel acts like the

Virginia Minstrels convinced their white Northern working class audience that their brand of minstrelsy was an unfettered replication of what it meant to be black in the antebellum South.

Such an ideological formation of artificial-authentic blackness was made even more devastating since the Virginia Minstrels engaged in “the wild and uninhibited portrayal of the most extreme stereotypes of black Americans,” during an economic depression in which many white people were unemployed and suffering.145 The racist representations within the first true blackface minstrel troupe, or “Ethiopian band” as they were occasionally called, allowed for a signification of white superiority to emerge through the vapid and dehumanizing rendition of black existence.

145 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 38.

Most of the early minstrel characters can be categorized, using Donald Bogle’s taxonomy of black stereotypes, as coons. For instance, Rice’s Jim Crow was a northern dandy coon with shaggy and colorful clothing seemingly meant to indicate that the black people of the time had gaudy tastes. Rice’s most famous song as Jim Crow was “Jump Jim Crow.” On its own terms, the song is an upbeat song about a misadventure of an enslaved black person. As some of the song’s early lyrics read: “I went down to the riber, I did’nt mean to stay; But dere I see so many galls, I couldn’t get away.”146 These lines suggest that Jim Crow lives such a care-free life that his only true concern is the women he meets at the river. When coupled with the visual of a white man dressed in blackface, it becomes a song about the capricious pleasures that enslaved life affords, which were not uncommon. Still, even a lively song such as “Jump Jim Crow” hints at the dangers of black autonomy: “And den I go to Orleans, An feel so full of flight; Dey put me in de Calaboose, An keep me dere all night. When I got out I hit a man, His name I now forgot,

But dere was nothing left ‘Sept a little grease spot.”147 “Jump Jim Crow’s” lyrics display the duality of desire and control at work in the blackface minstrelsy fandom. In one sense, the song offers a life unburdened by responsibility and rules. The song mandates this reading when Jim

Crow sings that he is, “glad that I’m a niggar. And don’t you wish you was too.”148 In another, it suggests that enslaved people were somehow able to move freely across the American South and randomly attack people. The lack of a clear racial qualifier suggests that the man Jim Crow assaults is intended to be read as white. Every time Jim Crow hits a black person, “niggar” is

146 T.D. Rice, “The Original Jim Crow,” quoted in Jim Crow, America: Selected Songs and Plays, ed, W.T. Lhamon. Jr. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 2 147 Rice, “The Original Jim Crow,” 3. 148 Rice, “The Original Jim Crow,” 5.

used to describe the person. The mixture of fun, frivolity, and random acts of violence continue throughout the song until the few lines when the song shifts to the concept of emancipation. The lyrics read: “I’m for freedom, An for Union altogether, Although I’m a black man, De white is call’d my broder.”149 Far from a true call to racial unity, the goal of this lyric seems to highlight the stupidity of a black man thinking that he is in anyway equal to a white man. In fact, the last line of the song suggests that if free, Jim Crow’s violence would soon be directed toward the white population, “And I caution all the white dandies, Not to come in my way, For if dey insult me, dey’ll in de gutter lay.”150 The issue of Jim Crow’s earlier violence juxtaposes with his later calls for the freedom of black people. For the minstrel show’s intended audience, the Northern white working class, minstrel shows offered the simultaneous fascinations of escapism through excess and a group to feel superior to. The fandom of blackface minstrelsy mixed the desire to occupy the unencumbered position of the black body with the fear of black people actually being free.

Positioning the struggling white working class against worse off black people is a story literally older than America itself. As Eric Lott states, the white working class’: “response was a much muted sense of class resistance, an attempt to shore up ’white’ class identities by targeting new enemies such as immigrants, blacks, and tipplers.”151 Moreover, he goes on to state that the minstrel show “…buried class tensions and permitted class alliances along rigidifying racial

149 Rice, “The Original Jim Crow,” 8. 150 Rice, “The Original Jim Crow,” 9. 151 Lott, Love & Theft, 144.

lines.152 While economic circumstances may explain the genre’s initial popularity, they only partially account for its eventual international popularity, and cannot explain its enduring legacy over a century and half later. For that we must understand that fandoms seek to consume the representational physical energies of their chosen text, critique them depending largely upon their own self-assessed libidinal desires, and reconstitute them through an active re-imagining of that text’s existence

Early blackface minstrelsy consisted of mostly white men dressed as mostly black men.

Their visual reconstruction of blackness included white actors with their faces painted black with either grease paint or a mixture of burnt crushed cork and petroleum jelly, red lipstick that exaggerated the thicker and fuller lips of black people, white gloves, and ill-fitting clothes that were, at least to the audience’s taste, too colorful and gaudy.153 Of course, it was not only white men that performed in blackface minstrel shows, and it was not only black men that these performances mocked. As the minstrel tradition spread to other mediums, black women became the focal point for similar minstrel tropes as black men. In those cases, the racism of minstrelsy merged with misogyny.

The black minstrel body constructed “appropriate” versions of black existence for both black men and black women. Blackface minstrelsy understood black men within a relatively consistent binary of loyal, stalwart, non-sexual, jovial, and non-threatening which eventually contrasted with the violent, aggressive, over-sexualized version that signified an immediate threat to white women and the nation that required destruction. Blackface minstrelsy created a

152 Lott, Love & Theft, 144. 153 Lott, Love & Theft, 5.

version of black womanhood that also vacillated between these poles, but in the case of the latter were also seen as sexual conquests that could be raped as well as murdered. Within these remediated parodies of the black body, white men performed song and dance routines that mocked enslaved black people through presumptions of black dialect, voracious eating of watermelon and fried chicken, their status as victims, and most importantly through the positive association with slavery.154

Even more than the tom, the mammy figure exists to justify the evils of slavery for a white supremacist culture disinterested in coming to terms with its own pathology. According to

Micki McEyla, we can trace the origins of the mammy to the 1830s, when southern writers would write fanciful tales of their dedicated caretakers.155 Like the tom, the mammy embodies the white desire for subservient blackness. She is a loyal caretaker who rejects her own personal wants in favor of nurturing and serving her white masters. Unlike the tom, however, the mammy’s body is a significant part of her racist construction. Because the image of the mammy was created to illustrate the proper docility and subservience that a black woman ought to have, she has been made to appear older and obese so that she could fit a comfortable delusion of the life of a slave.156 As Melissa Harris-Perry points out, the mammy figure fictionalizes the existences of black women in that:

Enslaved women working as domestic servants in Southern plantations were taken from their families and forced to nurse white babies while their own infants subsisted on sugar

154 Mel Watkins, “Foreword,” in Darkest America, xii. 155 Micki McEyla, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 4. 156 Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 72.

water. They were not voluntary members of the enslaver's family; they were women laboring under coercion and the constant threat of physical and sexual violence. They had no enforceable authority over their white charges and could not even resist the sale and exploitation of their own children. Domestic servants often were not grandmotherly types but teenagers or very young women. It was white supremacist imaginations that remembered these powerless, coerced slave girls as soothing, comfortable, consenting women.157 Harris-Perry’s words get to the core of blackface minstrelsy and what this chapter will largely attempt to uncover. The fandom of blackface minstrelsy, which still exists today, altered the realities of enslaved black people and turned them into song and dance routines, vaudevillian style jokes, and over the top melodramas all for the enjoyment of its primarily white fan base. In all cases, but particularly the blackface minstrel constructions of black women, the fan capacity to alter the idea of the black woman in such a way that it correlates to a desired image remains a constant within American media and thought through films like Gone with the Wind (Fleming

1939) and The Help (Taylor 2011) and the Aunt Jemima product line.

Aunt Jemima did not appear on the minstrel stage until after the end of the Civil War.

The Aunt Jemima character was attached to the pancake mix when one of the creators of the formula saw two white men dressed in blackface perform “Old Aunt Jemima,” a song written by black blackface performer, Billy Kersands158 Despite her late arrival, Aunt Jemima’s body is perhaps the most widely recognizable blackface minstrelsy image still in circulation. That is almost entirely due to the products bearing the character’s name and image. Aunt Jemima

157 Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 72. 158 McEyla, Clinging to Mammy, 18.

pancakes were introduced to the world during the 1893 World’s Fair.159 According to McEyla, spectators swarmed the exhibition as Nancy Green, a woman performing the role of Aunt

Jemima, cooked pancakes as she regaled her white audience with plantation story after plantation story.160 For those not in attendance, the R.T. Davis Milling Company, the owners of the Aunt

Jemima trademark, put out a booklet titled The Life of Aunt Jemima, the Most Famous Colored

Woman in the World.161 Since then, Aunt Jemima has remained one of the most popular brands in American advertising.162 Aunt Jemima’s image and ideological core expose the fandom gaze placed upon the blackface minstrel female body. Nancy Green, the actor playing Aunt Jemima, added authenticity to an obviously ideology-laden and objectively harmful fictional creation. Her body, symbolically and iconically, allowed for the possibility that there really were fat black women who wanted nothing more than to take care of white people. In that moment, she became the nation’s mammy. She would hold that position until she died in 1923.

Other than the some well-known products, perhaps the most long-lasting singular artifact from the blackface minstrel era was the song, “Dixie.” In many respects, “Dixie,” has, for some, come to signify a glamorized version of antebellum Southern society before it was ravaged into ruin by the Civil War. However, “Dixie,” an upbeat dance song about a slave already dreading the day of his eventual emancipation, was originally written before the war by Dan Emmett.

Emmett was one of the founding fathers of blackface minstrelsy and manages to convey the

159 McEyla, Clinging to Mammy, 2. 160 McEyla, Clinging to Mammy, 1. 161 Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, yesterday, today, and tomorrow (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 76. 162 Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus, 76.

primary ideological concern of the minstrel tradition: black people are natural slaves. Emmett’s

“Virginia Minstrels” are the first generally recognized blackface minstrel troupe and their performance on February 6, 1843 is, according to John Springhall, the birth of the genre.163 In fact, it was “Dixie” that acted as the closing number to many of those early blackface minstrel performances.164 From the very beginning of the genre, blackface minstrelsy argued that black people were not just better off as slaves, but preferred that status. As such, along with depicting black people as lazy and stupid, the genre constructed for the white Northern working class an image of black existence as perpetual slaves. “Dixie” would ultimately became a popular go-to song for blackface minstrelsy performers in the North and the South, inspiring dozens of versions with slightly altered lyrics, and eventually becoming the unofficial theme song of the

Confederacy when the war started.165

Thus, blackface minstrelsy was a fandom enterprise which sought to define the black body as ontologically associated with the plantation and through that constructed an even larger fandom of the black body as the genre moved from its Northeast beginnings, spread to the South, and finally to Europe. Blackface minstrelsy became the dominant lens through which American media from the nineteenth century onward rendered black people, locking the image of the black body as existing perpetually within a plantation milieu. This genre of theatrical engagement illustrates how ideologies surrounding the black body are somewhat static, even as some of the circumstances of black life move into new ecologies. The black body, in this sense, seems to

163 Springhall, The Genesis of Mass Culture, 61. 164 Springhall, The Genesis of Mass Culture, 69. 165 Lott, Love & Theft, 245.

exist as a referent disconnected from its original site of mediation, black people. For the bulk of its history as a genre, blackface minstrelsy did not even require actual black people, merely facsimiles whose ideological encodings were deemed preferable to the real thing.

As many historians have argued, it would be easy to categorize blackface minstrelsy characters as buffoons and simpletons who enjoyed their enslavement. The facts of the matter simply contradict this narrow perspective. Blackface minstrelsy performances often depicted a range of emotions that could, in another context, be considered universally human. As Yuval

Taylor and Jake Austen state: “. . . minstrels also sang about and played the part of sorrowful, overworked slaves; old slaves pining for their youth; happy, dancing slaves with hardly a care; lovers grieving over their dead mates; religious slaves afraid of the devil; rough slaves fighting over a woman; female slaves mourning their stolen children; and so on.”166 However, the plurality of emotions displayed by the minstrel show should not be mistaken for well-rounded and textured utterances of the lives of enslaved people. These performances highlighted the capacity for white Americans to dismantle the existence of enslaved people, chop them up into sections so that each individual piece could be removed from all specific context relating to black people, and reformed into hyper-racist caricatures imbued with white supremacist renderings of the value of black lives. Blackface minstrelsy conditioned the American public to think of black life as being significant only insofar it can be used for entertainment and the coherence of white national identity since blackness was presumed to be the structural bottom of a great chain of racialized being.

166 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 41.

Blackface minstrelsy purposefully articulated, not that it would matter if it were incidental, the narrow pathways through which black men, and the occasional black woman, ought to exist through the creation of specific characters that constrained their acceptable cultural identity. At the heart of the minstrel show milieu was that not only were black people happy as slaves, but were better off under white rule. Even though we now tend to associate minstrelsy with specific characters such as Zip Coon, Uncle Tom, and Jim Crow, these characters fell underneath a larger archetypal categorization, with often significant overlap between them.

There was, for instance, the slovenly, stupid, and slow-witted coon who has come to embody the stereotype that black men are slothful, stupid, and in search of handouts. Thus, without the white overseer, the white master, and the white dominant culture at large to keep the coon in check, to force him to work when he did not want to, he would bend toward self-destruction, and perhaps take the union with him. This idea fully adheres to the argument of pro-slavery theorists, such as

George Fitzhugh, who famously stated: “The negro is improvident; will not lay up in summer for the wants of winter; will not accumulate in youth for the exigencies of age. He will become an insufferable burden to society.”167 The coon’s significance as a cultural representation for the lethargy of black men removed from the plantation would not end, even in the post-emancipation period. Just as the coon is himself a fanonical parody of the perceived laziness of enslaved black men on the plantation—an absurdly biased conceit if ever there was one—subsequent remediations of blackness took the coon into various other genres and mediums.

167 George Fitzhugh, “The Blessings of Slavery,” n.d. accessed March 3, 2017, http://wps.ablongman.com/wps/media/objects/26/27123/primarysources1_13_2.html.

For instance, the coon song, which emerged after the Civil War, was a style of music in which blackface minstrelsy singers would ruminate over their lost status as slaves.168 These songs deconstructed the disentangled visual and musical renderings of the minstrelsy show, and emphasized the white supremacist cultural vision of willful black subjugation. In one popular song, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” the lyrics state: “Massa and misses, have long gone before me, Soon we’ll meet on that bright and golden shore. There’s where we’ll be happy, and free from all sorrow. There’s where we’ll live and we’ll never part no more.” The song was written by James A. Bland, a black man who, after the death of Stephen Foster in 1864, became known as “The World’s Greatest Minstrel Man.” The popularity of songs such as this illustrates the power of racialized depictions of black men that activate the white supremacist identity endemic within the larger American imagination. The coon here does not just wish for a life back on the plantation, but that his immortal soul will be intertwined with those of his oppressors.

The coon was the first and most popular blackface minstrel character during the genre’s formative years and illustrates the genre’s capacity to mold blackness into a preferable shape and then have that molding spread out and define the limits and value of black performance. While the Uncle Tom was the stalwart, stoic figure who loved his master (whiteness) so much that he would endure any punishment and suffer any debasement, the coon was his older more jovial cousin. The coon shows his revelry for his enslaved condition through his singing, dancing, and propensity for pranks.169 Since the beginning of the minstrel tradition, the coon has existed at the

168 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 37. 169 Ronald L. Jackson II, Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial. Politics in Popular Media (Albany, SUNY Press, 2006), 26.

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center of the minstrel stage. As Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen write: “Capable of almost infinite variations, the coon is minstrelsy’s primary legacy, with his shucking, grinning, sloth, and mirth—whether he appeared as Sambo, Jim Crow, Zip Coon, or “The Hottest Coon in Dixie.”170

One of these forms, the child coon or pickaninny, in particular would prove to be a popular variation on the coon, appearing in various visual mediums such as advertisements, television, and film. As with every minstrel archetype, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment of the pickaninny’s creation.

However, some form of the pickaninny existed in blackface minstrel sheet music since the 1840s. In 1847 the cover to the sheet music for A.F. Winnemore’s The Virginia Serenaders’

“Plantation Melodies,” depicts pickaninnies playing musical instruments with smiles on their faces (Fig. A1).171 The pickaninny quickly moved away from the minstrel sheet music and infiltrated the American imaginary through visual culture. As Ronald L. Jackson states, the pickaninny completed the rendering of the black family (mother, father, and child) as inferior to their white counterparts.172 In the post-emancipation period, the image of the pickaninny was employed to sell everything from watermelons, fried chicken, candy, soap, and gator bait. For example, an ad for “Pickaninny Freeze,” depicts a smiling pickaninny eating watermelon. In the ad, the girl’s body is completely blackened out except for white eyes and bright red mouth. Ads such as this embedded a fandomized reading of the black body that borrowed from the blackface minstrelsy aesthetic while also turning the blackface minstrel body into an object of and for

170 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 9. 171 A.F. Winnemore, “Plantation Melodies,” as sung by the Virginia Serenaders, American Minstrel Show Collection, 1823-1947, (MS Thru 556), Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 172 Jackson, Scripting the Black Masculine Body, 27.

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commodification. The sheer volume of these ads illustrate the scopophilic obsession that white supremacist dominant culture had with the black body as seen through a minstrel lens, especially those who existed in service to whiteness. Thus, even after the Civil War, the black body was locked into a state of perpetual, if ideological, slavery.

The Social Death of Blackness

Prior to the seventeenth century, blackness did not exist as we currently understand it.

Before there was an America, the conceptualizations of Africanness as inferior existed within

European and Arabic contexts, but had not yet been systematized into the presumed essential qualities of black people that would eventually characterize black existence throughout the world. Even as negative stereotypes were encoded into African identity throughout Europe and the Arabic world, Africans were still Africans. In the American context something different and even more insidious took hold. The transformation of Africans into black people occurred as a result of the centuries’ long annihilation known as slavery and the middle passage. As Frank

Wilderson III suggests, the journey from (mostly) West Africa to the Americas on slave ships divorced the living cargo on those ships from their culture, their home, their reality, and their world.173 Slavery in America created the ontology of African peoples into first niggers; then

Negroes; then coloreds; and finally blacks/African Americans. Each terminological identity corresponds with a mitigated increase in authorial control over that identity. However, while

173 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: University Press, 2010), 38.

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each new iteration challenges the political and rhetorical limitations of the previous ones, they are never fully divested from that initial ontology. Blackness yesterday, today, and seemingly forever is tethered to the white supremacist ideology that created the identity. Over the course of multiple generations, a visual, cultural, and legalistic system of alienation of black existence informed the dominant, if fictive, formations of what it means to be black. Orlando Patterson, borrowing from French and Jewish social scientists calls this alienation the “social death of the slave.”174

In Patterson’s view, there are two conceptualizations that categorize the slave’s social death. The first, “structural viewpoint,” sees the enslaved person ripped from their homeland on both a physical and cultural level. The enslaved person’s “death” stems from the denial of access to the very thing that makes her alive: her personhood. She is “desocialized and depersonalized” and “socially negated.”175 The second conceptualization, “intrusive,” is when the enslaved, now a non-entity, enters into the enslaver’s cultural and physical environment. For Patterson, the slave is a permanent prisoner of war, extricated from their milieu and inserted into a world detached and hated because they will always and forever be the enemy from the perspective of the site of slaveholding. While Patterson writes about the social death of the slave from a variety of global, historical, and cultural perspectives, Afro-Pessimists take on the concept of social death from within literary, filmic, sociological, and psychoanalytic traditions in order to posit a theory of eternally compromised black existence within America.

174 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), Kindle Edition. 175 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, Kindle Edition.

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Afro-Pessimist theorists such as Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and Frank

Wilderson argue that, while the material conditions of black suffering as first instantiated during slavery seem to have ended, the economic, social, psychological, and cultural conditions that black folks face not only remain, they define the parameters of black existence throughout the

African diaspora. Hartman thus defines blackness as an object of and for accumulation and fungibility.176 In other words, the very ontology of blackness confines our existence to a disposable and exchangeable set of goods that can be traded and destroyed whenever the white supremacist dominant culture sees fit. The obvious correlation between this definition and slavery needs no further coverage, as the act of gathering of millions human beings as property inherently conveys an extreme amount of disposability. It is how Hartman relates contemporary black existence to the lingering effects of slavery that requires further inquiry. To illustrate, she states:

Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery— skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.177 To be socially dead is to be the victim of an oppressive calculus that can and does exchange the variable that represents your existence at a moment’s notice. Blackness, both during and after

176 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America, (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 177 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 6.

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slavery, is thus a textual object whose rhetorical coding may change, but whose value remains the same.

I use textual object here to describe the means through which white supremacy understood blackness as a thing that could be and was read, re-read, created, re-created and destroyed. The histories and ramifications of blackness are carved into the skin of the flesh and blood of enslaved people and their ancestors, but its origin point exists outside of the corporeal dimensions of black folk and inside the various mediated products that caused it to spread throughout the American imaginary. To consider blackness a textual object is to acknowledge that whatever stereotypes of blackness that existed yesterday and continue today did not come from any thoughtful analysis of black behavior, culture, or thought, but instead spread outward like a virus from slavery to the racist letters of Thomas Jefferson and the images of T.D. Rice’s

Jim Crow. While the former is significant, the latter, I argue, had an even greater impact on the material conditions of black life from the seventeenth century to the present. Blackface minstrelsy planted the seeds of appropriate articulations of black behavior within the minds of, initially, Northern white working-class spectators, and then reified the already existent feelings of their Southern counterparts. It created the visage of a very particular form of black inferiority for the country first, and then the world, that remains to this day. It is blackface minstrelsy that authored the first truly national iteration of the black body, and blackface minstrelsy that became the country’s first widespread fandom.

While these initial foundational elements were created largely by white slave owners and the leaders of pre-American colonies through Slave Codes, religion, and dietary customs, among other things, it was the visual and literary media depictions in the nineteenth century which

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formally rendered a willfully flawed permutation of blackness to people around the world. In this sense, the notions of blackness found most prominently in blackface minstrelsy performances, itself a reading of blackness already loaded with a violent intentionality, became blackness. One of the great powers of America’s white supremacist project, particularly with the nineteenth century rise of mass media technologies that spread American ideology throughout the world, has been the capacity to define the parameters of full humanity, diminished humanity, and non- humanity. This near cultural omnipotence, bolstered by absolute control over the technological means of meaning-proliferation, at once defined blackness through rhetorical and visual articulations, and also cohered together American whiteness through a negation of blackness.

To challenge the arguments of Hartman and Patterson, that blackness and slavery are inextricably bound together by the never-ending, all-consuming force that is white supremacy, one must be able to answer when slavery, from an American context, and blackness disentangled? We know that according to Douglas Blackmon and Michelle Alexander slavery for black folk did not end after the Emancipation Proclamation was written, nor did it yield after the ratification of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Blackmon’s book, Slavery by Another

Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, documents the strategies, particularly convict leasing, that Southern states, capitalizing on the rhetoric of the

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, employed in order to control black male populations and cut down labor costs to almost nothing. Regarding this continuation of black enslavement, he writes:

It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was slavery—a

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system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.178 Blackmon’s words return us to Hartman’s notion of accumulation and fecundity, to blackness as infinitely tradable and replaceable. Blackmon’s history takes us right up until the end of World

War II, which leads into the beginnings of the modern Civil Rights Movement, the end of Jim

Crow, and the start of mass incarceration. When did black folk become free? For Afro-Pessimists the answer cannot be boiled down to the reductive, yet hopeful: not yet, but something far more insidious, and wholly understandable given the taxonomy of white-rule on this continent: never.

Most would seemingly object to this analysis because, as President Barack Obama is often fond of stating, “We have come so far.”179 And yet, according to the 2016 annual report on black inequality published by The National Urban League, the material conditions of black

Americans are largely unchanged from 1976 when compared to white Americans. In 1976, black people had 59% of the median income of white people, today it is 60%; the black poverty rate in

1976 was 20% higher, today it is 16.8% higher; the black unemployment rate in 1976 was 6.2% higher than white people (13.2 to 7.0, or slightly less than double), in 2016 it was more than double (9.6 to 4.6).180 While a statistical analysis of the supposed progress black people have made in this country reveals that we have not really come all that far in the last forty years, the

178 Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 3. 179 "Obama's Victory Speech," MSNBC, New York, NY: NBC Universal, November, 5, 2008, accessed February 27, 2017, https://highered.nbclearn.com/portal/site/HigherEd/browse/?cuecard=38858. 180 “40 Years: The State of Black America, 1976-2016,” The National Urban League, n.d. accessed February 27, 2017, http://soba.iamempowered.com/40-years-state-black-america-1976-2016.

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problem with the President’s words loom larger than merely factual incorrectness. The supposed advancement of black folk cannot be measured on the peripheries, nor equated to the flashing lights of brilliance that men and women such as the Obamas represent. We cannot rest on the notion that black people no longer find ourselves literally chained together on a cotton field while an overseer watches over our shoulders to make sure that we make our daily mark. Just because we are no longer enslaved (unless you are in prison) does not mean that the condition of black life is not still analyzable through the presumption of this rubric. Or as Frank Wilderson

III, one of the pre-eminent Afro-Pessimist scholars puts it:

If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between Slaveness and Blackness.181 Blackness’ vulnerability to being molded into textual objects, particularly during slavery’s formative years, allowed for the creation of images of the black body to be carved into the larger system of bondage. As will become clearer below, the formation of the performances of an enslaved person to become rendered into blackface minstrelsy, which then, for the white supremacist dominant culture, became the signifying quality of black existence existed and exists

181 Wilderson, Red, Black & White, 11.

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within the same cultural and systemic frameworks which allowed for the owner of enslaved people to occupy and situate his property in nearly any way he saw fit.

The “slaveness” of black people did not merely manifest itself in the physical labor of the black body, but also in its capacity to please and entertain white people. If a creator of images or written works, working either unconsciously or consciously as an agent of white supremacy, wanted black people to be lazy and slothful, they were, regardless of the actuality of the events that transpired. If white people wanted black bodies to represent good-natured humor and an inherent negation from the capacity of intellectual investigation, hyper-sexuality, lack of sexuality, loyalty and submission, criminality, humility, athleticism, incoordination, meekness, aggression, it did, it did, it did. Because there was no capacity for black people to construct their own identities outside of white purview, blackness has been, and continues to be, a remediated textual object that whiteness shifts, discards, enjoys, or destroys at its leisure, at a moment’s notice. As is inevitably the case for any popularized text, the fandom of the black remediated body stems from the obsession of the white supremacist dominant culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to articulate the circumstances of their own domination using the malleable contours of readily available technologies and the inherent lack of autonomy of the textualized black corpus.

As I mentioned in the Introduction, the tom or Uncle Tom character is a loyal and proud slave to his master (whiteness); he desires nothing more than to uphold his master’s interests, even if his master is nowhere to be found. The tom figure was inspired by Harriet Beecher’s

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but its legacy has far more reach. From the perspective of white supremacy, the tom is the perfect black person. His loyalty to his master stems from a deep and

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powerful love of whiteness. And yet, the tom does not wish to be white; he has so fully imbibed white supremacy that he believes he knows the limitations of his own mind. The tom is satisfied with being adjacent to whiteness. Donald Bogle, who literally wrote the book(s) on the minstrel stereotypes, says tom characters, “keep the faith, n'er turn against their White massas, and remain hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless and oh-so-very-kind. Thus, they endear themselves to White audiences and emerge as heroes of sorts.”182 Historically, the tom was popularized during the “Tom” shows of the 1850s, but he has been a constant fixture in American media since then. You see Tom every time you look at a box of Uncle Ben’s rice, or anytime you see a black/white buddy cop or superhero film.183

In the case of both blackface minstrelsy and lynching, black existence was remediated into visual, textual, and performative objects and imbued with ideological presumptions imparted upon it by the white dominant culture that ultimately signified meaning that allowed for the coherence of white identity. Moreover, the remediated constraining of possible black existence

(blackface minstrelsy) and the physical annihilation of the black body (lynching) were not private events limited to the most sadistic plantation owners. Both were popular remediated spectacles that placed the bodies of black folk in central focus, each attracted tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of mostly white fans who seemingly gained immense satisfaction in their capacity to gaze upon and take part of this fundamental reconceptualization of black performance. They are dialectic constructions of each other. Whereas blackface minstrelsy constructs a milieu—the plantation—around the black body that it can never truly escape from,

182 Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 2016, 2. 183 Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus, 49.

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lynching culture recreates the spectacle of the black body for those black people who attempt to escape the confines of the plantation.

And while that alone would be enough to consider both blackface minstrelsy and lynching fandoms, the two also created what John Fiske called in his taxonomy of fan behavior

“shadow cultures,” in which fans of dehumanizing black representations created and shared fan objects that further mutated and transformed the material realities of black existence into articulations that reinforced white supremacist thought.184 In the case of blackface minstrelsy, fan created sheet music for songs that further degenerated black existence into dehumanizing artifacts. To illustrate, the visuals included with blackface minstrelsy sheet music often displayed black bodies in the throes of ecstasy. One image from a Virginia Minstrel song sheet intertwines the work done on the plantation with the performative rapture displayed on the minstrel stage (Fig. A2).185 In the image, the enslaved people tend the field as they play their instruments. Many of their bodies are contorted as if overcome by the rapture of the song, or taken by the spirit. It is as if to say that the enslaved people are in some ways freer than the laborers up north because their lack of intellectual capacity makes their minds more at home in their bodily circumstance, even if it was one of bondage. Thus, the white fan can access that freedom and care-free existence by gazing upon the black body and being taken away from the

“worldly” troubles of being white in mid-nineteenth century America.

184 John Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” in Adoring Audiences: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), 45. 185 Sheet Music Cover, Old Dan Emmett’s Original Banjo Melodies, 1843, box 20, Item 99, Sheridan Libraries, John Hopkins University.

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For lynching, it means that the remediated spectacle of the destroyed black body was contained within various sorts of fandomized artifacts—photographs, postcards, stereocards, films, and body parts of lynching victims that allowed for a “fanonical”—a revisionist—reading of content through a particular fandom or sub-fandom ideological lens—an authoring of events that justified the torture and murder of black people, while also allowing the holders of these objects to make a profit on the side.

Blackface Minstrelsy and Fandom

In his incomparably influential The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois argues that the “Negro folk-song,” was influential to minstrel song, which suggests that he believed the white minstrel performers, and thus blackface minstrelsy itself, were inspired by enslaved African people and was instrumental to the creation of the American musical form. He states: “In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world.”186 In suggesting that these songs became the medium through which slaves authored their identity to a wider public, Du Bois funnels black cultural artifacts through the prism of white supremacy. Blackface minstrelsy, for Du Bois, was authentic in that its formal constructions were indebted to the works and cultural production of actual enslaved black people.

The shadow economy endemic of blackface minstrelsy appears through this fabricated lens of authenticity. Blackface minstrelsy historian Stephanie Dunson argues that the popularity of T.D. Rice’s Jim Crow character, whose remediated image helped lead to the proliferation of the blackface minstrelsy genre throughout the country and across the Atlantic to Europe can be

186 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk and other Writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, (Houston, Halcyon Press Ltd, 2010), Kindle Edition.

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attributed to his ability to authentically pantomime—at least according to his white fans—the movements and style of black street performers.187 For white fans of blackface minstrelsy, the occupancy of the black body for the purposes of entertainment amounted to the best of both worlds. It was the fun and energy of black cultural output without the actual black body to remind them that the vast majority of black people were locked in bondage. Moreover, Rice’s capacity to appear authentic coincides with the fandom’s writ large desire for textual authority, even as fandoms actively defy that authority at every turn. To fandomize, after all, is to assert ownership over a textual corpus, to kill the author, not for egalitarian purposes where authorial rights and privileges become shared between creators and fans, but to become the author. It is this authorial lens that also reveals why black performers who performed blackface minstrelsy were so attractive to both white and black audiences.

From the beginning of the blackface minstrel genre, black fans frequented the shows created to establish their dehumanization.188 And while this has often been seen as surprising from historians such as Eric Lott, it should not be. bell hooks, in her seminal article “The

Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” writes that: “When most black people in the

United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy. To stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images, was to engage

187 Stephanie Dunson, “Black Misrepresentation in Nineteenth-Century Sheet Music Illustration, in Beyond Blackface, ed. William Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 48. 188 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 46.

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its negation of black representation.”189 For black fans of white-performed blackface minstrelsy shows gazing upon the destruction of their own body was likely not lost on them; however, within those performances they could find pleasure in a remediated system that did not really articulate their own identity. This was not a passive gazing, which might be said of white fans, but an active one that attacked the visage, internally dismantled the formation, and reconstructed it in ways that gave those black fans power over the formation of their own internal racial identity. This appears to be what Du Bois, and later Donald Bogle, who originally wrote on his love of blackface minstrel stereotypes within film almost a hundred years after the original genre faded into oblivion, find valuable about the minstrel show stereotypes. For these black fans, the shadow economy that they saw would have been of inauthenticity.

At least that is one way of looking at it—the traditional fan studies scholar way of looking at it. Another way to think of it would be that the Northern black fans, along with scholars such as Du Bois and Bogle, who consumed blackface minstrelsy found power in the rendering of enslaved bodies into texts. Not only could they differentiate themselves from those black people, they could attempt to claim an identity that moved them closer to whiteness through the shared consumption of a genre created by and for white people, but about them. If this is so, the white-performed blackface minstrelsy spectacle did involve the shadow economy of authenticity for black fans. The coon, the dandy, and the trickster did narrate some element of their lives. After all, to be black in America does not mean being immune to the all- encompassing ideology of white supremacy. One can resist, but many cannot. Some can fight

189 bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 117.

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back, but others succumb. Or, as bell hooks would later posit about some black women moviegoers: “Then there were those spectators whose gaze was that of desire and complicity.

Assuming the posture of subordination, they submitted to cinema’s capacity to seduce and betray.”190 (120). While it is impossible to know how each of the black fans of early white- performed blackface minstrelsy understood what they were watching, historians have presented a clearer idea of what black fans of black-performed blackface minstrelsy thought of that practice.

Black Fans of Black Blackface Minstrelsy

Even as I categorize the formation of the remediated black body as a fandom, and articulate how blackface minstrelsy, both as a kind of fan-text and a sub-fandom all its own, helped to proliferate anti-black racism within the American imaginary, it is important to note that neither fan activity nor white supremacist ideology are unidirectional in their mode of engagement. Fandom activity has never been a simply top/down relational enterprise where the fan can simply dehydrate the meaning of a text down to a nearly empty husk in order to reconstitute it with an alternate coding of the fan’s desire. Nor can that relationship be reduced to a paradigm in which a text, imbued with all the powers of the culture industries, imposes its values and ideologies on the otherwise gullible fan.191 Instead, the fan/text binary reveals itself to be no simple binary at all. Rather, I argue, it is best understood as a metaphorical

190 hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” 120. 191 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic from Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1993).

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dominant/submissive dialectic, with the fan/text switching roles depending on the particular moment. For instance, post-emancipation, black people became, for a short-time, the primary fandom for blackface minstrelsy, particularly those shows with black casts.192

Black performers in minstrel shows began popping up in the 1840s, but did not receive the notoriety or success of white minstrel performers until two decades later.193 It was not until the 1890s, even after the genre had largely fallen out of favor with white audiences, emancipated black people began to take notice. And yet, black blackface minstrel shows did not attempt to thwart the racist ontology of the minstrel remediation. Instead, as Taylor and Austen state: “In fact, we can make no excuses for these performers. These African Americans took pride in deliberately replicating racial stereotypes that are, to contemporary sensibilities, truly nauseating, and their African American audiences ate it up.”194 These were black men portraying

“themselves” in similar ways that the minstrel fans had become accustomed to viewing black men. In doing so, these men fandomized their own bodies as a means to capitalize on the white supremacist fetishization of happily degenerate black bodies. No longer could the lingering doubts of white fans about the verisimilitude of blackface minstrelsy be taken seriously if one could see black bodies performing similar routines. We know this, of course, to be nonsense, but within the hyper-mediated world that currently exists, the strategy of using black bodies to denigrate black bodies is still deployed to add ethos to racist coding.

192 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 45 193 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 50. 194 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 27.

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Still, while we know that representation mattered then, just as it matters now, there’s always been the ongoing question of whether or not it’s better to have no representation or bad representation. Notable thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were split.

Regarding early black adopters of the minstrel stage, Frederick Douglass wrote in his anti- slavery newspaper, The North Star:

We are not sure that our readers will approve of our mention of these persons, so strong must be their dislike of everything that seems to feed the flame of American prejudice against colored people, and in this they may be right, but we think otherwise. It is something gained when the colored man in any forum can appear before a white audience; and we think that even this company with industry application, and a proper cultivation of their taste, may be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race. But they must cease to exaggerate the exaggeration of our enemies, and represent the colored man rather as he is, than as Ethiopian Minstrels usually represent him to be. They will then command the respect of both races; whereas now they only shock the state of the one, and provoke the disgust of the other.195 Douglass’ words reveal several important issues regarding his own understanding, however overly optimistic, of the power of representation. Douglas believed that if black minstrel performers represented the black man “as he is” then racial prejudice against black people could be defeated – 167 years later, I can safely say that, with all due respect to Mr. Douglass, his notion is at least somewhat false. A century and a half of disparate positive renditions has done very little to combat white supremacy. This is because the inauthentic, but presumed otherwise, representation of black bodies within blackface minstrelsy did not create white supremacy or

195 Frederick Douglass, “Gacitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders,” The North Star, June 29, 1849 on Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture, accessed March 3, 2017, http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/minstrel/miar03at.html.

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racism, it was the other way around. Black minstrel performers simply evince the inconsistent logic inherent in white supremacist fan ideology. White supremacy produces blackness as a gestation point for pathological behavior and innate inferiority. Thus, the continued poverty, lack of access to health care, and high incarceration rates that afflict black communities stem from what was initially considered a biological deficiency and now a matter of a defective culture. It is not, according to white supremacist thought, because of white supremacy and its four centuries long campaign of systemic, mediated, and personalized violence that it has inflicted on black communities. The oppressive rubric from which blackness still, and likely forever, finds itself embroiled in will not, as Douglass seemed to suggest, be alienated if only white people could see black people in a better light. As can be seen with notions of black criminality, black poverty, and black anger: the chicken always comes before the egg.

Douglass was also mistaken about the level of scorn that other black people held toward black minstrel performers. After the Civil War, black-performed minstrel shows gained wild popularity among black audiences, particularly in the South. Taylor and Austen suggest that the black fans that flocked to minstrel shows can be understood through the stylistic and structural differences between white-performed minstrel shows and their black-performed counterparts.

For instance, black performers often did not don the minstrel mask in their shows, instead relying on their actual blackness to portray the much-desired authenticity.196

While power in this contemporary modality of fandom/object is shared and deferred, to some degree the same cannot be said for the fandomization of blackness. In this circumstance,

196 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 51.

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the black body has no original author from which to borrow, but a shared one constructed through the Slave Codes of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and were then formed into ideological utterances displayed within theatrical performances, illustrations for sheet music, and eventually filmic and televisual images which distinguished whiteness and blackness. These images separate the ontology of the owner and the owned; they are slave texts.

Blackface Minstrelsy as a Slave Text

Slave texts, not to be confused with slave narratives, are texts in which a collective subject has no means of access or power to how it is being interpolated within a mediated environment. For instance, the previously mentioned the archetype or myth of the sexually voracious black woman, or jezebel, was according to Melissa Harris-Perry, borne out of

American slave society’s desire to justify the perpetual rape and assault of black women.197 On the minstrel stage, moments when white men would dress up as black women were rare, just as the presence of black women in the theatrical version was also rare. As Eric Lott notes, when a representation of a black woman did make an appearance, she was often a “wench” placed there to be a cipher for white male sexual pleasure.198 The idea of the always sexually available black woman filtered into a variety of blackface minstrel artifacts, particularly as the jezebel archetype becomes closely aligned with what Donald Bogle calls the “tragic mullato.”199

In the 1920s, Josephine Baker was a black woman whose erotic and erratic dancing made her an international sensation, while also proliferating the racist fandom created out of the

197 Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 67. 198 Lott, Love & Desire, 27. 199 Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 2016, 6

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blackface minstrel jezebel. Baker’s performances became synonymous for an “exotic” evil that could manipulate the minds of men. Nowhere is this illustrated better than in Fritz Lang’s science fictional elitist screed about the necessity in ensuring that power stays in the hands of the wealthy, Metropolis (1927). In the film, the working-class, who live underground with the machines, and the wealthy-class, who dwell in luxurious high-rises are on the verge of civil unrest. The working class is represented by a woman named Maria (Brigitte Helm), who wants to see the two sides come together as one people. In order to stop her, the elite’s leader kidnaps her and replaces her with a robotic manifestation of orientalism and anti-black racism. In one notable scene, false-Maria ensorcells the rich elite through a sexualized dance clearly borrowed from Josephine Baker, who was immensely popular in Berlin at the time.200 False-Maria is dressed in the same jungle attire as Josephine Baker, and the actress playing both Maria and her doppelgänger attempted to replicate Baker’s herky-jerky dancing. The implication of the distinction between Maria and her counterpart are quite clear.

The “real” Maria exemplifies traditionalist white femininity in both looks and performance. She demures to the will of men, desires to maintain the status quo, and dresses as if she was a farmer’s daughter, despite theoretically living her entire life in a large city. In contrast, false-Maria is overtly flirtatious, desires wanton destruction, and dresses provocatively. In short, false-Maria is infected by a combination of orientalism, which can be seen by the strange skulls and other Eastern iconography surrounding the robot, and the fandomized hyper-sexuality of a black woman. Even though the film has no people of color, false-Maria’s defeat and the lower-

200 Katherina Von Ankum, “Introduction,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed, Katherina Von Ankum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 9.

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class’ acceptance of the mantra that they are little more than “the hands,” ultimately indicts non- white cultural performances as the root cause of many of the issues inflicting white people in

1920s Germany. All, seemingly, because Fritz Lang bought into the American fandomization of black women. It bears pointing out that, in my view, Metropolis is not the slave text in question.

The slave text is the metaphorical construction of the black woman body that is remediated into

Metropolis. It is the unchallenged critique of black female performance.

Slave texts are bound forevermore to the whims of the reader/gazer who authors every element of meaning that can be derived. As the text has no singular author, no original gestation point, it thus has no capacity to challenge any reading of itself on the basis of intent. Josephine

Baker did not create the idea of the jezebel, like any number of black blackface performers before and after her, she capitalized on the fascination with out of control blackness. Slave texts like Baker are, in the Barthesian sense, pure signifier and signified—vulnerable at all times to constant signification outside of its purview. Blackness, and its attendant fandomized constructions, such as blackface minstrelsy, are thus remediated technological mythologies.

Objects born out of their immediate and hyper-mediated relationship to a dominant culture created an artificial reality whose ideological perspectives form the meaning of the object a priori to its creation. The slave text can only ever attempt to resist its mythological status, and almost always ultimately fails. This will become clearer in the corresponding chapters, but for now blackface minstrelsy exemplifies, herein, that the slave text had only limited opportunities to define itself outside of the gaze of white supremacy. And when it did, due to the hyper-visibility endemic in the systemic surveillance propagated against black bodies, it was always already

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vulnerable to miscalculation, remediation, or active disregard for its intended content construction.

Enslaved people brought their traditional performative elements, such as dancing and music, to America, and over the course of a century, these traditions were mined, reconstructed, and then re-presented to a largely Northern, white, male, lower middle-class audience, and then eventually the world.201 Even still, enslaved people were hesitant to give white people access to their actual cultural output, but that did not stop white people from taking the songs, stories, dances, and various other forms of cultural output, and remediating them into what we now consider the earliest incarnations of American popular culture.202 This did not stop blackface minstrelsy content creators, such as T.D Rice and Dan Emmett, from suggesting that their songs and routines originally came from enslaved people. In other words, blackface minstrel performers simultaneously created a veneer of authenticity from their performances, while also suggesting that their anti-black racist performances that justified the enslavement of black originated from black people themselves. In other words, these white men, who were so enamored with the performative aspects of African culture that allegedly ripped the songs and dance routines from their creators and original contexts, occupy the status of those creators, and then almost entirely erase the actual creators, keeping only the suggestion of trace amounts of their influence so that the occupiers could grant themselves an air of credibility.

Amongst blackface minstrelsy and American popular culture historians, how much of blackface minstrel shows came from re-creations of African cultural performances remains a

201 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 37. 202 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 37.

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contested issue, but for very different reasons. In their historical account of the cultural permanency of blackface minstrelsy, Darkest America: Blackface Minstrelsy From Slavery to

Hip Hop, Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen situate the genre through a “blackface minstrelsy tradition” that intertwines white and black aesthetic contributions, or what Christopher J. Smith calls a “creole synthesis.”203 Smith, Taylor and Austen all agree that, on some level, blackface minstrelsy, regardless of its origins, has been and remains a black artistic movement. Similarly,

W.T. Lhamon, writing in 2003, a full decade earlier than either Smith or Taylor and Austen, argues that T.D. Rice, better known to the world as Jim Crow, found a class-based commonality in the singing and dancing of enslaved people, which inspired him to create his popular character. To this point, Lhamon writes of Rice: “He bodied forth a figure that was simultaneously white and black, and whose location fudged class… That is, Jim Crow demonstrated the allure of the low, both to those who were indeed low and too many who were not.”204 As I have been arguing throughout this chapter, blackface minstrelsy was in no way

“simultaneously white and black,” but a flaying of the figurative and semi-literal black body so that white men could dance and sing while wearing the harvested black skin like people suits.

Of course, Lhamon states that he has no interest in redeeming the Jim Crow figure or

Rice for that matter. In his own words, “I want to deepen the sense of tragedy one feels upon seeing how those who controlled public space increasingly bent Jim Crow to their purposes,” and that “the earliest blackface minstrelsy plays were already ambiguous art… that had multiple

203 Christopher J. Smith, The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the roots of blackface Minstrelsy (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2013), 1. 204 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 4.

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meanings that included admiration for perceived blackness.”205 For Lhamon, the more relevant tragedy was how politicians and policy-leaders occupied and used the name and image of Jim

Crow after Rice’s death in 1860 obviously limited his capacity to offer consent, and not how

Rice occupied and used the images and cultures of blackness, supposedly, without their consent, and for economic and cultural gain. As Lhamon himself states: “In the Atlantic during Rice’s immediate era, the metaphor of blackness came to signal a worst-case condition that others who were neither black nor fully empowered could join and deploy to signal their own disaffection.”206 To Lhamon’s credit, he does appear to understand that non-black people have been using and, I would add, occupying blackness to make a statement about their own condition. What he does not seem to understand is that doing so is a core tenet of anti-black racism and the fandomization of blackness, at least not when black people are not fandomizing ourselves. Neither does he understand, to return to Hartman and the Afro-pessimists, how fungibility and accumulation are the fundamental elements of ontological blackness. Lhamon would likely not agree with my analysis, but I feel it is important to note that white people have been defending racist white people for their racism since before anyone currently alive can remember. It happens nearly every time one white person states that another white person is not racist, and especially when white people claim anti-white racism. A study conducted in 2011 by

Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers shows that more white people believe that anti-white racism is a bigger issue than anti-black racism.207 I am not suggesting that white people cannot

205 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 7. 206 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 4. 207 Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(3), (2011): 216.

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understand or diagnose racism; however, when white scholars attempt to suggest that a trend or an idea is not racist, when they try to reclaim something that scholars of color have thought of as racist, their burden of proof ought to be extraordinary. It is, of course, not white scholars who have had the history of racism carved into their bodies and psyches. As I illustrated in the first chapter, racism, white supremacy, and the academy continue to support each other. Lhamon claims, somewhat subtextually, that blackface minstrelsy, or apparently anything, ought not be considered racist because calling something racist “turns a tangle into a binary. It is a powerful weapon with many uses, including self-purification. But handy terminology guarantees neither deeper behavior nor fuller analysis.”208 Lhamon supports this claim by stating that racism is a relatively new term, not in use during the era of blackface minstrelsy, and it was created by

Nazis.209 So, obviously, he clears the hurdle for burden of proof.

Over a century after the creation of the blackface minstrelsy genre, Roland Barthes challenged readers to reconsider their conceptualizations of an author’s authority in his seminal,

“Death of the Author.” In it, Barthes argues that readers should pay no specific heed to a writer’s personal history or politics when attempting to uncover the meaning of a text. For fandom studies scholars, this text has been instrumental in arguing for a construction of textual meaning that does not end at the author’s intent, but extends outward to a larger cultural reading development of a text’s meaning formation. However, neither Barthes nor fan studies scholars were particularly interested in examining a history of textual meaning that corresponds to the material existence of actual people. While minstrel historians such as Yuval Taylor and Jake

208 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 10-11. 209 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 10.

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Austen and W.T. Lhamon have trouble separating out what is authentically black within the blackface minstrel tradition and what is white supremacist propaganda, noted black writer and intellectual, Ralph Ellison has no trouble seeing the distinction. In his famed essay: “Change the

Yoke and Slip the Yoke,” he rejects any idea that blackface minstrelsy expresses black cultural production when he writes: “Nor does the role, which makes use of Negro idiom, songs, dance motifs and wordplay, grow out of the Negro American sense of the comic…but out of the white

American’s Manichean fascination with the symbolism of blackness and whiteness expressed in…his general anti-tragic approach to experience.”210 For Ellison, the blackened mask of the minstrel performer, created through the use of either crushed cork or greasepaint, as well as the white-gloved hands that prominent minstrel performers wore, make up the singularly significant quality of the minstrel remediation. This costumed parroting of blackness constructed a visual formation of black identity that came to represent the white supremacist dogma of black inferiority. Whatever Lhamon might want to state about T.D. Rice’s amalgamation of whiteness and blackness, it was Rice’s most popular minstrel character that became the namesake for Jim

Crow laws. In African American cultural vernacular, the “coon” is a dancing and shuffling negro who sells himself and his race out for white adulation and dollars. An “Uncle Tom” is a black man who prostrates himself for the love of white people. Thus, any intellectual or historical conception of blackface minstrelsy that attempts to perceive the genre’s codified visage as somehow related to “authentic” blackness subtextually suggests that black people are in some way responsible for the oppressive and violent actions inherent within these performances. In

210 Ralph Ellison, “Change the Yoke and Slip the Yoke,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, Modern Library Paperback Edition (New York: Random House, 2003), 102.

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other words, blackface minstrelsy is one of the earliest and foremost examples of a fandom dislocating the meaning of a text (blackness) in order to assert an ideology that aligns with previously existing conceptions of reality (white supremacy). Or as Eric Lott writes:

Minstrelsy brought to public form racialized elements of thought and feeling, tone and impulse, residing at the very edge of semantic availability, which Americans only dimly realized they felt, let alone understood. The minstrel show was less an incarnation of an age-old racism than an emergent social semantic figure highly responsive to the emotional demands and troubled fantasies of its audiences.211 It strikes me as ironic that although Lott’s book on the relationship between blackface minstrelsy and the white working class in no way purports to be about fandom, its sub-title “Love and

Theft,” perfectly articulates the complex and fluid relationship between fans and their chosen textual object. The fandom practice of blackface minstrelsy involves both a love and fascination with the black body and the theft of its material condition. To remediate the black body for the purpose of constructing representations in order to reflect an already existent racist ideological framework of those same bodies illustrates the pitfalls with engaging in many fandom practices that occupy remediated bodies. The remediated minstrel body is a decontextualized copy of a decontextualized copy. When that body became recontextualized within a white supremacist cultural logic, it altered the state of the perpetually half-created original black body. The normative black men and women whose understanding of their own existence were created in part by a racist slideshow of the white supremacist dominant culture.

211 Lott, Love & Theft, 6.

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Blackface minstrelsy historians attempt to prove their argument through the use of archival data that seeks to illustrate the minstrel show performer’s intent. So there is no doubt that blackface minstrelsy inspired and was inspired by black art forms, and perhaps Rice really did not intend for his most famous character to become the namesake for the post-emancipation campaign of systemic alienation and deprivation of black people. Still, these claims were made in order to embolden the minstrel show’s authenticity, which inevitably meant that the white supremacist message that permeated throughout all minstrel performances became even more fungible since it was assumed to come from the enslaved themselves.

So while scholars like Lhamon have suggested that blackface minstrelsy’s capacity to heal the wounded white spirit, to subvert the conceptions of the enslaved black body into one in which fun and pleasure could be derived, amongst other reasons, somewhat pardons the practice of its racist roots, I would argue that the exact opposite is the case. For the progenitors of blackface minstrelsy to initially render blackness as a means to appropriate our condition through a systemic manifestation of racism in order to financially prosper is little more than the textual, musical, and imagistic re-enslavement of the black body as it reduces lives to products. The

Virginia Minstrels and others’ capacity to argue for a remediation of the black body so thorough it can be said to replicate it, as if black people were one size fits all, is to forever limit the capacity of blackness to fit outside of the white supremacist grammar of American popular culture. For the consumers of the black body as product, the bystanders, finding joy in the impoverished depictions of black existence is not much better. Or, as Eric Lott eloquently notes:

If the primary purpose of early blackface performance had been to display the “black” male body as a place where racial boundaries might be both constructed and transgressed, the shows that developed in the mid-1840s were ingenious in coming up with ways to

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fetishize the body in a spectacle that worked against the forward motion of the show, interrupting the flow of action with uproarious spectacles for erotic consumption.212 This is not to say that the early iterations of its practice or its most famous celebrity performers did not have their detractors. They did, but from a perspective that only highlights how dehumanizing the practice was toward black people. Even prior to the minstrel performance becoming codified as a medium within American popular culture, the earliest characters such as

T.D. Rice’s Jim Crow and Edwin Forrest’s Sambo, gained attention mostly from white working class men. However, according to Lhamon, the elites’ problem with Jim Crow and other blackface characters was that they “weren't racist enough.”213

To say the absolute least, the early remediated performances of black identity were far from benign; they were violent renderings of black existence that insisted upon an ontology of blackness devoid of agency, autonomy, and intellectual capacity. There were initially blackface minstrelsy performers and fans who seemed to delight in the otherness of blackness, but only as textual object. Only to be regarded as interesting within the fantastical realm of the minstrel milieu; only as a fetish through which the supremacy of whiteness could be confirmed. Even those minstrel performances that attempted to evoke the cleverness of tricksters, did so under the firm understanding that the trickster was inherently lesser than the average white person.214 It was if to say that if an enslaved person could be smart, it was only smart for a slave. For instance, the popular character, Zip Coon, created by G.W. Dixon, was depicted as a Northern

212 Lott, Love & Theft, 144. 213 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 11. 214Dunson, “Black Misrepresentation,” 48.

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free black dandy who foolishly used language that he could not control. In the minstrel milieu,

Zip Coon was smarter than what the performers and audiences of blackface minstrelsy would have thought was the average black man, but far dumber than any white person. In constructing this visage for a character, the performers seemed to not only insult black men as a whole, but they implied that he would be better off as a slave. In general, the blackface minstrel show was an attempt to alleviate white guilt toward the treatment of enslaved people through characters that not only seemed to enjoy being enslaved, but required it for continued existence. This remediated constraint of black identity would have significant impact post-emancipation as the ideological positioning of blackface minstrel shows was to intertwine blackness with slavery.

A New Beginning for Blackface Minstrelsy

Even as the popularity of the theatrical genre of blackface minstrelsy waned in the late nineteenth century, its fandomized alienation and fungibility of the black body had already begun to be encoded into every major form of American mass culture. If the black body can be understood as ontologically a slave-body and the textual, imagistic, and digital artifacts produced out of or from that blackness as “slave-texts” then the American media industrial complex, and truly America itself, can be understood ontologically as a plantation. The American plantation milieu, from the twentieth century until the present, uses the material and metaphorical condition of the black body as either signifier or signified, depending on its ideological purpose. In other words, while individual fans of the black body, regardless of their own specific racial designation, may use blackness for any number of ideological purposes: to metaphorically announce resistance, fear, violence, hyper-sexuality, athleticism, musicality, perseverance etc., the ultimate fan of the black body is America itself.

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In an earlier chapter I remarked upon how one of the most persistent problems that fan studies scholars face is the over-reliance on individual fans/fan communities, and not the way that fandoms operate as a systemic modality that often reflects, and even instigates, institutionalized oppression. The histories of blackface minstrelsy, racial representation in popular mediated images, and white supremacist institutionalized racism reveal that on nearly every level imaginable within the American plantation milieu, blackness is occupied and then employed, decoded and then recoded, objectified and then fandomized. Post-blackface minstrelsy, “to blackface” was to reconstitute the presupposed emancipated black body into its ontological slave form. Just as the “Coon Songs” were an attempt to nostalgically re-imagine black people in their “proper” place, so too has the remediated image of the black body— whether it be in television, film, or the digital—worked to reposition, or perhaps de-position, black folks into an ongoing condition of servitude. Moreover, this remediated servitude, which includes physical, emotional, and intellectual labor and entertainment, has been bolstered and buffered by America’s never-ending campaigns of systemic violence against black communities.

In effect, racialized systemic oppression is just as much a fandomization of the black body as blackface minstrelsy. Jim Crow Laws, redlining and other nefarious forms of housing segregation, mass incarceration, over-policing, the pre-school to prison pipeline, police brutality, etc., etc., etc., each work to constrain the capacity of black people to exist beyond our preconceived textual conditions. In short, America refuses to allow black bodies to become black humans. If the state sees your value as inherently that of the slave, then you are always already and forever a slave.

Blackface Minstrelsy Fandom in Film

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If the “Coon” song looked back nostalgically on the enslaved nigger, then early filmic fandomizations of blackness worked to place necessary boundaries around the agency of the unfortunately emancipated. In the early twentieth century, noted filmmaker Edwin Porter became one of the first to depict black bodies on screen. In 1903, prior to directing his most influential film, The Great Train Robbery, Porter directed two films that depicted actual black people,

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and What Happened in the Tunnel. However, let us not think that Porter’s depiction of black people somehow works to undermine blackface minstrelsy’s legacy of constraining black performance. In both films, Porter represents his black characters in ways that assert already existent white supremacist ideology. In What Happened in the Tunnel, a white

Northern dandy riding the train propositions a white woman who is sitting next to, presumably, her mammy. The woman attempts to politely decline the man’s advances, but he continues undaunted. The short film concludes when the train goes underneath a tunnel, causing temporary darkness. When the train exits the tunnel and light returns, the white dandy finds himself kissing the black mammy, who is now sitting in the seat that the white woman previously occupied. In response to his predicament, the white dandy recoils in horror, then makes a motion to wipe his mouth in order to cleanse the “filth” of placing his lips on black skin. The film ends with the white woman and black mammy laughing at the man’s disgrace—obvious to both the black and white woman, and thus to the audience as well.

The film works to fandomize the black woman’s body as disgusting, non-sexual, and wholly at peace with this racialized enjoyment. What Happened in the Tunnel reveals how fandomizations do more than just depict or represent, they tie together an image with a commonplace ideology that creates a narrative shorthand for consumer participants. The

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fandomized image of the black body disseminates a state-sponsored, fandom approved reading that requires very little in the way of more thorough investigation. Fans of the black body, as well as thoughtful investigators of how marginalized bodies are encoded in popular media, know that a black mammy encodes more than just a woman who happens to be a maid. In this case, the revulsion of the white dandy is seemingly meant to be a cautionary tale to young men who harass women on public transportation. If those men break through their own walls of Victorian respectability, they are thus deserving of kissing a black woman and engaging in an activity that humiliates them.

In Porter’s other film depicting actual black actors, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the main black characters are white actors in blackface, while the black actors are used primarily for dancing scenes in which enslaved people are depicted as fun-loving and happy, or as extras in cotton- picking scenes. Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a filmed version of the blackface minstrelsy- inspired “Tom Shows” of the middle part of the nineteenth century. Both Lott and Taylor and

Austen argue that it is incorrect to haphazardly align Tom shows with blackface minstrelsy but for different reasons. Lott suggests that some Tom shows were as invested in critiquing the institution as they were in upholding some of the visually constructed ideological concerns as more traditional blackface minstrelsy performances did.215 In contrast, Taylor and Austen see the difference between the Tom show and blackface minstrelsy, at least in the late 1800s, as being one of audience: Tom shows were largely for a white audience, while black people had by that time reclaimed blackface minstrelsy as their own.216 Of course, it is important to note, that

215 Lott, Love & Theft, 225. 216 Taylor and Austen, Darkest America, 55.

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Taylor and Austen examine the Tom show in a different temporal moment than Lott. Whereas

Lott examines the sub-genre in the 1850s, Taylor and Austen are interested in its continuation post-Civil War. Still, Tom plays were significant because, according to Lott, they were the medium through which many Americans consumed the ideologies found within Harriet Beecher

Stowe’s famous novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which has been credited with galvanizing the abolitionist movement in the mid-part of the nineteenth century.

That said, in the 1850s, Tom shows, like any proper fandom activity, twisted and reconsidered the ideology within Stowe’s novel, depending on who was in charge of the production.217 Porter’s own remediation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin conceives of Tom as both a force for anti-slavery and anti-blackness. In the film, Tom is played by a white man who stands in the foreground, with the actual black people standing in the background. Whether this was because

Porter wished to perpetuate the blackface minstrel notion that white men played black better than black men, or that he was simply replicating the visual orientation of the Tom show is anyone’s guess. However, it should be noted that black performers had been playing Tom for twenty years prior to Porter’s film. Regardless, through this casting, the film correlates Tom’s actions with whiteness. In the film’s eighteen-minute runtime, it also makes sure to recreate minstrel-style dance performances, even as it discards much of the plot contained in the plays and Stowe’s novel. In one particular moment halfway through the film, an enslaved black woman dances uncontrollably in front of the film’s two main characters played by white people: Tom and Eva.

The differences between how Tom and Eva are costumed compared to the black woman are

217 Lott, Love & Theft, 219.

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striking. They are dressed in the trappings of whiteness. Tom has on a suit. Eva has on a white dress. In contrast, the enslaved woman has on what amounts to a burlap sack. The distinction between Tom and Eva and the woman is further illustrated through their movements. Tom and

Eva are reserved in their movements, while the woman erratically bounces from one spot to another. The two characters in blackface seem simultaneously bemused and afraid of the wild gesticulations of the black woman. As they attempt to leave, the black woman grabs the belt off of Eva, who then goes on to scold the black woman for her raucous behavior. Thus it seems clear that Porter’s goal was to recreate the blackface minstrel spectacle, while also characterizing the distinction between whiteness and blackness. Tom and Eva are clearly marked as white through their clothing, mannerisms, and the actors playing them, while the black woman is depicted as a savage. Even in a film adaptation of an at-the-time fifty-year-old novel meant to, however problematically, argue for black emancipation, the black body still gets fandomized as inferior to the white body.

If the state gazes upon the remediated representation of your inferiority and then validates it, as is what happened when Woodrow Wilson used D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation

(1915) as the first film to be screened at the White House, then you become the nation’s fan object par excellence. Much has been, and continues to be, made of D.W. Griffith’s seminal racist screed, The Birth of a Nation. There have been so many historical and film theorist accounts of the film that I will not bother going into specific details of its production, or significance to film history, except to say that the film can be credited with creating the course of film history both through its formal filmic elements that delineated cinema from other visual mediums, and in its yearning desire to incorporate the white supremacist ideologies found within

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blackface minstrelsy into Hollywood-style films. So much has already been said about the film that I am somewhat apprehensive in including it in my analysis of post-minstrelsy blackface fandom. And yet, how can one deny the film that acts as both the perfect junction point between blackface minstrelsy and lynching, and also an exemplar of the capacity for “professional” filmmakers to fandomize blackness for their own ideological purposes. Let us make no mistake,

The Birth of a Nation is a fan-object made out of passionate engagement with remediated blackness. Blackness in the film exists at all turns to activate and enhance the larger public’s valuation of white nationalistic identity. For The Birth of a Nation is as much a violent assault on the potentiality of miscegenation, or visual lynching, as it is a paternalistic desire for black subjection to white supremacy, or blackfacing; this latter part would be true even if the movie did not largely feature white men in burnt-cork visage to depict black people.

The film, itself an adaptation T.F. Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman, re-authors the then recent history of the Reconstruction Era South through a white supremacist ideological prism. It fundamentally argues that Northern carpetbaggers were responsible for the degeneration of the post-emancipation South, with the inherently inferior black people depicted as animalistic underlings left to run amok without the needed constraint of the plantation milieu and its overseers. For instance, in one famous scene the film depicts a black-run legislature conducting their daily business with fried chicken, watermelon, and booze afoot. Herein, Griffith displaces the minstrel representation of black bodies outside of its typical plantation milieu and into the formal setting of a government body. In utilizing these caricatures of black existence, Griffith harkens to the minstrel ideology of black bodies requiring slavery in order to control their baser instincts. He suggests here that because white Northerners have let loose black people onto the

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American republic that the country, or at least the South, is now at risk of falling into utter chaos.

The racism of the scene positions itself within the white fan of the black body’s ideological understanding of the proper place of black people. Just as with the coon songs, the film does not desire a wholesale annihilation of black bodies, an idea which was only truly developing at the same time in scientific and sociological spaces as a response to black emancipation. Instead, like many fan texts, nostalgia is its primary mandate. The film’s success and persistent legacy, both despite and because of its racism, underscores the capacity of professional media content creators to activate the white audience’s fears of losing their place as the superior racial force governing

America’s future. The film’s usage of the visual grammar of blackface minstrelsy is, even if incidental, a stark reminder to the true legacy of blackface minstrelsy.

Fittingly, The Birth of a Nation’s most fandom like moment came at the end of the film when the Ku Klux Klan rides into town in order reassert power over the unruly negro bodies that had driven society into chaos. While the black legislation in the film might have legal power, the film desires its viewers to think of the Klan as the true representation of the law. This law, of course, is white supremacy; the crime being black agency. This moment strikes me as the most fanonical moment of the film because does this moment not, for many white fans, remediate history into an intensely pleasurable and entertaining text? Does it not also engage in one of

America’s most persistent shadow economies, the white supremacist control of the black body?

While we can levy any insult we want toward Griffith, we cannot deny that he understood the exact visual construction needed to activate a fandom that likely desired black subjugation almost as much as they needed to believe in white supremacy. In recreating the minstrel character, but placing him outside of the plantation milieu, Griffith was able to create a

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fandomized work of the remediated black body in order to cohere white supremacist ideology to the perceived threat of black autonomy. In this we see how Birth of a Nation’s visual representation of the Ku Klux Klan defending the nation against renegade black minstrel bodies has since then been used as a strategy in filmic and televisual mediations.

The violence of and against black minstrel bodies has, since Birth of a Nation, become interwoven within the very grammar of American mediated images. Through Gus, the film became the first major American work of visual media to feature an iteration of the white- woman-obsessed, hyper-sexual and violent blackface minstrel character, the black buck or

Stagolee.218 According to Donald Bogle, the undisputed authority on the reoccurrence of blackface minstrel characters in Hollywood cinema, this character was so immediately reviled that it altered the course of Hollywood history in that black men would, from that point forward, be resigned to be either toms or coons.219 In particular, the tom character type would eventually mold into the sexless, noble black character that actors such as Sidney Poitier and Will Smith have embodied. Ironically, as Ed Guerrero argues, it was the rise of the Blaxploitation film, which directly responded to Sidney Poitier’s neutered black male construction, which allowed

Hollywood cinema to again depict the minstrel trope.220

Griffith’s film, widely considered to be the forefather of Hollywood cinema, fandomizes blackness in two crucial ways that have had significant import in how American mediated

218 Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 4th Edition (New York; London: Continuum, 2001), 10. 219 Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 2001, 17. 220 Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1993), 70.

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culture understands the black body. The first is that the illusion that scaffolds Birth of a Nation’s filmic universe is that unmediated black bodies are dangerous black bodies. The second is that the only reasonable response to unmediated black bodies is violence. Over the last several decades, Hollywood films and television shows have quietly engaged in a visual campaign of control against violent black bodies. In response, cinematic violence against black people is often depicted as justifiable, because those who perform said violence represent the state. For instance, films such as Dirty Harry (Siegel 1971), Cobra (Cosmatos 1986) Marked for Death (Little

1990), and Demolition Man (Brambilla 1993) valorize the police assault on black bodies and black communities. Ed Guerrero argues in Framing Blackness: The African American Image in

Film that these sorts of films reflect a conservative shift in filmic practices that respond to claims within black communities for greater economic opportunity and political agency in the 1960s and 1970s.221 Thus, larger ramifications of the fandomization of the black body within Griffith correspond to the entangled realities of the remediated black body with the actual lives of black people. As Henry Giroux states: “Hollywood thrives on the spectacle of racial violence and the

American government devolves into a torture state. But it is also a society that has intensified its racism behind the cloak of colorblindness and other post-racial myths while at the same time exercising with more diligence in its policing and punishing functions.”222 Thus, the Klan riding in to save the day in Birth of a Nation becomes an early incarnation of the now common visual of police in riot gear standing against protesters in black communities. Of course police do not

221 Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 104-105. 222 Henry Giroux, “Hoodie Politics: Trayvon Martin and Racist Violence in Post-Racial America,” Truth- Out.org, April 2, 2012, accessed March 4, 2017, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/8203-hoodie-politics-and-the- death-of-trayvon-martin.

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just do this in response to mostly black protests, but this is where Giroux’s notion of colorblindness and post-racial come into play. One could obviously argue that police would shoot tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters like they did in Ferguson, Missouri and Standing

Rock, but what other community except black ones exist under the dehumanizing conditions of

Ferguson, Missouri? The myth of a post-racial America posits a country in which all bodies are created and treated equal. And yet, somehow this myth has contradictorily created two separate digital pseudo-movements: #BlueLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter. In both instances, these fandom movements access the ideological modes of engagement of fan communities in order to attempt to further constrain the black performance. In particular, #BlueLivesMatter has inspired various forms of cultural marginalia in the form of shirts, pins, and flags in order to, seemingly, argue that a lack of compliance from black people, or to put another way, black agency, deserves a death sentence.

Conclusion

This history of blackface minstrelsy and its remediation in early forms of cinematic representation demonstrates that within the American plantation milieu the slave-text and the black body are one in the same. What remediated fandomizations of the black body reveal are that even though all bodies, all people, are capable of being fandomized, black people are always already in process of being fandomized—always already a textual object. The fans of blackface minstrelsy were consuming the libidinal ideology of an original text, the black body, which they had little firsthand awareness of. As such, the white northern fan of blackface minstrelsy relied on the visual and musical texts in order to temporarily displace their own identity within the black body’s, while also continuing to maintain an affective superiority of that body. Blackface

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minstrelsy as a genre, its continual presence as a remediated strategy, and as an act of fandom, exemplifies this condition. However, blackface minstrelsy ideology, the visual and textual constraint of the black body, also endured throughout one of America’s most oppressive conditional states: The Lynching Era.

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CHAPTER 3

LYNCHING AS FANDOM

Introduction

The black body was film before there were films, radio before there were radio programs, and television before there were television shows. The black body has been the textual space in which America carved out the blackface minstrel, which historians call America’s first true popular culture. In many respects, the black body remains the most popular and significant mediated object that we have. From sports to music to digital culture, the American consciousness has been obsessed with all manners of black performance since at least the nineteenth century. Like many popular mediated texts, blackness produces fans that watch, analyze, and remediate it. Fandoms may write songs, deconstruct and reconstruct images, perform cosplay, write fan fiction that re-author the mediated text in ways that confer with the fandom’s ideological position. The object’s disobedience is met with a physical, textual, or imagistic assault that reinforces the original text’s ideological or content position. Fan remediations illustrate the fan’s capacity to deconstruct the capitalist consumer regime through re-assigning the meanings and values of corporate cultural objects. But when fandoms do reassert the values of the dominant culture, it is often with more veracity. Those values, I argue, allowed for white people to position and ontologically understand the black body to be a tool for labor and entertainment.

It is these two terms that are central to my argument. In the case of labor, the black body, in all its permutations, is and has been used as a way to scaffold and construct white identity.

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From slavery onward, the dominant culture has, in service of white people, used its misreading of the black body as inferior, violent, lazy, lustful, and stupid in order to suggest that white people, the white body, is its opposite. In doing so, the dominant culture also created a paradigm in which the black body, at a moment’s notice, could be rendered an object of entertainment that white people could occupy in order to imbue themselves with pleasure. Lynching sits at the intersection of labor and entertainment. The dominant culture of the late nineteenth and early to middle twentieth centuries granted white people the authority to kidnap, torture, and murder black children, men, and women for nearly any reason without having to worry about legal ramifications. This manifest discordant power dynamic further concretized the white supremacist ideology that slavery had already institutionalized. The difference was that not only did lynching author a reality that even emancipated black people were inherently less than white people, it also allowed potentially all white people to find revelry in the physical dismantling of black people. And find it they did. At its height, hundreds of thousands of (mostly) white spectators attended lynchings. They took photographs, collected body parts, and wrote songs in celebration of participating at a lynching. In this chapter, I argue that lynchings and their attendant activities can best be understood as a participatory fandom.

The work of two thinkers is instrumental to my argument. First, I build on what

Jacqueline Goldsby calls “the cultural logic of lynching,” in which she suggests that the ideologies that inspired lynchings and allowed them to take place did not represent the abnormal behavior of a select few, but was central to the way that late nineteenth and early twentieth

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century American culture understood free black people.223 Second, my inquiry is guided by what

Amy Louise Woods calls “the spectacle of lynching”:

The rituals, the tortures, and their subsequent representations imparted powerful messages to whites about their own supposed racial dominance and superiority. These spectacles produced and disseminated images of white power and black degradation, of white unity and black criminality, that served to instill and perpetuate a sense of racial supremacy in their spectators. Lynching thus succeeded in enacting and maintaining white domination not only because African Americans were its targets but also because white southerners were its spectators.224

While I will expand upon how the ideology inherent in lynching images fused with a burgeoning mass media culture in the next chapter, this chapter focuses on physical lynching—its tortures and rituals—and how its fandom remediated black people into black bodies, and how the remediations of those remediations inspired a fundamentally white supremacist project.

Lynching and the Remediated Black Body

On May 15, 1916, in Waco, Texas, Jesse Washington was lynched in front of 15,000 uproarious men and women for being accused of murdering Lucy Fryer, a white woman (Fig.

A3).225 In an assault not dissimilar to thousands more like it, Washington underwent a process in which his body was remediated in a number of different ways until it was finally destroyed.

223 Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 228. Woods, Lynching and Spectacle, 2005), 14. 224 Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 2. 225 Jesse Washington, “The Waco Horror: What does it mean to share a name with the victim of one of the most infamous lynchings in American history?” The Undefeated, N.D. accessed April 17, 2017, https://theundefeated.com/features/the-waco-horror/.

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According to Bolter and Grusin, “remediation,” the process through which one form of mediated object is transformed into another, involves two separate, smaller processes of visual representation: immediacy and hypermediacy.226 In the case of the former, “immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented.”227

Which is to say that the immediacy of a visual image, its capacity to immerse the spectator within its frame, obfuscates its artificiality. Bolter and Grusin are quick to point out that receivers of the remediated object do not draw a one-to-one correlation between the representation and what it stands for, but that there is a “necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents.”228 They go on to suggest that this contact point materializes as some form of sensorial or conceptual affordance available in the space in which the mediated object exists. For instance, light makes the photograph seem immediate, while continuity editing does the same for film. This idea becomes problematized when we decontextualize the theory of remediation from its original bearings and move it to a space where the visually represented object cannot be divorced from the physical object it represents because they are one and the same.

Every act of lynching has at its ideological core an immediacy of retribution and discipline unheard of in any other social context. Physical, textual, or imagistic lynchings (see the next chapter) insist that the black body be punished for whatever “crime” it may have committed at that moment, lest black people witnessing the social ordination of the event get the

226 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge; London: MIT Press, 1996), 4. 227 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 6. 228 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 30.

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idea that they too can access a similar level of agency or autonomy implied by the “crime.” Yet, it is fundamental to the history of lynching that we understand that lynching has never been about the punishment of black people who commit illegal acts. Rather, lynching acts as a mode of containment that hinders the autonomy of black people to perform their blackness in ways that they see fit in whatever the white supremacist society deems public spaces. Thus, in effect, any time an individual black person is lynched, the black body itself is being lynched. The immediate logic of remediation thus reveals that within the still ongoing lynching culture, the black body exists both as remediated text and object of fandom because a black person has always been in danger of being spontaneously remediated if she fails to meet the ever-changing guidelines of the larger dominant spectator culture that governs her.

Lynching is every bit the remediated object that a biography of a person’s life is because the body itself is being moved into a new mediated space for public consumption that disregards the person’s agency or status as a citizen. Just as a person’s life becomes textualized into the limited framework of a book, lynching turns a black person into a readable object encoded with a set of ideological markers. And yet, the precarious conceptualization of black citizenship, which has only mildly improved in the century since Washington’s lynching, alludes to the second dynamic at work within Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation: hypermediacy. Bolter and

Grusin state that hypermediated texts are so inundated with mediated objects that they call attention to their own mediation.229 For them, this phenomenon best reveals itself in a web browser with multiple windows open. However, hypermediacy does not end at the boundaries of

229 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 31.

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visual representations on mechanically constructed screens, but also explains how subject positions, particularly those of marginalized groups, have been constructed throughout American history. Perhaps better than any other group, American black people descending from enslaved populations reveal the way that hypermediacy complicates the notion of a singularized, unified identity. As I state in the Introduction, the very notions of black people and blackness evolved from the technological moorings of the Middle Passage and slavery. As Frank Wilderson argues, there was no such thing as a black person before slavery and, subsequently, the various formations of black identities that have erupted since emancipation stem from a complex intertwining of traditional African cultural practices, imposed white supremacist values, and organically created manifestations of black survival, self-loathing, and resistance that have been created since the latter part of the nineteenth century. The pluralization of each node reflects the multitude of practices at work, or hypermediacy, in the construction of black thought, identity, and consciousness both for black people, and for the dominant culture itself.

Washington’s trial and subsequent murder reflect the hypermediacy and immediacy embedded within remediation. The process through which Washington went from black man to object of mediated fandom, a black body, happened almost as soon as he was accused of the crime. In what, at the time, was called “one of the quickest trials on record in this part of Texas,” a mob rushed Washington immediately after the guilty verdict was levied against him.

Washington was then kidnapped from the courtroom, chained by the neck, and dropped into an open flame.230 Once the attackers had satiated their lust for his death, Washington’s charred body

230 “15,000 Witness Burning of Negro in Public Square,” New York World, May 16, 1916, quoted in 100 Years of Lynching, edited by Ralph Ginzburg (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988), Kindle Edition.

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was then hung in the town square for public consumption. According to news reports at the time, the entire affair lasted less than an hour.231 The immediacy here, and in any moment when a body’s status shifts from citizen to criminal, and when a criminal transforms into a victim of state-sponsored racial violence, works on a level beyond simply the expediency of the actual affair. This alteration of the identity of the object, transformed into the body, represents both the power of the state and its attendant ideological hammer, white supremacy. Immediacy, as such, operates on two levels that have been largely ignored by both media scholars and historians of lynching, prisons, and state authorized violence.

The first is that the American criminal enforcement system, itself a mediated technology, remediates people into bodies, into criminals, except when those bodies are black bodies, because, according to all American institutions, now, then, and possibly forever, black bodies are always already criminals in waiting. Because blackness is trapped within an ideological rubric that locks black existence within the plantation milieu, which is to say ontological slavery, free black existence is seen as fundamentally criminal. As the work of Khalil Gibran Muhammed,

Douglas Blackmon, and Michelle Alexander reveal, from the end of slavery onward, even during

Reconstruction, blackness and criminality became intertwined within the American consciousness. As Muhammed states, “the problem was racial criminalization: the stigmatization of crime as ‘black’ and the masking of crime among whites as individual failure. The practice of linking crime to blacks, as a racial group, but not whites… reinforced and reproduced racial

231 “15,000 Witness Burning of Negro.”

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inequality.”232 When we take into account the lingering impact of blackface minstrelsy on this newly emancipated black public, a free black person was doubly guilty. Not only was she always already stolen property, but she was under constant surveillance and subject to the whims of a violent fannish culture that she had only limited means to combat. For her, guilt was not just assumed, it was interwoven into her very existence. It was immediate.

The second way that immediacy has been ignored is that many Americans believed then, as they do now, that the purpose of the courts is to mete out justice, not to control deviant bodies who, in some way, reflect the larger dominant culture’s conceptualization of blackness. Justice itself does not describe a constructed paradigm that alters individual lives at the point of contact; it is, in most situations, the naturally occurring means through which a society controls and disciplines its deviant members. The very symbolic constructions of the American legal system as “Lady Justice” and two evenly distributed scales—suggests that the law functions as a neutral arbiter of disputes. We, of course, know that not to be the case. The sharp contrasts in the incarceration rates between black people and white people are neither the work of an unbiased system, nor people getting what they deserve. Justice is a mediation of events colored by ideology. Moreover, in the case of a lynching like Jesse Washington’s, the white mob deputized itself, further obfuscating its own mediation in favor of the pleasurable act of torturing and murdering a black man.

A Brief History of Lynching Ideology

232 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010), 3.

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The majority of white people and the majority of black people have differing views on how the dominant culture responds to and controls black bodies. In the temporal moment of physical lynchings, 1877-1950, the lack of black agency and white liberal sympathy over the largely Southern-based campaign of racial terror allowed for a specific brand of black bodily hypermediation to take root in the American consciousness. Black people were the victims of a seemingly contradictory set of mediated signifiers that allowed for their destruction if they did not choose wisely enough in a given moment. Black people were lynched, and continue to be lynched, because black people asserted an autonomy that pushed back against the ontology that hundreds of years of enslavement remediated into the conceptual and imagistic confines of blackface minstrelsy. Being a slave means to have access only to agency first granted by the white dominant culture, the slave master par excellence. In 1712, Slave Codes were written to restrict the movement of possibly renegade (autonomous) black bodies outside of the plantation and mandated that enslaved peoples’ quarters must be searched every fortnight to make sure that they did not possess firearms or any other property not meant for them.233 The punishment for any enslaved person who broke these onerous laws was either death or mutilation, depending on the severity of the “crime.” For a white owner, failure to uphold the Slave Codes resulted in a fine and loss of “property.” The Slave Codes created the first apparatus for the examination of the now hyper-visible and hypermediated black body. Moreover, these codes also necessitated that it was the responsibility of the seventeenth-century colony writ large to uphold the conditions of black enslavement, since any black person required the necessary paperwork in

233 Charles M. Christian, Black Saga: The African American Experience: A Chronology (New York: Civitas Books, 2008), 17.

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order to be able to move outside of the purview of the plantation if not in the company of a white person. Autonomous black movement thus became an act worthy of surveillance. And yet the white supremacist scopophilia of the black body inherent in the future mediated representations did not begin with the Slave Codes. Rather, the Slave Codes granted white people unfettered access to mitigate and control black autonomy, which then bled into the remediated spectacle known as blackface minstrelsy.

Blackface Minstrelsy and Lynching

As I discussed in Chapter 2, the first wide-scale remediation of the black body came out of the blackface minstrel tradition. Blackface minstrel shows largely presented white men, with black tar or burnt cork covering their faces in order to create a veneer of blackness, singing and dancing in ways that would become one of the dominant culture’s accepted understandings of performed blackness. The initial rise of blackface minstrel shows, which for a time were

America’s leading cultural art form, reduced black people to stereotypes that negated their intelligence and agency, while simultaneously revealing what I call a “slave text.”234 The most beloved blackface minstrel performers presented black men and women as either docile buffoons or jovial, if loyal, idiots in order to justify slavery. However, subsequent renditions of blackface minstrelsy, particularly after emancipation, did not simply end their justification for black enslavement. With black people free from the actual shackles of slavery, some blackface minstrelsy characters became violent and aggressive. This shift from stalwart and lovable fools

234 Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen, Darkest America: Blackface Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop, (New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), Kindle Edition

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to dangerous and threatening aggressors invited spectators to perceive of slavery as good for both white people and black people. In the case of the former, black people were depicted as an ever- present threat to whiteness and the nation, and for the latter, black people needed slavery to control their baser instincts. In particular, one aspect of the remediated black body was that it represented a constant danger to the virtue of white women. So, when Jesse Washington confessed to the murder of Lucy Fryer, the white dominant culture’s understanding of his hypermediated body was validated.

The fan impulse to define blackness and black behavior within a constrained rubric stems largely from the Stagolee or “black brute” character that entered into the genre’s milieu after the

Civil War. For instance, Sam Hose, one of the country’s most famous lynching victims, was described in the Newnan Herald and Advisor as “the black brute, whose carnival of blood and lust has brought death and desolation to the home of one our best and most worthy citizens,” must be “run down and made to suffer the torments of the damned in expiation of his hellish crime.”235 As discussed in the last chapter, the over-sexualized Stagolee was a blackface minstrelsy character created post-Emancipation who longed violently for white women. A racist textual object created by white men in response, seemingly, to their newly lost ability to control and constrain the movement of black people, in particular black men, became one of the primary rationales employed in the construction of a new de facto slavery system.

235 Phillip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Modern Library Inc., 2003), 5.

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On the surface, this seems like an impossible and absurd moment in history, and yet it happened because black people, or more appropriately, black bodies, were already understood as textual objects—things that could be written and rewritten, read and reread based on the needs of the white supremacist dominant culture, or a person who represents it. Blackface minstrelsy thus cannot be separated from lynching or any other form of racial terror because blackface minstrelsy had already created within the white American imagination an acceptable form of black public performance: the obedient, loyal, and deferential tom and the black woman counterpart, the deferential and nurturing mammy. To illustrate, those black men and women who walked off of the sidewalk when a white person approached, who bowed their heads in reverence when a white person deemed them worthy enough to talk to, who understood, or at least behaved as if they understood, their place as natural inferiors were less likely to be lynched.

Still, adhering to these strict social mores would not necessarily save a black person from being lynched. As an Equal Justice Initiative report on lynching states: “Many African Americans were lynched not because they committed a crime or social infraction and not even because they were accused of doing so, but simply because they were black and present when the preferred party could not be located.”236 Thus, just as with blackface minstrelsy, while lynchings were a psychological form of cultural torture meant to cohere white supremacist ideology through the active destabilization of safety for black people and within their communities, it was also a white form of entertainment of which black people were the unwitting stars.

236 Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (Montgomery, Alabama: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015), 30.

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Additionally, while historians of lynching and blackface minstrelsy often give nods to the other in that they both hold significant consequence in the centuries-long history of white supremacist assault on black people, they have not, in my view, emphasized that the two are irrevocably linked. The era of blackface minstrelsy (roughly the 1830s-1880s) remediated black existence into consumable artifacts that managed to simultaneously confer black inferiority and establish an ideological component of white supremacy. At the core of blackface minstrelsy performances were depictions of dancing Negroes who were, largely, happy within the bondage of enslavement. Blackface minstrelsy texts constructed an epistemological notion of blackness for the white imagination in which the contours and articulations of black performance were under the purview of white content creators. On the minstrel stage there were no misbehaving black bodies. Black people were slaves, and their remediated representations were happy with that status. Once black people achieved emancipation, white supremacy could no longer rely on the plantation milieu as the only affordance allowable to black people; for twelve years following emancipation, white people had few formal methods at their disposal to control black people.

However, that did not stop “coon song” artists in the late 1860s/early 1870s, such as James A.

Bland, from creating songs and blackface minstrel shows that waxed nostalgic about the “good ole days” of antebellum America when black folks knew their proper (ontological) place was in and under captivity.

To be fair and clear, the lynching fandom is not made up only of white people. There are people from all races and ethnicities who emotionally profit from the conceptual and actual death of black bodies, including black people. However, the logic of rendering the black body into a textual object that consecrates an identity through that body’s destruction is a particularly

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American white supremacist project. For instance, according to George M. Frederickson, lynching either as a culture or a practice does not exist in South Africa, the closest analogue to the United States in terms of the white supremacist domination over black bodies.237 What makes the United States of America so unique when it comes to lynching fandom is that just as the people of America were constructing a racialized hierarchy for themselves post-slavery, the mass media culture which has allowed American ideology to spread throughout the world through films, television shows, and music was also taking shape. For instance, on the same day,

February 1, 1893, that Thomas Edison recorded his first film in his famous Black Maria Studio in Edison, New Jersey, Henry Smith was lynched in front of five thousand people in Paris,

Texas. Thus, while lynching is by no means America’s first fandom, it predates many of the media industries that govern fan identity. Before any of the current major sports leagues, film, television, or radio, there was lynching culture. Lynching culture and its fandom meant that five thousand people would travel to Paris, Texas on a Wednesday in order to see Henry Smith lynched. Lynching culture and its fandom meant that some of those five thousand would purchase pictures of his charred body from professional photographers who came to the spectator event to make extra money. It also meant that those pictures would later be paired with a phonographic recording of Henry Smith’s screams while he was tortured and murdered so that lynching fans as far east as New York City and as far west as Seattle could consume, relive, and enjoy his death since they could not be there in person. Lynching was not America’s first

237 George M. Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American & South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 251.

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fandom, but it is perhaps the first fandom to have major implications for the technological modes of production that would later become a hallmark of American mass media culture.

In 1901, eight years after Smith was murdered, while walking down a street in Seattle,

WA, Samuel Burdett happened upon a man advertising a “new” form of audio-visual entertainment.238 This new form of entertainment amounted to an alleged recording of Smith’s screams set to photographs of his lynching. Two decades before the film industry would standardize “talkies” and five years before Thomas Edison finished developing his kinetoscope, lynching peddlers were integrating the sounds and images of black death to satisfy and create lynching fans in nearly every part of the globe.239 Five years after Burdett’s discovery, on the other side of the country, in a New York City nickelodeon, Lester Walton paid a penny to watch a filmic version of Smith’s lynching. Both Samuel Burdett and Leston Walton were black critics with activist bents. The fact that each of them, years apart, could encounter remediations of

Smith’s lynching illustrates how deeply and thoroughly lynching fandom permeated a burgeoning American mass media system and how even black people could become complicit participants in the lynching fandom. Even though in both instances, the remediations of the

Henry Smith lynching were turned into profit-inspired visual objects, their very existence functions both as acts of fandom and as objects used to disseminate the fandom.

In the late nineteenth century, lynching, a tool used against black people after slavery, served and still serves to discipline black people who fail to willfully perform their blackness in ways that reflect the model set by blackface minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy and lynching

238 Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 72-73. 239 Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret, 228. Woods, Lynching and Spectacle, 73.

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occupy two poles of the same sphere. As I stated in Chapter 2, the minstrel show, along with the textual objects that followed in its tradition, remediated enslaved black people’s performative acts of resistance (singing, dancing, and showmanship) into a perverse mimetic form of parodic denigration. The result of these remediations was that the black body became an iconic attribution of non-existence, a thing devoid of being, but a thing nonetheless. To be a thing, but not a being, meant that the fictionalized ideological signifiers associated with blackface minstrelsy were, after slavery, personified as actual black people. As Nicole R. Fleetwood writes,

“the racial icon…conveys the weight of history and the power of the present moment, in which her or his progress marks the historic moment. To stand apart and to stand for are the jobs of the racial icon.”240 After slavery, black people in America had no collective history; blackface minstrel icons and white supremacy became their history. As such, the lovable, loyal, and oafish

“tom” character became one of the few acceptable behavior modalities that a black man could safely engage. Lynching then became a literal and figurative corrective disembodying of a black person; it was a mode of engagement where black people were forced to inhabit that history or else. In other words, just as blackface minstrelsy was an early remediated fandom of the black body in that it created a visual and performative definition of appropriate black behavior, lynching, along with the visual (photographs, postcards, paintings, and films) and material objects (the actual mutilated body of the lynching victim) created from and about lynchings, is a remediated participatory fandom which attempts to discipline black bodies whose public

240 Nicole R. Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (New Brunswick, University of Rutgers Press, 2015), Kindle Edition.

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performance fails in some way to reflect the canonized textual formation of the blackface minstrelsy slave genre.

One of the more prominent concerns throughout the history of America has been uncontrollable blackness. This has been evident in the rhetoric used to write laws regarding black movement and autonomy since the 1600s. Where this connects directly with lynching culture is that some of the very first laws negating black agency were written with interracial relationships at their center. The white male fear of black men engaging in sexual relationships with white women has been at the core of white supremacist racism since the late seventeenth century when the first anti-miscegenation laws were written stating that any non-slave (white) woman who married an enslaved (black) man would herself, along with any children that the two might have, be placed into bondage. Of course, these laws did not explicitly forbid relationships between black men and white women; instead they relied on language that made their point clear, while denying the law’s intent. The statute reads:

That if any English woman being free shall have a bastard child by any negro or mulatto, she pay the same of fifteen pounds sterling, within one month after such bastard child be born, to the Church wardens of the parish where she shall be delivered of such child, and in default of such payment she shall be taken into the possession of the said Church wardens and disposed of for five yeares, and the said fine of fifteen pounds, or whatever the woman shall be disposed of for, shall be paid, one third part to their majesties for and towards the support of the government and the contingent charges thereof, and one other third part to the use of the parish where the offense is committed, and the other third part to the informer, and that such bastard be bound out as a servant by the said Church wardens until he or she shall attaine the age of thirty yeares, and in case such English woman that shall have expired that she ought by law to serve the mater for five yeares,

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and the money she shall be sold for divided as is before appointed, and the child to serve as aforesaid.241 The heavy price enacted on any white woman who chose to be in a relationship with an enslaved black man reveals how serious early white colonialists took the threat of interracial relationships, at least those between enslaved black men and white women. For them, these relationships were an affront to the natural order of existence, a crime against humanity. Other forms of interracial relationships were also punished: any white man or white woman who married a black person or a Native American was to be banished from the colony. And yet, it was only this form of relationship that justified the levying of a fine against the white woman, and if that woman could not afford the fine, the enslavement of said white woman. The obvious threat was that a white woman, with limited access to money except from her father, would be unable to pay such a fine and thus be forced into bondage. Given the punishment, it seems unlikely that many white women would willingly put themselves and their children into slavery.

As equally inevitable, the rhetoric of anti-miscegenation laws in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would soon become as transparent as the racism of society itself. Just as race, blackness, and slavery became systematically knotted together in a bond so tight that it was impossible to disentangle, so too did the hyper-visibility of the black body and the white

American imagination’s fascination, lust, and fear of it—the irony of course being that one of the most fundamental and lingering conditions of slavery, for both black women and black men, is

241 William Waller Hening, The New Virginia Justice, Comprising the Office and Authority of a Justice of the Peace, in the Commonwealth of Virginia. : Together with a Variety of Useful Precedents Adopted to the Laws Now in Force. : To Which Is Added, an Appendix Containing All the Most Approved Forms of Conveyancing, Commonly Used in This Country, Such as Deeds, of Bargain and Sale, of Lease and Release, of Trust, Mortgages, &c, vol.3 (Richmond, VA: Early American Prints), 86-88.

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the nearly three hundred years of rape that white men inflicted on black women. While black women were also the occasional victims of physical lynchings, it was most often black men who were tortured, hanged, mutilated, and set on fire in the name of an entertainment product that also stabilized the white supremacist cultural identity.

With regard to physical assault, black women were just as likely to be rendered into objects in need of deletion as black men, but for very slightly different reasons. In fact, just as black men were deemed over-sexual as a justification for lynching, black women have been denigrated and fandomized as voracious sexual beings in order to justify the centuries-long campaign of sexual violence inflicted upon them.242 Additionally, many of the black women who were the victims of lynching were also raped prior to their murders. For instance, according to an article in the Chicago Defender in 1915, Cordelia Stevenson, a black woman, was raped and lynched because her son was accused of burning down a barn.243 While some, including Melissa

Harris-Perry in her essential Sister Citizen, situate that the creation of a cultural attitude, as evidenced in mediated objects such as novels, plays, television shows, film, and popular music, correlate to a mythological assignment of black bodily behavior, I believe that the idea of myth simply does not go far enough. The notion that black women are thought to be hyper-sexual and thus deserving, or even wanting, of rape is a myth implies that what we are talking about is a cultural lie told so often that we have forgotten that it has no correlation to reality. Instead, I use

“fandomize” both in this instance and to describe the larger textualization of the black body into

242 Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 49. 243 “Rape, Lynch, Negro Mother,” Chicago Defender, December 15, 1915, quoted in 100 Years of Lynching, edited by Ralph Ginzburg.

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objects that can be used, abused, and discarded at the leisure of a white supremacist nation and its most ardent agent-supporters; to fandomize another individual is an active and purposeful reconceptualization of that individual’s reality. Further, to be a victim of fandomization shows the inherent vulnerability of being an ontological slave—an object permanently removed from subjecthood. Thus, even in Harris-Perry’s own otherwise thoughtful and detailed cultural history, black women can be and are fandomized into tools for labor and entertainment in whatever form or shape the white supremacist mediated culture desires them to be at that given moment.

Moreover, to describe black people within the American imaginary as tools for labor and entertainment might not be putting a strong enough point on the material reality of black existence. Black people were not, are not, tools in the most direct sense of the word: meaning a thing used for a specific purpose. Embedded within the very ontological conceptualization of the black body comes a stratagem that allows blackness to hold a status of infinite fungibility, to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s term for one of the central properties of the black slave, and endless utility. Hartman calls this psychic gesture that circumscribes blackness to a perilous position in

America’s social order “The Property of Enjoyment.”244 To this point, Hartman states:

The constitution of blackness as an abject and degraded condition and the fascination with the other’s enjoyment went hand in hand. Moreover, blacks were envisioned fundamentally as vehicles for white enjoyment, in all of its sundry and unspeakable expressions; this was as much the consequence of the chattel status of the captive as it was of the excess enjoyment imputed to the other, for those forced to dance on the decks

244 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 23.

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of slave ships crossing the Middle Passage, step it up lively on the auction block, and amuse the master and his friends were seen as the purveyors of pleasure.245 Placed within the context of American history, the crowds of tens of thousands who sometimes travelled miles to see a black person lynched served as a reminder to both black and white citizens of the seemingly omnipotent capacity of white supremacy to remediate black bodies in whatever form a white person desired. If the enslaved were the “purveyors of pleasure” then the form that pleasure took on was of no consequence to lynching fans. It could be the joviality and deprived autonomy of the minstrel character; its antecedent, the dancing slave; or the scorched and mutilated remains of the lynching victim. At every level of American society following

Emancipation, black people were perceived as renegade slaves who had somehow been set loose on an undeserving white public.

This strand of thought emerges within the American imaginary even prior to

Reconstruction. The Thirteenth Amendment granted black people freedom from bondage and tyranny of slavery, while simultaneously adding a clause that made sure that individuals who commit crimes could be placed into some form of bondage. While the Thirteenth Amendment did not explicitly encode criminality with blackness, historians and legal experts such as Douglas

Blackmon, Michelle Alexander, and others have illustrated how the Thirteenth Amendment gave law enforcement and corporations (which often worked in conjunction with one another), the leverage needed to place many formerly enslaved people back on the plantations from which they had previously been emancipated. Blackness became synonymous with criminality because

245 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 23.

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various laws were enacted that matched the ideology surrounding the black body at the time, creating a system that victimized those black people who were the most vulnerable.

Just as being black comes with a set of specifically imported qualifiers that, regardless of how contradictory, always adhere, other qualifiers can be encoded at a moment’s notice for whatever purpose the encoder deems necessary. This is what it means for black people to be ontologically slaves. As Frank Wilderson states:

If, as an ontological position, that is as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Humanity establishes, maintains, and renews its coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is having no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of relationality, then our analysis cannot be approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not unless the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world.246 The black body, in Wilderson’s formulation, does not exist to serve; it does not serve in a conceptual sense at all except as a means through which humanity (whiteness) governs its usage.

Blackness is then the ultimate site of fandom because it is a creation of a fandom after the fact. It is a thing that is used only insofar as it coheres together the framework of white identity. Thus the “gratuitous violence” of lynching, or police brutality, for which the black body remains open, is violence only from the perspective of the victimized and those who somehow can connect their own suffering to that violence. For the rest of the country, it can be ignored or it can be entertainment. Returning to Goldsby, lynching is in actual fact no “spectacular secret” at all. To

246 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: University Press, 2010), 11.

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suggest otherwise is to conceptualize an America that regards blackness in opposition to

Wilderson’s words. And while that is by no means impossible, it does go against the larger body of evidence, with new instances emerging every day, that seem to prove him right.

Ideas of Lynching

And yet, lynching historians often seem perplexed as to how the lynching era, and the culture it produced, emerged as such a primal force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their attempt to explain how lynching became such a significant practice and idea within American history, these historians have attempted to frame lynching in various ways, most often having to do with some form of perversion of legal authority. Historians such as

Michael J. Pfeifer, Manfred Berg, and many others primarily see lynching under a rubric of

“Popular Justice,” or “Rough Justice.” Inherent in this designation is a belief that lynching after

Reconstruction was an abnormal instantiation of white fear toward social and legal modernity.

Michael J. Pfeifer makes this exact point when he states:

I believe that lynching can best be understood as an important aspect of legal change that had far-reaching social and cultural ramifications throughout the United States. The response of midwesterners, westerners, southerners, and northeasterners to the evolution of the formal law is the key to understanding the social and ideological underpinnings of mob violence.247 If we take Pfeifer’s words to be accurate, how do we account for the lynching victims who neither broke a law nor were accused of breaking a law? What crime did Young Reed, who was lynched for publicly kissing his white girlfriend of two years, commit, other than being a black

247 Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 4.

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man who dated a white woman? If lynching is associated with post-antebellum white anxiety toward modernity through a changing legal system, what is being suggested is that being black in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century American South was in fact a crime punishable by death. This might very well be the case, at least with regard to how contemporary Southerners perceived the law as it related to black existence, but attempting to explicate lynching in this way simultaneously centers the identity politics of white supremacists while erasing its significance.

Not only does Pfeifer analyze lynching within a framework that privileges white racism over black death, but he goes on to present it within classist terms when he writes, “Lynchers responded in part to a middle-class reform movement, present in all regions, that stressed due process and attempted to rid the performance of criminal justice of its popular trappings.”248 In highlighting the class politics of the day, Pfeifer positions lynching victims as collateral damage in a battle over traditionalist/proletariat versus modernist/bourgeoisie modes of legislating criminality. I am not suggesting that lynching historians think that the overwhelming numbers of lynchings that occurred from the 1880s onward were not in service of white supremacy, but that their attempt to historicize lynching as a peculiar element of American history and to situate racism as only an intersectional factor in an otherwise class-based investigation refuses to see

America as the complex and horrific project that it is. Physical lynching is not a peculiar, bygone activity that promoted white supremacy; it is an ongoing tactical action of a white supremacist nation primarily against its black citizens. Suggesting otherwise runs the risk of

248 Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 7.

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legitimizing the history of lynching and its perpetrators, as well as its continuation within the visual arena.

For his part, Pfeifer presupposes this argument when he states, “Crucially, it is attractive to dismiss the notion of a close relationship between lynching and notions of law because the idea that lynchers were acting out an understanding of law seems to confer their actions legitimacy, a legitimacy that they and their apologists at the time coveted.”249 As I have already addressed this challenge above, allow me to use another lynching historian as theoretical backup.

Jacqueline Goldsby, in her book A Spectacular Secret, challenges the notion propagated by

Michael Pfeifer and other lynching historians that the practice was in some way a return to a barbaric age or a peculiar phenomenon with a clear end point. She perceives lynching as more than just a practice—it is an ephemeral and invisible “cultural logic” that manifested “within the flow of American history for as long as it did because its cultural logic allowed us to disavow its connections to national life and culture.”250 For Goldsby, lynching was not merely an act, but a kind of ideological formation of thinking which altered everything it touched at the point of encounter, which was society itself. In making the claim that lynching was more (or less) than violent action executed against black people, she argues that “because of its reciprocal capacity, an appeal to cultural logic counters those arguments that characterize the violence as anomalous, aberrant, local, and anti-modern.”251 Scholars such as Pfeifer operate from an almost post-racial perspective that regards blackness and whiteness as culturally constructed fictions, and not the

249 Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 8. 250 Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 27 251 Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 27.

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oppositional binary that was created to uphold white supremacy and black inferiority. In one instance, remediated black bodies exist as a fulcrum for an American white identity that proposes to not exist.

As Richard Dyer argues in his essay, “The Matter of Whiteness,” American intellectual thought has long considered the act of thinking about or studying race as an activity solely interested in the analysis of non-white people.252 From this perspective, if whiteness functions as normalcy, then blackness equates to anything abnormal, to the ultimate qualifier in that its very utterance tinges, or even taints, the everyday—altering what under white circumstances would mean less than nothing and turning it instead into something so abhorrent that it requires the utmost attention. Black schools, black hair, black-on-black crime, and even the black body are just a few exemplars that reveal the inherent degradation in blackness as qualifier that presupposes the purity of whiteness.

Even if, on the other hand, blackness is often used as a resistive tool that black people employ to articulate the specificity of our existence, as the example of black-on-black crime suggests, it will always be used within certain sectors of white thought on blackness to condemn black people. This, of course, is not merely a benign action, but one that has been fundamental to the creation of whiteness. For instance, the annexation of performative blackness to the cultural cesspool of blackface minstrelsy went beyond the remediation of blackness into stereotypical and offensive depictions, but to something far more insidious. The power to constrain and reduce the existence of a people to stereotypes that then become so formative in the creation of the mass

252 Richard Dyer, “The Matter of Whiteness,” in White (London; New York: Routledge, 1997) 1.

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media industrial complex that its residue can be felt a century and a half later (for example, when white college students and celebrities dress in blackface at Halloween) reveals the unparalleled power of whiteness to destroy blackness in order to replicate a banal facsimile of its supposed elements. As Saidiya Hartman states: “The owner’s display of mastery was just as important a title to slave property. In other words, representing power was essential to reproducing domination.”253 This domination is central to how white supremacy creates, embodies, personifies, and destroys blackness.

With few rejoinders either historically or contemporaneously, those who emotionally profit off of the death of black bodies do so because of the persistent notion that the victims deserved it. Thousands of people watched lynching victims like Sam Hose, Henry Smith, Jesse

Washington, and Richard Coleman be burned alive.254 While we cannot know the feelings of every single person who bore witness to these remediated murders, there ought to be little doubt that many of the spectators present thought that the lynching victims deserved their fate. Even if they did not, just as one cannot distinguish the avid football fan in a packed stadium from the spectator at the same game who has serious concerns about the traumatic brain trauma that the players on the field are likely suffering, the lynching fans who may have had misgivings about the practice were still passive participants in public murder. Even still, as Barthes writes: “We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the

“message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and

253 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 7. 254 Harvey Young, “The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching,” Theatre Journal 57, no. 4, (2005).

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contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations.”255

The terms of lynching’s dimensional space were previously negotiated by the culture that allowed the act to take place. If, in this paradigm, the black body is the text of the lyncher/author, then it is the history and culture of the United States that had already transformed black people into black bodies, and situated it within a paradigm in which lynching could emerge. For

Barthes, the spectator/fan/reader is less an individual than the larger culture which furnishes meaning. As Stuart Hall suggests, intentional mis-readings exist only within a constrained number of options.

The lynching fandom that came about during the late nineteenth century and continues to this day through digital culture (see the following chapter) formed as a consequence to the technological innovations of the time and the larger fear of freed black people that arose during the Reconstruction period. During Reconstruction, black people, particularly in the south, were able to organize, vote, and enter the labor force for the first time since the early part of the eighteenth century, prior to the enactment of the colonies’ first set of Slave Codes that disenfranchised even free black men and further disenfranchised enslaved black men. With few exceptions, as the colonies under British rule became states after the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the United States Constitution, black men, even those who owned the requisite property, were denied the right to vote because an empowered and autonomous black polity was seen as antithetical and dangerous to a country founded on the occupation of black bodies. Or as

W.E.B. Du Bois states:

255 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York; London, Hill and Wang, 1978), 146.

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As slavery grew to a system and the Cotton Kingdom began to expand into imperial white domination, a free Negro was a contradiction, a threat and a menace. As a thief and a vagabond, he threatened society; but as an educated property holder, a successful mechanic or even professional man, he more than threatened slavery. He contradicted and undermined it. He must not be. He must be suppressed, enslaved, colonized. And nothing so bad could be said about him that did not easily appear as true to slaveholders.256 And while the legal and systematic disenfranchisement of black people during the antebellum period is common knowledge in the South, Northern states were only marginally better in their treatment of black people. Throughout the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many northern states granted and removed black male suffrage seemingly at a whim. In addition, prior to and during the Civil War, race riots broke out in major northern cities, particularly in

New York, due to the federal government’s attempt to draft working-class white men who were initially angered that wealthy white people were granted exemptions. Ultimately, however, this class-based anger soon turned into racialized fury that resulted in poor whites killing innocent black people in New York. The speed in which class resentment turns into violence against black people is literally older than the United States itself, but more importantly to Du Bois’ point: to be black and to be free were seen as incompatible ideas within the American imaginary up until and past the end of the Civil War. Thus, with Reconstruction and the decline of blackface minstrelsy, America had to face a new reality that incited fear of an evolved national identity that was not universally white. So great was this fear that many white Americans saw violence

256 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Kindle Edition.

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perpetrated against black people by other white people as a form of entertainment that covered their desired white American identity.

However, during the Reconstruction era and well into the twentieth century, lynching became intertwined with the mob murder of black people, or as Goldsby puts it: the “extralegal executions of African Americans by groups (larger than three) of self-appointed public authorities.”257 Existent within the categorizing of lynching as “extralegal” is an ideological perspective I wish to spend some time debunking. For the murder of black men, women, and children, regardless of the stated reason, to be considered “extralegal” presumes an inherent criminality in black existence. To perform an extra-legal activity is not to go against the law, but to go beyond the scope of the law. The apparent rhetorical distinction between an extra-legal act and an illegal one is that, in the case of the former, the act seeks to accomplish what the law cannot, while an illegal act is in opposition to the law. Of course, performing an extra-legal act might mean breaking the law, but calling something an extra-legal act presupposes that the law needs help, and it is in accordance with a higher moral authority that the law cannot live up to.

To consider lynching “extra-legal” suggests that lynchers would have followed the law if only the law had done its job.

It is as if to say that through our very existence, black people commit crimes that somehow upend a larger social contract. The fact that many black people, in particular men, who were the victims of physical lynching violence were often also accused of some sort of violent act, often the rape of white women, only reveals the hidden ideology behind framing lynching

257 Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 16-17.

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within a legalistic rubric. During the height of American lynchings, shortly after the

Reconstruction period, black people were not lynched for committing crimes; they were lynched for being black in a way that somehow resisted their appropriate behavioral modality as dictated by the white supremacist dominant culture. Emmett Till was not lynched for committing a crime; he was lynched for daring to look at a white woman. The entire black part of Greenwood, Tulsa,

Oklahoma was not collectively lynched in 1921 for committing a crime—unless we think of black prosperity as crime (which, for some white people, it undoubtedly is). Lynchings of one sort or another have been a part of the American psyche for hundreds of years. Before enslaved people were set marginally free into an American society that was largely resistant to the prospect of free black people, white men and the occasional white woman were the primary victims of extralegal assault because they managed to break a law that somehow damaged the relative sanctity of the local society that they inhabited. Although, as Goldsby points out, after the Civil War, the word lynching became altered from its original context-based use.258

Originally, to lynch meant to impose a non-lethal, societally-defined corporeal punishment on individuals who were “Tory loyalists, horse and livestock thieves, bank robbers, or adulterers who threatened to disturb the peace in just-established communities.”259 This marks quite the departure from what lynching came to represent, and how we currently understand the phenomenon. Today, lynching often connotes an unfair public assault, be it physical or linguistic, on an individual ostensibly seen as either innocent, or whose punishment fails to meet the crime.

258 Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 17. 259 Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 16.

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Lynching as Fandom

On July 31, 1908, approximately one hundred rabid fans waited outside a courthouse in

Russellville, Kentucky. These fans, bristling with the righteous anger that occurs when texts misbehave, eventually stormed the courthouse in order to discipline the unruly objects responsible for their anger. The police officers inside the courthouse—agents of a systemic order designed to impose cultural notions of propriety on fans—were no match for the collective power of fandom at work. The fans dragged these texts (Virgil Jones, Thomas Jones, Robert

Jones, and Joseph Riley) outside the courthouse, took them to a nearby farm, and hung them by their necks until they were dead. As was common then, and remains so today, but with different implications and politics embedded in the actions, the fans then took photographs of the defeated men as to commemorate their victory and to sell to other fans later who had the misfortune of not being present. There is another reason that members of lynching fandoms took photographs of murdered, mutilated, and immolated black bodies; it is the same reason that members of fandoms write fan fiction, re-edit television shows and movies that create new narratives, and make fan art that destabilizes the canonical text and places it into an alternative milieu: they want to re- conceptualize the ideological moment. Fans want to consume a text, then reorder its properties in ways that make it more satisfying for them as consumers. To engage in fandom does not end at consumption or the creation of objects inspired by consumption. It is a recursive process in which consumption inspires creation (in the broadest sense), which in turn inspires more consumption. With regard to lynching, this means merging any and all black behavior, whether it be an actual crime committed by a black person or “nothing” as evidence for a lack of humanity,

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which thus necessitates treating black people as if their lives were under constant threat for destruction.

In this case, the postcard entitled “’Taken from Death’ Lynching at Russellville, Logan

County, Kentucky, July 31, 1908,” offers a cultural history of the site of the lynching that attempts to assure its future gazer and buyer that these texts were not disciplined because they were black. It reads: “Hanged on the Old Proctor Lynching Tree. This is a multiple cedar tree and these four make a total of nine men lynched on this tree. Some were white men.”260 The subtext of this inscription is that this public and ritualistic destruction of a human being was not race-based because it was not only black people who were killed on this site. Whether or not this claim has any validity is largely beside the point. By the time what historians call the “Lynching

Era” (1877-1950) had begun in earnest, black men made up the vast majority of lynching victims. Of the 5000 or so lynchings during the time period, at least 3959 of the victims were black.261 Any equivocating done by the creator of the “Taken from Death” postcard as to the non-racist rationale of the fandom that murdered Thomas Jones, Virgil Jones, Robert Jones, and

Joseph Riley is as relevant as those today who suggest that black people can be racists toward white people, or that women rape men too. Had those four men been lynched prior to the end of the Reconstruction period, perhaps the writer’s point would have had more ballast.

And yet, ironically, the lynching fandom is still made up of fans of the black body. Even if their fandom—their passionate consumption of blackness that is then redistributed into more

260 James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Sante Fe: Twin Palms Publisher, 2000). 261 Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America, 30.

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creations that depict blackness through their anti-black perspective—stems from an inherent desire for a white supremacy that can only exist with a subordinate and passive black body, they are still individuals who situate whiteness in relationship to black people and black death.

Lynching in all its various forms positions the black body as potentially vulnerable to destruction. This action renders blackness within a rubric of oppression as inherently inferior, which is why black people who have gained fame for one reason or another continue to be the most targeted. The white supremacist dominant culture justified the lynching of thousands of black men based on the threat that any and all black men were, at their core, the black brute,

Stagolee waiting for the proper moment to hunt down, rape, and murder white women. Fans often alter a canonical text into a fanonical one because the original fails to match the fan’s own ideological perspective. Fan scholars have typically seen this activity as one which heightens the fan’s autonomy in that it challenges the often conservative and exclusive nature of corporate- financed media. However, fan scholars have done much less work on those fans who hold regressive, even bigoted and biased perspectives. The fandoms of blackface minstrelsy and lynching are the perfect examples of this problem. After Emancipation, blackface minstrelsy expanded the public understanding of enslaved black men. The fun-loving and dancing, but ultimately loyal, characters who preferred slavery were joined by the black brute who represented what black people would become if they did not have overseers making sure they kept in line. This character became one of the main sites of antagonism for lynching advocates, and it also led to the murder of many black people. According to the Equal Justice Initiative,

“Nearly 25 percent of the lynchings of African Americans in the South were based on charges of sexual assault. The mere accusation of rape, even without an identification by the alleged victim,

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often aroused a mob and resulted in lynching.”262 Black men merely had to be in relative proximity to the idea, much less the reality, of being sexually active with a white woman in order to be the potential victim of a lynching.

Black women and children had an even smaller margin for being murdered. In 1916,

Mary Conley was lynched because her son, Sam, killed a white man who was attacking her.

Although Sam was able to get away before the lynchers could get to him, Mary was not so lucky.

The lynchers stormed the jail where she was being held, and shot her repeatedly until dead.263 In another similar lynching, according to an article published in the New York Age in 1914, a seventeen year-old girl was lynched after being sexually assaulted by two white men.264 In this instance, the young girl’s brother managed to stop the assault, killing one of the rapists in the process. In response, the local law enforcement arrested the young woman (they could not find her brother), only for a mob to take her from the jail and lynch her. In both of these cases, the woman and the child were lynched as substitutes for the desired victims. They did not have to commit any crime themselves, or even be rumored to have committed a crime—in fact they were both victims of crimes—they merely had to be black when the mob of fans, clearly representing defied white masculinity, required a dose of entertainment that would reinvigorate their prescribed identities.

262 Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America, 31. 263 “Negress Taken from Jail and Riddled with Bullets,” Atlanta Constitution, October 9, 1916, quoted in 100 Year of Lynching, edited by Ralph Ginzburg. 264 “Was Power to Aid Sister Who Was Raped and Lynched,” New York Age, April 30, 1914, quoted in 100 Years of Lynching, edited by Ralph Ginzburg.

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Then there is the more famous murder of Mary Turner. Mary Turner was lynched in 1918 as part of a mass-lynching taking place in Brooks-Lowndes County, Georgia. Unlike with Mary

Conley, Mary Turner was not lynched because of bystander proximity, but because she had the gall to challenge the authority of lynchers and the general public who displayed a tacit approval of mass lynchings.265 Julie Buckner Armstrong, whose book, Mary Turner and the Memory of

Lynching, serves as both a case study of Mary Turner’s lynching and a recovery history of black women who were affected by lynching either directly or through proximity, acknowledges that the history she re-tells regarding the death of Mary Turner and the others lynched during the

Brooks-Lowndes murders is open to debate and interpretation. The circumstances that led to the lynching of Mary Turner began when Sidney Johnson allegedly killed Hampton Smith, his white boss, and injured Smith’s wife.266 Sidney, in what is a consistent trend in these stories, attempted to make a run for his life, likely knowing the fate that would befall him if caught. Eventually, the lynch mob caught up to Johnson, but not before murdering ten other black people along the way, including Mary and her husband, Hayes. According to newspaper reports during the time, Hayes was lynched for helping Johnson plot the murder of Hampton Smith; however, Mary was murdered for, as Armstrong puts it: “…a more serious crime: talking back.267 Allegedly, prior to her death, but after her husband’s, Mary Turner threatened to bring charges against the lynch mob that had been terrorizing Lowndes. For a black woman to be lynched, “talk back” harkens back to the very purpose and rationale of blackface minstrelsy performances: to restrict the

265 Julie Buckner Armstrong, Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). 266 Armstrong, Mary Turner, 28. 267 Armstrong, Mary Turner, 37.

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capacity for black autonomy. And yet, within the contradictory cultural logic of the lynching fandom, Mary Turner, Cordelia Stevenson, and Mary Conley were lynched both because they went against minstrel stereotypes of black women and because they, at least for a white supremacist dominant culture, upheld them. For just as black men could be lynched if they were deemed to be brutes and savages in line with the Stagolee character, black women could be sexually assaulted, lynched, or both, if their cultural performance followed along with the fandomized construction of the “angry black woman” or Sapphire.268

These lynchings would counter histories of lynching that suggest that the activity corresponded with criminal activity. Instead, it directly reflects the Afro-Pessimist perspective on the ontology of blackness. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, and others argue that the material realities of blackness are a direct result of the systemic and imagistic reconstruction of the African body during slavery. Simply put, the Atlantic slave trade altered the trajectories of those within the African diaspora so profoundly that within slaveholding cultures such as the United States, to be black is to be a slave. The ease with which the white supremacist dominant culture could remediate a black person into a dead black body whose textual existence became a cipher for white masculine power reveals the contradictory logics encoded into blackness itself.

Had American physical lynchings been just occasional murders of black people by white people, their lingering cultural legacy would be a significant, but somewhat minute series of moments in history. They would be on the same level as the numerous race riots that saw white

268 Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 88.

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people assault and kill random black people from the middle part of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth. Instead, lynchings were more than just groups of white men killing mostly black men for various reasons. The act of lynching became a cultural movement in which thousands of white people were active participants in these assaults. Moreover, the cultural events were occasionally advertised so that droves of men, women, and children were in attendance. These attendees then created photographic and filmic recreations, as programs. Some even dismembered body parts of some of the victims and claimed them as memorabilia. If we struggle now to think of lynching as a form of entertainment, as an instantiation of the black body vulnerable to the whims of white desire, it is only because the history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has removed this association from our consciousness.

And yet, many of those early twentieth-century anti-lynching activists viewed the practice within this formation. William James, for instance, once famously stated in 1903: “The hoodlums in our cities are being turned by newspapers into as knowing critics of the lynching game as they long have been of the prize-fight and football.”269 James seems to be questioning the rationale of covering lynching like it was a sport, or perhaps at all, but there also appears to be something else lingering beneath the surface of his words. In using the word ‘hoodlum’ to describe the at-risk, impoverished, and almost certainly white youth, James points to the capacity for white nationalistic thought to manifest in lynching lack bodies. In comparing lynching to other violent and exploitative spectacles of the body (boxing and football), James presupposes the white nationalistic fandom that would eventually surround both boxing and football and their

269 Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 16.

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shared relationship to exhibiting black masculine bodies destroying themselves. Unlike boxing, which had already been seen in some circles as a scourge to the nation, it would take until the twenty-first century before such ideas about football began to circulate inside mainstream

American thought. Still, James’ quote above illustrates how lynching and fandom were already being intertwined, even if not directly in name.

Additionally, journalists who covered lynching often wrote about the practice, in either support or denigration, using language that similarly highlighted the excitement and enthusiasm with which white perpetrators mutilated and tortured black bodies. In 1899, one writer for the

New York World wrote a thorough, scathing indictment of the lynching of Richard Coleman, a young black man who had previously confessed to the rape and murder of a Kentucky woman.

The journalist writes: “Long poles were used to push him back and hold him in an upright position. Men burned themselves to catch him with their hands and hold him up, and the crowd cheered them again and again.”270 While the writer in no way minimizes the alleged brutality of

Coleman’s actions, he/she focuses on the scopophilic desire of the thousands of white men, women, and children who participated in Coleman’s subsequent bodily destruction. Throughout the article, the writer goes into such lurid and horrific detail in describing Richard Coleman’s murder that he or she effectively extends the violence that the young man suffered in the physical plane onto the page. Most importantly, the writer articulates the profound and depraved behavior of the lynching fans, not to mention one of the most disturbing practices of this fandom: the occupation of the literally deconstructed body. To illustrate, the journalist writes, “Long after

270 “Roasted Alive,” New York World, December 7, 1899, quoted in Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynching.

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most of the mob went away little children from six to ten years of age carried dried grass and kindling wood and kept the fire burning all during the afternoon. Relic-Hunters visited the scene and carried away pieces of flesh and the negro’s teeth. Others got pieces of fingers and toes and proudly exhibit the ghastly souvenirs to-night.”271 Both the children who continued the lynching process of Richard Coleman even after he was already dead and the collectors who then picked at the actual bodily remains of his desecrated corpse reveal how the lynched black body, and in reality all potential black bodies, could at a moment’s notice be rendered both a site of the carnivalesque, in the Bakhtian sense, and cultural commerce, in the fandom sense. The children’s continued efforts to intertwine the fetishistic destruction of blackness with the reverie and joy of the American picnic encodes Coleman’s charred body with the grotesque articulation of a literally remediated body with the play of complete domination of a textual object. Similarly, the so-called ‘relic-hunters’ and their desire to hold possession of Richard Coleman’s remains manifests in the pernicious ramifications of the American attitude toward black existence. In that moment, Coleman’s disembodied and scorched finger was worth more than his actual life.

The children who continued to play around and the relic-hunters who picked at his remains illustrate how the black body, either living or dead, has been considered a non-entity, an epistemological vacuum, an ontological slave. As Harvey Young argues in regards to the lynched black bodies that were turned into souvenirs, “The lynching souvenir is a spectacular performance or, more accurately, a remain of performance spectacle.”272 To destroy and dismantle the black body is a constitutive portion of that performance spectacle; it is both an act

271 “Roasted Alive,” in 100 Years of Lynching, edited by Ralph Ginzburg. 272 Young, “The Black Body as Souvenir,” 641.

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of fandom and the fandom itself. And yet, fandoms typically consume a text and then reorder that text so that it coheres with a pre-existing ideological or narrative desire. Fans act upon a text and, either through regurgitation or recreation, originate a new text that more accurately aligns with fannish desires. When these activities are directed toward a novel, television show, or film, these actions are often benign. Because they allow people an opportunity to find solace and comfort in the inclusion of marginalized identities and perspectives that would otherwise be verboten within mainstream media, they may even be considered emancipatory. However, when these activities are directed toward actual people, in particular people whose very existence in the United States has been defined, at least in part, by racist systemic violence, bondage, and oppression of every variation imaginable, what can occur is a dramatic and traumatic denigration of whatever understanding of their own identity black people in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century could have mustered. The very threat of having your body dissected and put back together into a spectacle of violence and entertainment did not just forever alter the white supremacist dominant culture’s perception of blackness, but also the geographic and cultural makeup of blackness itself. Stewart E. Tolney and E.M. Beck argue this very point in their article, “Racial Violence and Black Migration in the American South, 1910-1930.” In conjunction with the economic, educational, legal, and cultural oppression that black people faced with the creation of Jim Crow laws, they were also under the constant threat of randomly defying some written or unwritten white social order and thus having any or all white persons sentence them to death.

This fear, according to Tolney and Beck, led to a mass exodus of black people from the

South as nearly two million people were compelled to uproot their entire lives, fleeing generally

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to Northern states, but also to Western ones in order to find a better life for themselves and their families.273 As the two researchers found when reading the letters of black migrants and their families who remained back in the South, “Another frequently mentioned reason for migration was the fear of violence at the hands of southern whites… It is clear from contemporary accounts that lynchings terrorized the black population… and that in some cases blacks fled communities where lynchings had occurred.”274 Of course, white violence against black people was not specific to the South, and certainly neither were other forms of institutionalized oppressions that have continued to be inflicted upon black populations to the present day. Still, lynching seems to have had a pronounced impact on Southern black populations, particularly young black people who understood the tragic irony in that a generation after the Emancipation Proclamation, they could be murdered in front of throngs of rabid white people for failing to behave according to some pre-arranged coda for social interactions.275 They knew that their murders might only be the first in a long chain of events that would usher the forcible shift of their identity from black person to a black body. The horror of American lynching is not simply that someone could be murdered in public with tens of thousands of accomplices, but that it was systematically approved by local law enforcement; lynching perpetrators were seldom if ever were charged with a crime. Lynching was state-sponsored and government-approved.

After all, “at the hands of persons unknown” was the language commonly used to address lynching perpetrators in police reports— a piece of history worth remembering the next

273 Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, “Racial Violence and Black Migration in the American South, 1910- 1930,” American Sociological Review, no. 1 (1992): 104. 274 Tolnay and Beck, “Racial Violence,” 104-105. 275 Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 44.

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time a politician seeks to “rebuild” the trust between black communities and law enforcement.

We are less than a hundred years removed from the time when white people could advertise the public murder of a black person in the local newspaper, attracting thousands of people from throughout the area to watch the murder, which would attract vendors looking to sell merchandise, photographers looking to create content they could sell at a later date, journalists looking for a news story, the aforementioned relic-hunters looking to pick at the bones—and not a single person would be arrested, much less convicted of a crime. And still, none of these, or perhaps all of these things combined, illustrates the true undeniable horror of the lynching fandom. Just as American mass media culture was codifying itself into an international endeavor that would scour the planet, lynching representations were solidifying themselves as a small, but lucrative form of cultural of commerce that simultaneously cohered white supremacist identity while also making a profit. And yet today, when someone says they were lynched, what they often mean is that a mob of angry people insulted them for what they perceive as no reason.

The rhetorical shift in how we think of lynching has arguably de-racialized the term in order to metaphorically associate the violence and victimization of black bodies with a larger public idea about perceived injustice. The notion of justice, or more aptly victimization, is at the core of the term today, but because anyone can claim to be lynched if he feels that a mob has attacked him unjustly, the very specific history of anti-black violence which altered the geographic and cultural landscape of black people for almost a century has been erased by a general conception of unfairness.

Even during the height of the physical lynching era, white fans of the black body were creating visual works of art that struck at particular black bodies as a means of addressing all

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black people. For instance, after the lynching of Sam Hose, The National Police Gazette—a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century illustrated amalgamation of Playboy and Sports

Illustrated, which has subsequently dubbed itself “America’s First Tabloid”—published an illustration of the lynching of Sam Hose. In the image, jubilant white men and women point and cheer as Sam Hose’s body is engulfed in flames; Hose’s face, drawn in a slightly more realistic blackface minstrel style, with big lips and a large nose, is washed in shadow as chains that defy gravity dangle through the fire. The image depicts the lynchers on the left and Sam Hose on the right, forcing the viewer of the image to focus on the joyous faces of the murders. Their humanity, their perceived righteousness is on full display while the victim is literally and figuratively placed in smoke-filled shadow (Fig. A4).276 Another image from the same issue renders Sam Hose’s alleged crime in full display. In this drawing, once again, Hose stands over his would-be victim with an axe in his hand; his face is blanketed in shadow with only his lips and eyes truly distinguishable. In the background, we see the wife of the victim, who Hose allegedly raped, the shock of her face in full view except for the baby she holds in her arms (Fig.

A5).277 The image seemingly attempts to confer the shock and horror embedded in the visage of the woman’s face onto the reader, thus justifying the nearly orgiastic euphoria displayed in the drawing of the actual lynching.

Sam Hose’s lynching was not the first such murder to be documented within the pages of the National Police Gazette. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the magazine published articles and drawings on a number of lynchings, almost always celebrating

276 “BURNED AT THE STAKE,” The National Police Gazette, May 13, 1899: 74, 8-9. 277 “BURNED AT THE STAKE,” The National Police Gazette, May 13, 1899: 74, 6.

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its practice. According to Guy Reel, The National Police Gazette began in the 1840s as a tool to help criminal enforcement.278 Thirty years into its existence, under the leadership of a new editor, Richard Kyle Fox, the rag became a force in constructing a non-Victorian white masculinity through a focus on edgier topics such as crime, sex, gender roles, and of course, lynching. More pointedly, Fox used the bodies of oppressed and marginalized people (Asians, black people, criminals, and sexually active women, etc.) as a counterpoint to render an acceptable form of white masculinity.279 Non-white men were then textualized in the extreme to simultaneously activate white masculine notions of superiority and proper modes of engagement and arouse within those same white men attitudes correlating with colonization. The success of this magazine, which eventually became an internationally-sold publication, is one way that the fandom of lynching spread throughout the country in the late nineteenth century.

Lynching Photographs

While the magazine and newspaper articles that published lynching articles and drawn images gave lynching a national platform, lynching photographs were the dominant way that the fandom cohered. Taken in 1916, the pictures of Jesse Washington’s charred, mutilated body are some of the most pervasive and prominent lynching photographs in the public record. The photographer, Fred A. Gildersleeve, was able to take such clear and remarkable photographs because he was granted unusual access to the lynching. The mayor of Waco told Gildersleeve that the murder was going down in exchange for a share of whatever the photographer made

278 Guy Reel, The National Police Gazette and the Making of the Modern American Man, 1879-1906 (New York; Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 4. 279 Reel, The National Police Gazette, 8.

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from selling the images, which were ten cents each.280 It would be easy to gloss over this incident as another appalling example in a seemingly endless list of appalling examples that come from the lynching era. But there is something significant in an elected official deciding to make money off the public spectacle of lynching that undergirds the prominence of the fandom.

Nowhere can ideology be transmitted with more alacrity and force than through the image. This was particularly true in the latter part of the nineteenth century when mass mediated images were becoming a primary force for the spread of an American identity which had been fractured, if it ever truly existed at all, during the Civil War. After all, it was the nineteenth century that saw both the invention and reinvention of the photograph—which culminated briefly with the daguerreotype before moving on to more efficient and speedy photographic processes— and the invention, reinvention, and reinvention again of film cameras and narrative filmic structure. These technologies, coupled with the telegram and innovations to the printing press, allowed for the beginning of the American media industrial complex, which centered the visual above all other forms of media. This has continued to be the case, even with the phonograph and radio offering brief moments of resistance to optical hegemony in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, respectively. Still, the image did not fight for dominance with mediums that engaged a different sense, but with the written word. Whereas the written word was understood to be a subjective perspective of the world, Americans of all sorts in the nineteenth century saw the image, in particular the photograph, as a direct representation of reality.

280 Dora Apel, “Lynching Photographs and the politics of public shaming,” Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds, in Defining Moments in American Photography, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 47.

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Whatever corresponding elements of truth nineteenth-century Americans related to the image should not negate the significance of ideology during this time period. In fact, just the opposite is the case. Because nineteenth-century Americans saw the photographic, and then later the filmic, image as an unfettered depiction of life, the ideologies held within the image moved even more fluidly than they do in our current moment. The ramifications of these ideologies continue to scaffold the complex matrices evident within the creation of the corporatized image, the consumption of that image—including how the image functions as signifier and signified—and the various participatory cultures that further transform the image into remediated objects of fandom.

As much as any singular technological practice during the dawning of the American mass cultural system, lynching photographs, from both theoretical and practical perspectives, are touchstones that map the trajectory of the expanding primacy of the political power in “looking.”

In the case of the former, as Roland Barthes points out, the photograph itself elides direct categorization in that its very ontology as both representation and physical object disrupts a formal conceptualization of what is being seen (reality or frame?) even as its infinite reproducibility continuously directs us back to the subject of the photograph which, one supposes, cannot be separated from its referent.281 However, when it comes to lynching photographs, what constitutes the referent? Who is the subject of these photos? Is it the dead black body that is forever trapped in time and space in some position and combination of hanging, shot, and burned? Or the white men, women, and children whose eyes bore into the

281 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucia: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 4.

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camera, simultaneously asserting the mirrored claim of black inferiority and white supremacy?

According to Ashraf Rushdy, lynching photographs convey some amalgamation of the two.

Rushdy states that: “One group of white people, gathered around a burned black body, was communicating to another group in another country: they had done their part, asserted their place in the world.”282 Like all fandom texts, lynching photographs were attributions toward aesthetic and ideological validity that impart, as a polemic within their very existence, a call to action.

Shawn Michelle Smith makes a similar point when she states that “photography documented lynching but also played a role in orchestrating it. Making a photograph became part of the ritual, helping to objectify and dehumanize the victims, and, for some, increasing the hideous pleasure.”283

In the case of the latter, as Jacqueline Goldsby notes, the evolution of the lynching photograph parallels the technological advancement of photography as a medium.284 The very first mechanical image (that we are aware of) of a lynched black person, captured in 1878, was not a photograph, but a stereocard.285 Moreover, as lynching images altered with mechanical- image technologies—from stereographs, picture cards, to finally Kodak photography—the process of capturing lynching, meaning which moments were possible to be rendered, changed with this evolution. And while the conventions of the lynching genre may have altered, this does not mean that the ideological perspectives embedded in their creation underwent a similar

282 Ashraf Rushdy, American Lynching, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 70. 283 Shawne Michelle Smith, “The evidence of Lynching Photographs,” Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds, Lynching Photographs, vol. 2, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 16. 284 Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 219. 285 Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 230.

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process. In fact, the opposite was true. As Goldsby notes: “When considering lynching photographs and their social effects, we must approach them as artifacts that are more than transparent, self-evident documents of these events of racial violence were used to cultivate the experience and meaning of sight itself.286 In this context, lynching images helped to create the affordances through which the fandom, and the country, learned to see blackness within the mass media domain.

If public spectacle lynching illustrates fandom activity through a psychological rendering of the black body as a textual site of enjoyment, then the photographs and postcards taken of those events demonstrate the material component of fan engagement. Similarly, postcards of public spectacle lynchings capture not merely the visual moment, but also the nostalgic desire to recreate and then share formative moments that bind fans together in their collective identity.

Photographers took photos of lynchings, sold them to the spectators both present at the lynching to commemorate the moment, and to individuals in neighboring towns and cities. Some people present at lynchings also sent photographs of a lynching to friends and relatives with personal messages and comments. Just as is the case with many objects of fandom, lynching photographs and postcards taken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were seen as internal documents for the localized lynching fan communities rather than images meant to be spread to eyes that were not necessarily aligned in seeing lynching as a necessary means of controlling deviant black bodies.287 As the practice spread in both popularity and frequency, the lynching photograph eventually developed its own sort of formal genre conventions. In the photos that

286 Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 238. 287 Woods, Lynching and Spectacle, 105.

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uphold these conventions, a wide shot of the body of a lynched person, usually, but not always a black man, hangs in the center of the frame. Sometimes the body is charred beyond all recognition, as was the case with Jesse Washington, sometimes not. The lynched black body is surrounded by white people, most often white men and white boys, who stare into the camera.

The lynchers’ faces are not hidden or obstructed in any way. Their eyes penetrate the plane of the camera, the casualness of their demeanor seemingly contradicting the trauma of having a dead body above them. These images display white supremacy in all its consequence as the lynched black body is almost consumed by the sheer number of white bodies.

Of course, not all of the hundreds of lynching photographs and postcards that have been discovered and made available fit this description. For instance, the photographs taken of the lynchings of Laura Nelson and her son challenge the supposition of genre conventions within lynching photographs, while simultaneously upholding their white supremacist intent. In these photos, taken on a bridge in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1911, Nelson and her son were hung over the

North Canadian River feet apart (Fig. A6).288 Above them, on the bridge, a group of white men, women, and children pose casually, a reminder that lynching photographs were often not captured in the heat of the moment, but were calculated constructions meant to render authority and legitimacy of the lynchers themselves over their murdered subjects. In placing the lynchers above the victims, G.H. Farnum, the photographer, created a visual metaphor for black life under white supremacist rule. What is also somewhat unique about this photo is that Farnum placed a

288 Frances Jones-Sneed, “Gender, Race, and the Antilynching Crusace in the United States,” Minds Eye 3, (2011): 64; “The Nelson Lynching of 1911 @ Okemah, Oklahoma,” lauranelsonlynching.weebly.com, N.D. accessed April 17, 2017, http://lauranelsonlynching.weebly.com/

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copyright notification on his photographs, an unusual act that shows how little he worried about the legal repercussions of being party to a lynching. Or perhaps Farnum had bigger plans for the images as, according to Frances Jones-Sneed, these photos were not sent to newspapers, nor were they ever turned into postcards.289 Other than their formal construction, what makes the photographs of the lynching of Laura Nelson and her son unusual is that these are the only publicly available photographs of a lynched black woman.290

Fandom Obscura

As Kristin M. Barton notes, defining a fan or what it means to be a fan has been consistently debated by fan studies scholars.291 Barton sees little value in trying to create a formula to determine who counts as a fan; instead, she focuses on fan activities. She states:

The reason we become fans are varied and personal: being a fan allows us to express ourselves, it helps us connect with like minded people, and it allows us to escape into a world devoid of the pressures of life, even if only for 30 minutes at a time. But more than anything, being a fan means being in love.292 While attempting to avoid the quagmire of defining the fan, Barton’s description of fan motivations raises two of the clearest obstacles in defining a fan: first, must fans self-identify as fans? Does a person who discusses Donald Trump with her friends, writes social media posts about Trump, and maybe even creates the occasional meme that derides and insults Donald

289 Jones-Sneed, “Antilynching Crusade,” 64. 290 Jones-Sneed, “Antilynching Crusade,” 64. 291 Kristin M. Barton, “Introduction,” Kristin M. Barton and Jonathan Malcolm Lampley, eds, in fan CULTure: Essays on Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century (Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2014), Kindle Edition. 292 Barton, “Introduction,” Kindle Edition.

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Trump count as a fan? An anti-fan? Someone just passionate about politics or legitimately scared about what might happen to her life under President Trump’s rule? Certainly, discussing the actions of Donald Trump on social media can help her express herself and connect with like- minded people, but it would not seem to help her escape the pressures of the world, nor would anyone suggest that those people who exist in opposition to Trump are in love with him. Except, that is exactly the case. In my view, fandom is an identity constructed through practice, not identification with a group. Donald Trump has a uniquely robust fandom made up in large part of people who hate him, or, put another way, are in love with their opposition to him. Millions of people across the world identify as being with him or against him, meaning their own identities are formed in acceptance or opposition to him. To be a fan is, in itself, a neutral identity that coincides with practice informed by ideology; it is not ideology unto itself. An “anti-fan” is merely a fan who actively engages with the text through her self-prescribed denial of its creative, intellectual, ethical, or moral value. One of the relatively less-threatening complexities of living under a Trump Presidency is that his dual existence as a public figure and textual entity, combined with his overt white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal ideology, force those who oppose him into his fandom.

This leads directly into the second problem with conceptualizing a fan. Can someone like

Donald Trump even have fans? The answer, in short, is yes. Today, public figures, whether they are politicians, actors, or media celebrities, present a textualized version of their existence for public consumption. Once textualized, they become “readable,” and once readable, they have the capacity to be fandomized. Individuals can read, discuss, and analyze their textual output in ways that construct an identity that either coincides directly with the public figure’s formation within

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the rubric of mass media culture, or in opposition. Of course, in the time of digital media where anyone with a cellphone can become a media content producer, this also means that anyone, potentially, can become a remediated textual object.

I tend to agree with Barton that what matters for this discussion is what a fan does. Where

I break ranks with Barton is her gleeful description of the rationale of fans. Even as I write this chapter, one of the ideas floating on the periphery of this conversation is whether or not lynching fans are in fact fans of the black body, or fans of whiteness, or if there is truly any distinction between the two at all? Lynching fans are in love with the destruction of the black body, or at least as much as the symbolic and iconic replication of that destruction allows for a stratification of whiteness over blackness. And their love of whiteness comes as much from a negation of blackness as to any qualities that they perceive whiteness as having. Because, as I pointed out in

Chapter 2, just as blackface minstrel performances helped to create a white identity in that it established the performative boundaries for working-class white people, lynching, in particular spectacle lynching, transformed blackness into pure signifier. The peculiar irony in the non- existence of the black body is not that it holds no meaning, but that its nothingness means it can carry all meanings all the time, and yet remain, from a certain perspective, monolithic, at least to some.

There are some theories of fan scholarship that would reject lynching as a fandom for a number of different reasons. The first, and probably most prominent, rejection would be that many believe that being a fan is a self-selected identity. To this, I return to my early point: I am less interested in classifications of a fan than I am in what fans actually do. If we use Mark

Duffett’s definition that media fandom is “the recognition of a positive, personal, relatively deep,

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emotional connection, with a mediated element of popular culture,” then lynching absolutely qualifies.293 Lynching was both an object of popular culture and an object that influenced popular culture. And while I disagree with Duffett that to be a fan does not require a positive connection, merely a personal and deep one, even if I ignored my own objections, lynching would still fit into this description. The people who engaged in physical lynchings then, and imagistic lynchings now, clearly have a positive, personal, and deep connection with disciplining the black body. It is of little consequence whether people today could be found who say they actively enjoy watching black people die. I suspect if someone had conducted a poll on February

1, 1893, and asked those in attendance when Henry Smith was lynched whether or not they enjoyed watching him die, many would have said no. But lynching is a participatory fandom, and they participated.

The second argument against my theorization of lynching, at least from the fan studies perspective, would be that it would seem as though I am engaging in what Matt Hills calls a

“decisionist narrative.”294 Hills states that a decisionist narrative “seeks to attack or defend sections of fandoms, or fandom taken in the abstract. ‘Decisionist’ narratives hinge on making political decisions as to the ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ of fan cultures; should these fan attachments and interpretations be devalued as industrial complicity or values as creative expressions of audience agency?”295 Like most fan studies scholars, Hills sees the only contemporary argument against fandom is that they function as extensions of corporatized

293 Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture (New York; London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 23. 294 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), xi. 295 Hills, Fan Cultures, xi.

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culture industries, instead of realizing that within a larger paradigm, culture industries and their fandoms represent a much more pernicious and older apparatus: white supremacy.

The “culture industry” as an idea was originally announced in the settling dust of World

War II by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkenheimer in the essay “The Culture Industry:

Enlightenment a Mass Deception.” The essay, which is seemingly a thinly veiled rebuke of

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” asserts, in

Marxist terms, that technologically proliferated works of arts are soulless money-making ventures meant to brainwash passive consumers into even further passivity.296 Theodor Adorno, in his landmark “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” would decades later update the idea of the culture industry’s internal workings: “The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan… The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years.”297 Fan scholars, as well as more optimistic media scholars, have been pushing back against Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim that consumer activity is “integrated from above” for decades. In particular, Fiske and his protégé, Henry Jenkins, have been on the frontlines of investigating the consumer as more than just a vessel for the capitalist ideologies found within culture industries. Fan scholarship is as much a response to the intellectual pathologizing of the fan as it is a response to Adorno and Horkheimer’s polemic against media

296 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). 297 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 98-99.

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consumption. In my view, Adorno was perhaps somewhat mistaken, in hindsight, in that he suggests that the culture industry subsumes its consumers into its own web of control where the consumers become objectified in order to support more cultural commodities. Adorno seems to think that the ideology inherent in the culture industry manifests in the actions and behaviors of the consumers, but this is not a one-to-one correlation. As discussed above, the ideology of blackface minstrelsy (and slavery) fans concretized in lynchings, but not as an exact reflection.

As Adorno states, “Individual forms of production are nevertheless maintained. Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far as the illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy.”298 The lynching fandom, at once both individual and embedded within the culture industries, is at one level a reconceptualization of axis to power in that it presumes the power to pull black people into the sanctuary that Adorno speaks of. Where Adorno is mistaken is that some mediations do not inhabit the fan/culture industry binary. Further, the cultural industries and consumer consumption surrounding lynching and blackface minstrelsy were mutually constructed modalities in which the ideologies of the spectator and those of the industries that profited from them did not require that the latter warp the thinking of the former. The systems of oppression that the dominant culture has positioned black people within exist both ideologically and materially in the industries of culture and the spectators of that culture.

Conclusion

298 Adorno, “Cultural Industries,” 101.

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While nearly 4,000 black people may have been lynched in this country, lynching fan activity made sure the practice touched nearly every black person in the country. The inherent ideology found within fandomized methodologies of the black body reveal that the ideological underpinnings of lynching are in no way the sole possession of those people who either lynched black people or were witnesses to lynchings. Instead, lynching ideology, like racism itself, is a normative and persistent idea within the American imaginary. It did not begin with the rise of black lynchings in the late nineteenth century, nor did it fade away as a practice in the middle part of the twentieth century when anti-lynching advocates were finally successful in ending the terror of the lynching ideology’s physical manifestation. Lynching, like many fan practices that became so popular, so thoroughly defined that they became their own separate enterprises, evolved within a textual, and in this case legalistic, articulation of other systems only to find its raison d’etre when the necessary set of technological and sociopolitical circumstances emerged at an advantageous time.

If what Barton considers to be the nature of the fan is true—that being a fan is about being in love—how can fan scholars navigate understanding a love that can potentially lead to physical, psychological, and emotional brutality? The answer, of course, is that they have not.

Fan scholarship somehow missed blackface minstrelsy and lynching as evidences of fandom behavior in racially destructive enterprises. It missed the figurative and literal castration of black men and the over-sexualization that manifested in the rape of black women. It failed to see that a seventy-year tradition of hanging, shooting, and burning black people could be entertainment. In their self-analysis of what it means to be a fan, fan scholars looked away from a practice in which thousands of people gathered together, held all-day parties, collected the mutilated body

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parts and photographs as mementos, drew pictures that were published in magazines, and integrated the recreations of these events so that other people, other fans, could experience the lynching events at another time and in another space. While many fandoms are notoriously insular and private in their activities, fandom itself believes in proselytizing. After all, a fandom without fans does not truly exist. Most of all, fan studies scholars failed to see how lynching fans who saw their fandom targeted by NAACP, the Association of Southern Women for the

Prevention of Lynching, Ida B. Wells, and to a lesser extent the federal government, did not despair or move on. The lynching fans did what fandoms often do. They changed the way they practiced their fandom to meet incoming technological innovations. They became less invested in the physical destruction of black life, and more invested in the proliferation of representations of remediated black death, in the visual metaphors of white supremacy.

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CHAPTER 4

IMAGISTIC LYNCHING FANDOM IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Introduction

During the spring of 1911 in Livermore, Kentucky, Will Porter (or Potter), the manager of a black-only pool hall, allegedly asked a white man named Clarence (or Frank) Mitchell and his friend to leave because “a negro poolroom is not the place for a white man.”299 This resulted in a fight between the two men, which led to Porter shooting at Mitchell and, perhaps, hitting him. As is the case with many lynching reports, accounts vary as to what happened next, or in this case even the names of those involved. What all sources agree on is that Porter was arrested and somehow ended up in a backroom at the town’s opera house.300 Amy Louise Wood suggests that the city’s marshal took Porter directly to the opera house, forgoing all semblance of legality.301 George C. Wright, on the other hand, states that a lynch mob kidnapped Porter from his cell and took him to the opera house.302 Neither scenario is altogether farfetched considering the history of lynching. Whichever narrative is true, we know that after Porter was taken to the opera house, he was dragged to the center of the stage. Wright insinuates that even more men

299 Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 113. The historical record on lynching victims is notoriously inconsistent. Many newspapers reported different names in their accounts. In this instance, Will Porter is often called Will Potter. I have chosen to go with Porter because, in my research, that name was most often used.

300 Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 228; Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 2005), 251.

301 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 113.

302 George C. Wright, “By the Book: The Legal Executions of Kentucky Blacks,” in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. William Fitzhugh (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 251.

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then paid admission to “not only witness the lynching but to riddle Porter’s body with bullets.”303

Wood, for her part, calls these accounts “exaggerated,” instead stating, “As news of the incident spread throughout the town, a mob of ‘infuriated citizens’ formed and broke into the opera house, overpowering the marshal and his deputies. The men then took Porter to the center of the stage, tied him down, and turned on the footlights. Arranging themselves in the orchestra pit, they, on cue, began to shoot.”304 Wood does not offer a rationale for why the marshal would have taken Porter to the opera house and not to jail. I suppose the subtext is that the marshal took

Porter there in order to protect him from the very fate that he eventually suffered, although even that does not explain how the town’s men heard where he was being stashed away. Regardless, it does not truly matter how Porter ended up in that opera house, or whether or not he shot at

Mitchell, shot Mitchell, or neither of the above, or even if the lynchers paid admission to kill

Porter.

What matters is that on that day dozens of men displayed Porter’s body on an opera house stage in order to literally and figuratively place themselves within the dual positions of content creators and content consumers—embroiling themselves in the internal logic of fan identity, a material variation of what Axel Bruns calls “produsage”—in a visual and performative remediation of a black man into a lynched black body.305 As Wood states, “That Porter was lynched in an opera house may appear to be an unfortunate coincidence, except that the mob did

303 Wright, “By the Book,” 251.

304 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 113.

305 Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

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not simply shoot Porter where it found him. The lynchers evidently saw the dramatic potential of their violence…and by placing themselves in the orchestra pit rather than on stage with Porter, they positioned themselves as both performers and audience—spectators to their own drama.”306

To further illustrate the lynchers’ embodiment of a fan identity, we must remember that, according to Wood, the stage on which Porter was murdered would likely also have been a site which depicted other forms of violence against black bodies: the lynching films and blackface minstrelsy performances explored in Chapter 2.307 Even if we cannot assert a one-to-one causal relationship between whatever forms of remediated black violence occurred on-screen or onstage in that opera house and Porter’s death, we can draw a clear correlation between the imagined violence of the former and the inflicted violence of the latter.

As noted in the previous chapter, Henry Smith was lynched in Paris, Texas, in 1893, and remediated constructions of his lynched body were remediated into auditory and visual texts after the fact. The lynchers who murdered Will Porter remediated his lynched body into an intertextual object that encoded the violence with the spectacle of the opera house for their own perverse enjoyment. The lynched body is a site in which the negotiation of white identity and the fear of black autonomy via emancipation is worked out in the reification of American racist ideology. Blackness under certain limited parameters is not just acceptable, but even pleasurable.

In America’s moral conceptualization, Porter’s crime was not shooting at Mitchell, or even hitting him—it was daring to challenge the logic of white supremacy which states that black

306 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 113.

307 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 115.

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people belong only where white people tell them, while white people have free rein to go anywhere they please. Thus, Wood is incorrect when she posits that Porter was trying to “uphold

Jim Crow segregation by telling Mitchell that ‘a negro poolroom is not the place for white men.’”308 Instead, I contend that Porter was trying to maintain the limited sanctity for black spaces available within a systemic order literally meant to negate undesired movement of black bodies. Unfortunately for Porter, in 1911 Kentucky, telling a white person about anything was tantamount to paralyzing his very identity. Although in many respects that is still true today, the consequences for such a move are not nearly as taxing on the mind or body. Similarly, when a text defies a fandom in such a way that it challenges a fandom’s identity, the result is that the fandom responds in agitated, sometimes even aggressive ways. When the text was a black person in the lynching period, that aggressive means of disciplining the text was to lynch.

Oddly, while Wood differs from many lynching historians in that she does situate lynching activity as a form of entertainment, she does not make the connection that one of the reasons why lynching was so popular in the South, and quite a bit less so in the North, was because the South had far less access to films at a time when the theatrical melodrama, including blackface minstrelsy, was losing popularity. This helped create a white American national identity that, due to the violent destruction of black life depicted, alienated blackness via the construction of a visual coda that remediated black bodies as the objects/villains of lynching.

Lynching simultaneously considers agents as the subjects/heroes who, according to advocates of the practice—such as “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, a South Carolina Senator in the late 1890s and

308 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 114.

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early 1990s, lynched black people for the betterment of civilization.309 This contradicts the general belief held by historians such as Robert Thurston in Lynching: American Mob Murder in

Global Perspective and Michael J. Pfeifer in Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society,

1874-1947, who imagine lynching as a rejection of the looming modernism of the twentieth century. However, as both Jacqueline Goldsby in A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American

Life and Literature and Amy Louise Wood in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial

Violence in America, 1890-1940 argue, lynchers’ engagement with the new media and technology of the time period resists such a theoretical categorization.

Instead, lynchers and fans of lynchings used visual mediated technology as a means to spread the formal and ideological conditions of the act itself. At the height of its practice in the late nineteenth century, a black person in the United States was lynched a little more than once every other day.310 As lynching eventually declined during the middle part of the twentieth century, a lynching occurred about once a year.311 Despite this apparent shift in lynching popularity over time, I argue that lynching has not diminished in the American consciousness.

From the writing of the Virginia Slave Codes to the present, control over the black body has been a primary concern within the American imaginary. Because blackness has been a formative signifier, both in iconic and symbolic form, in American mass cultural media the reading and misreading of blackness has merged with the participatory desire present in industrial and post-

309 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 98.

310 American Social History Project for Media and Learning, “Bar Graph of African American Lynchings, 1890-1929, HERB: Social History for Every Classroom, n.d., accessed 3/13/17, https://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1884.

311 American Social History Project, “Bar Graph of African American Lynchings.”

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industrial cultures to discipline misbehaving texts to create a fandom of the black body. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, blackface minstrelsy began as a textual site for white people to construct a white American identity through a negation of blackness. During Reconstruction, when formerly enslaved black people began to find political and economic agency for the first time, the response from the white supremacist dominant culture was to reinstitute the ideological structure of slavery, if not slavery itself. This led to black people being murdered and attacked, both physically and inside the available sites of ideological formation and proliferation; these were textual lynchings (newspapers, books, stories, etc.) and then later imagistic lynchings

(photographs, films, digital images). In many instances, physical lynchings were remediated into visual objects (drawings, photographs, and films) and became the inspiration for future lynchings and future visual objects that depicted lynchings. Lynchings, in all instances, regardless of whether they were physical, textual, or imagistic, functioned in much the same way as blackface minstrelsy texts, to create and unite a white American identity. This chapter argues that the historical and contemporary images constructed out of the milieu of lynching–the ideological site of personified black object-ness and white subjectivity—has created a fandom subculture simultaneously existent within mass cultural images and those produced by amateurs. Similarly, those black people who performed their blackness in ways that challenged the constrained affordances created out of the fandom of blackface minstrelsy became vulnerable to physical destruction.

In this chapter, I challenge the idea that lynching culture and its fandom ended in the middle part of the twentieth century. Instead, I am interested in the way that the lynching fandom had already been in the process of shifting into images that proliferated within the burgeoning

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American mass media culture industries of the early twentieth century. Lynching was not merely a means to assault those black people whom the white supremacist culture deemed in need of discipline. Rather, it emerged as an ideological force that infiltrated every form of popular visual media, and it continues today. In the twenty-first century—despite the history of the civil rights movement, the recent attention paid to police brutality and mass incarceration, and the continued relevancy of black creatives and intellectuals—contemporary imagistic lynching manifests in the attacks on black people within digital cultures of the Internet. I do not mean to negate the ever- present concern of physical assaults on black people that are state-sanctioned (the police) and state-sponsored (vigilantes such as George Zimmerman), but to illustrate how lynching as an ideological practice informs and is informed by an increasingly participatory visual culture. To describe the specific way this ongoing assault remediates black bodies, I separate lynching into two distinct categories: physical lynching and imagistic lynching.

Physical Lynching

Physical lynching refers to the torture and murder of black people by a group of more than three, most often white perpetrators. Lynching is usually justified by the mob as retaliation against black people who failed to perform their blackness in ways that the white supremacist dominant culture deemed acceptable. During the physical lynching era (1870-1950) black people could be lynched for being accused of committing crime, knowing another black person who was accused committed a crime, testifying in a court of law that a black person accused of committing a crime did not actually commit the crime, looking at a white person, not paying the proper deference to a white person, being too successful, being the child of someone who was going to be lynched, not looking at a white person, and any number of various ways in which

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white people in the late nineteenth century and early-to-mid-twentieth century could turn a black person into a murdered black body with little regard for legal punishment. The supposed end of the lynching era should not be confused for the end of lynching of black people. For instance,

Laura Wexler, in her monograph Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America, states that the final lynching that had the full legal and cultural support of a local government took place in 1946.312 This, of course, says nothing of Emmett Till or James Byrd Jr., each of whom were murdered by white men who were not immediately prosecuted. Nor does this include the countless murders of black people by police throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, who also have faced no legal consequences for their actions. In fact, it is this last point which truly highlights the difference between a lynching and what we might now call a hate crime. The lynchers of black people since the end of the Reconstruction period did not merely often get away with their crimes. In the case of mass or spectacle lynchings they did so in full view of an entire town or city who did not just passively ignore the violent transformation of a person into a body, and a body into a text, but looked upon the violent destruction of black people as entertainment. What was true then remains true today.

We are so inundated with the daily destruction of black bodies, both real, fictionally depicted, and digitally constructed, that we have completely lost sight of, or perhaps never truly considered, that physical lynching was always the most aggressive means through which white supremacist culture constrained black behavior, movement, and safety; but it was not the only one. This is, in part, because many historians, such as Jacqueline Goldsby, who consider

312 Laura Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America (New York; London: Scribner, 2003).

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lynching to be a manifestation of white dominance over black people perceive that the practice was used primarily to keep black people in line. And while that is no doubt true, there is another obvious factor that does not get remarked upon nearly enough: that many white people of the time, and many still today, enjoy watching black people die.

This chapter traces the trajectory of the lynching fandom that mutated and proliferated inside of visual media objects. In the previous chapter, I argued that lynching photographs dictated to Americans a particular and harmful way of seeing black people. This mode of seeing imposed a visually-oriented ideological prison in which the icon, remediated lynched black bodies, and its referent, unruly black people, became irrevocably linked, even as popular attitudes toward lynching shifted. Of course, even as physical lynching declined in the early twentieth century, Jim Crow emerged as a systemic institution meant to constrain political and personal modes of public black engagement. And just as Michelle Alexander argues that the cultural logic of Jim Crow can be found within the legal trappings of mass incarceration, the desire to discipline misbehaving black bodies in violent spectacles did not simply fall out of favor; it found new life in American popular culture and the amateur texts created from their more canonical predecessors.313 As a consequence, the multi-modal methodologies found within the lynching fandom merged with the growing desire for participatory enjoyment. For instance, it was the image of the lynched black body in photographs which inspired boxing fans in Chicago to create visual effigies of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion, after he

313 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).

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defeated Jack Jeffries, the supposed “great white hope.”314 Johnson’s supposed crimes ran the gamut of inappropriate black behavior. Not only was he the first black heavyweight champion during a time when inhabiting that position meant one had achieved the epitome of masculine power, he was also unabashedly and unashamedly black and flaunted both his wealth and his relationships with white women. Even if lynchings had been on the decline nationally for almost a decade, Johnson’s black body incited white fans and excited black fans.

Jack Johnson defeated Jim Jeffries by knockout in the fifteenth round on July 4, 1910.

The supposed irony of the date has been somewhat lost on the many historians, such as Gail

Bederman and Dave Zirin, who have written about the violence that ensued after the fight. On the anniversary of America’s birth, black people took to the streets to celebrate. They were followed by mobs of white men. Riots broke out across the country, from as far west as Texas to as far east as Washington D.C.315 As one might expect, the bulk of the rioting occurred in the

South where white lynch mobs stormed black neighborhoods in search of retribution. Whereas the lynchings that Johnson suffered were representational, the lynchings and assaults that resulted from his victory were anything but. Historians differ on the exact number of people who died during the riots. David Zirin, a sports historian and journalist, states that one hundred and fifty-one people died.316 In contrast, Al-Tony Gilmore in his cultural history of the famed boxer,

314 Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3.

315 Dave Zirin, A People’s History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play (New York: New Press People’s History, 2008), 45.

316 Zirin, A People’s History of Sports, 43.

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Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson, suggests the number was closer to six.317 Gail

Bederman, in Manliness & Civilization, puts the number at eighteen.318 In any event, thousands were injured in what Dave Zirin calls the “most widespread racial uprising that the United States had ever seen—or ever would see until the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther

King Jr.”319

Soon after the fight ended, when the embers of the violence that followed had just begun to cool, white journalists and thinkers embarked on a textual assault on the American black body itself. White journalists and thinkers soon began writing what we, in today’s parlance, would categorize as think pieces that attacked whatever recently obtained joy and agency black people may have gained via Johnson’s victory. Editorials from Virginia to Los Angeles all warned black people not think of Johnson’s win as a portent for their own futures within the country. A Los

Angeles Times writer warned black men not to, “…point your nose too high. Do not swell your chest too much. Do not boast too loudly. Do not be puffed up. Let not your ambition be inordinate or take a wrong direction.”320 This threat mirrored similar ones made by white writers throughout the country both before and after the fight. Famed American novelist Jack London, who coined the term “Great White Hope” for Jeffries, spent a year trying to convince Jeffries to fight Johnson, suggesting that the then-retired boxer had to fight and beat Johnson for white

317 Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press Press National University Publications, 1975), 14. 318 Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, 3. 319 Zirin, A People’s History of Sports, 43.

320 Los Angeles Times, quoted in Davarian L Baldwin, “Our Newcomers to the City: The Great Migration and the Making of Mass Culture,” in Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890-1930, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 166.

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pride.321 Right after the fight, as riots erupted across the country, many cities prevented the public showing of the fight due to “fear of the effect on Negroes.”322 In both the more aggressive forms of assault used by the Los Angeles Times’ writer and the more passive-aggressive one evidenced by the New York Times article, the thrill that black folk got to feel after Johnson’s victory immediately became an issue to be mitigated by the white supremacist dominant culture.

The Black Image

It should come as no surprise that a culture that could threaten the mass murder of black people, innocent, guilty, or otherwise, would engage in similar practices throughout various other mediated forms that were gaining in popularity during the same time period. Just as was the case with actual black people, black characters in visual media were subject to indiscriminate termination when they were depicted as desiring a fate that existed outside of their station.

Images which depict violence toward unruly black bodies illustrate what Afro-Pessimists would call the rubric of oppression, and how this rubric finds similar articulations in both actual understandings of blackness and textual ones. Blackness is always already remediated, and just like whiteness, it exists doubly as metaphor and physical referent. Imagistic lynching illustrates how those who viewed lynching as an appropriate means of disciplining black people into remediated black textual objects could transform a specific black person into a synecdoche of blackness. Within this rubric, Saidiya Hartman’s notion that one of the characteristics of the ontology of black existence is fungibility, or the capacity for one black body to stand in for any

321 Zirin, A People’s History of Sports, 42. 322 The New York Times, “Bar Fight Pictures to Avoid Race Riots: Washington, Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Cincinnati Fear Effect it would have on Negroes. Mayor Gaynor Won’t Stop Them.” The New York Times, July 06, 1910.

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other black body, becomes indisputable.323 Like many Afro-Pessimists, Hartman posits that the contemporary material realities of black suffering within the United States link directly to the conditions that slavery created. If slavery allowed the dominant culture to treat black people as combinations of toys to be played with until discarded and animals that ought to be put down when misbehaving, lynching existed, and continues to exist, inside the various modalities of literary and visual cultures.

Less obvious within Afro-Pessimist theory is that slavery and the Middle Passage, at least within the American imaginary, reduced the plurality of black bodies, black people, and black thought into a synecdoche. Overlooking the categorical or adjectival descriptors used to describe enslaved people and free blacks alike (house nigger, field nigger, exceptional nigger, etc.) is an essentialist paradigm that locks all black people in a perpetual state of inferiority, as forever niggers. As the notion of the variations on the immutable nigger became used to visually and literarily describe blackness primarily to and for white people, the emancipation of enslaved black people, particularly after Reconstruction (see the previous chapter), threatened to overturn the monolithic conceptualization of black people as niggers. As has likely to some degree always been the case, but has become more evident with the advent of advanced media technologies

(film, television, etc.), the realities of the physical world and the textual ones are more recursive than unidirectional. Cultural mores influence textual objects and textual objects influence cultural mores. So just as the plantation milieu inspired blackface minstrelsy, and blackface minstrelsy helped inspire the dominant culture’s understanding of black people during and after

323 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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Reconstruction, the logics of both manifested in the physical lynching of black people. Just like on the plantation, where to publicly torture an enslaved person functioned as a warning to every other enslaved person within sight, to discipline one black body through lynching is, either through example or through ideological motivation, to discipline all black bodies. For instance, lynchers would leave notes on their victim’s chest that read as warnings to the black people of the community. It was clear when children were forced to watch their parents lynched in front of them. Imagistic lynchings draw on the same logic when a black person in an image is shown to be disciplined through racialized violence, she is a stand-in for all black people who might perform in similar ways. In many instances, the very creation of the image is an act of imagistic lynching.

Imagistic Lynching

Nowhere can ideology be transmitted with more alacrity and force than through the image. Unlike the written word, the image, particularly a mechanically created one, does not seem to create an artificial construction of its referent. It creates a direct representation, an element of truth and actuality that distills the stream of life into an instant or many instances. In doing so, the image has the capacity to speak for multiple actors at the same time, turning them into a collective sign. Nicole R. Fleetwood calls the process by which an image comes to stand for multiple signs “iconicity.”324 Iconicity would have been particularly influential in the latter part of the nineteenth century when mass-mediated images were becoming a primary force for the spread of an American identity which had been fractured, if it ever truly existed at all, during

324 Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Visions: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, Kindle Edition.)

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the Civil War. If, as Marshall McLuhan asserts, “The printing press cried out for nationalism,” the spread of the photographic image intensified the desire for a stable white supremacist nationalism through images of dead black bodies.325 The nineteenth century visual technologies allowed for a greater proliferation of American thought and culture. As Wood states, “The remarkable mimetic quality of photography and film—their capacity to simulate reality with uncanny accuracy—accorded them enormous cultural influence in modern life.”326 This has continued to be the case, even though the phonograph and radio offered brief moments of resistance in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, respectively. Still, the image did not fight for dominance with media that privilege hearing, but with the written word.

Whereas the written word was understood to be a subjective perspective of the world,

Americans of all sorts in the nineteenth century saw the image, in particular the photograph, as a direct representation of reality.327 Whatever corresponding elements of truth nineteenth century

Americans related to the image should not negate the significance of ideology during this time period. In fact, just the opposite is the case. Because nineteenth century Americans saw the photographic, and then later the filmic, image as an unfettered depiction of life, the ideologies held within the image moved even more fluidly than they do in our current moment. For instance, many of the stereotypes that continue to surround black people came from fictionalized or embellished images that proliferated, initially, in blackface minstrelsy. As I described in detail

325 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Electronic Edition (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, 2013), Kindle Edition. 326 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 9. 327 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 9.

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in the second chapter, the image of the mammy as an overweight black woman became the preferred rendering of enslaved black women through the Aunt Jemima brand and subsequent depictions throughout early and contemporary filmic representations of the black woman’s body.

Blackface minstrelsy helped to author an understanding of black identity that circulated throughout the country.

Similarly, images of lynching served as a reminder to white supremacy of the ability to kill black people without consequence, and also confined blackness to a subordinated state of existence. During the lynching era, white supremacy succeeded at fulfilling the desire to see whiteness elevated and to see blackness denigrated. Within America’s normative production of racial thought and belief, these desires are far from a thing of the past. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva asserts, they have become so completely enveloped inside of systems, institutions, belief, and everyday practice that the thoughts themselves have been mistaken for the truth.328 Worse yet, in the case of lynching, they have been construed as a form of entertainment. In other words, imagistic lynching is not merely the visual depiction of or incitement for lynching (although that occurs), nor does it require the obvious representation of black bodies. Imagistic lynching occurs when bodies—typically, although not exclusively, black bodies, or bodies that represent black bodies—are disciplined via acts of racist, or perhaps better stated, racialized violence.

To be imagistically lynched is to have violence enacted upon one’s visual depiction in ways that evoke America’s long history of racial terror against black people. For instance, one

328 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Second Edition (Oxford, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, INC., 2006), 2.

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semi-popular meme of President Barack Obama which spread throughout social media during the 2008 Presidential election, alters the visage of his iconic “Hope” poster through inclusion of a noose around his neck with the words “Rope” replacing “Hope” (Fig. A7).329 Thus the act of imagistic lynching ought not to be understood merely as a critique of black people or blackness, but rather as an assault that activates the never-dormant white supremacist ideology that continues to formulate autonomous blackness within a rubric of the renegade slave body. The technological capabilities at hand to someone in the current digital age make the creation of the

“Rope” Obama image a mundane task. Digital tools such as Photoshop and web-based applications like Meme Generator grant anyone who has the means to buy a laptop and the time to learn how to alter images the ability to become a content creator who can, to some degree, maneuver around traditional corporate gate-keeping mechanisms. While this can be positive in that it creates a point of access for people belonging to historically underrepresented groups, it also gives those who employ racist rhetoric a similar platform. So even though the technologies that created the Obama "Rope" meme and allowed for its circulation might be recent, the idea behind the image is far from new.

According to the most recent research, nearly 4,000 black people may have been lynched in this country.330 Lynching fan activity has made sure the practice touched any black person or black person who has ever had access to a newspaper, television, film, or computer. The inherent ideology found within fandomized images of the black body reveal that the ideological

329 “Rope Obama,” mangozeen, August 28, 2012, accessed April 17, 2017, https://mangozeen.blogspot.com/2012/08/rope-obama.html. 330 Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015), 5.

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underpinnings of lynching are in no way the sole possession of those people who either lynched black people or were witnesses to lynchings. Instead, lynching ideology, like racism itself, is a normative and persistent idea within the American imaginary. This ideology did not begin with the rise of black lynchings in the late nineteenth century, nor did it fade away as a practice in the middle part of the twentieth century when anti-lynching advocates were finally successful in ending the terror of the lynching ideology’s physical manifestation. Lynching, like many fan practices, became so popular, so thoroughly defined, that it inspired its own separate enterprises.

Imagistic Lynching in Early Film

Imagistic lynching does not require the visual destruction of those bodies. Just as physical lynching numbers are off-base because they do not include attempted lynchings, attacks that did not end in death, or the likely many lynchings that have gone unrecorded, so too do imagistic lynchings not require visuals that render death. As I detail more thoroughly in the pages that follow, films such as Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915), King Kong (Cooper, 1933), and Planet of the Apes (Schaffner, 1968), to name just a few, depict black characters and characters marked as black in ways that reflect a white supremacist perspective on ways black people ought not to behave. Even as film helped to stabilize what we now consider normative American values, it offered few correctives in how the American imaginary viewed and understood black people.

While Griffith’s Birth of a Nation will be the central focus here, his was far from the first film to depict a lynching or inspire the sub-genre called lynching films.

Just as with their photographic counterparts, lynching films were an instrumental part of the proliferation of lynching fandom. The majority of lynching films were created during the late

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nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were typically one-reel short films and though scarcely advertised in newspapers, were immensely popular with Southern audiences.331 These visual renderings of violent spectacles helped systematize a standard of conventional visual lynching practices that were replicated in the physical lynchings of black people.332 For instance,

Wood connects the filmic depictions of lynching with the lynching of Will Porter when she states, “As audience members, the men who lynched Potter had very likely witnessed scenes of hangings and shootings on that same opera house stage.”333 The lynching films that may have inspired the murderers of Will Porter are, in my view, fan texts that proliferated the iconic and ideological message of lynching to other fans who later brought the violence that inhabited the celluloid screen to physicalized spaces. These fans helped push the notion that the destruction of blackness is inherently fungible. According to Robert L. Jackson, lynching films can be also understood as any films in which a black person is threatened with lynching, the idea of lynching exists in an otherwise neutral state, or when lynching is evoked through a visual metaphorical arrangement wherein a film attempts to subtextually allude to lynching activity itself without directly activating the primary imagistic relationship embedded within the practice’s cultural memory.334

The most prominent exemplar for the first sort of lynching film in Jackson’s taxonomy is also one of the most famous films in the early Hollywood period, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a

331 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 120.

332 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 115. 333 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 115.

334 Ronald L. Jackson, Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 106.

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Nation. In this film, Gus is lynched after he makes a sexual advance toward a white woman. As I argued in Chapter 2, Birth of a Nation revels in its fandom of the black body through the gaze of blackface minstrelsy, both in its depiction of the “right” kind of black person who enjoys slavery so much that he or she happily dances and sings for his or her white betters and the “wrong” kind of black person who is granted agency by misguided white people and thus is allowed to run amok on white society and, most importantly, white women. In fandomizing blackness in this way, the film emboldens the white supremacist vision that blackness requires control and domination for the survival and prosperity of white supremacy, and thus the nation. The film also offers a response to black people who have fallen out of the scope of this vision. As I stated in

Chapter 2, Birth of a Nation insults those black people who were not satisfied with their condition as slaves by associating their depictions with harmful stereotypes. For instance, the film portrays Gus’ desire to marry a white woman as tantamount to embodying the blasphemous.

The film argues that black men hold an inherent and uncontrollable lust for white women. In fact, when she spurns Gus’ advances he chases her until she jumps off of a cliff in order to shield her purity from Gus’ unholy lust. Afterwards, Ben, the film’s hero, stares directly into the camera while clutching her dead body in his hands. In that moment, the film suggests that the only way for white men to deal with a black man’s desire for a white woman is through that man’s brutal annihilation. The film then lives up to its promise as the Ku Klux Klan later lynches

Gus. Working within a system of violence visited upon black bodies, the film acts as both a theatrical polemic toward the control of unruly black bodies and a participatory text invested in the continuation of lynching, which had been on the decline when the film premiered in 1915.

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Much has been written about the rise in Ku Klux Klan membership during the second decade of the twentieth century and whether it can be attributed to Griffith’s racist screed. Cedric

J. Robinson, for instance, writes that the Klan used Birth of a Nation as a recruitment tool during the 1920s, helping them bring millions of members into their ranks.335 I am not really interested in that question as Klan membership was not a requirement for lynching black people. What is interesting is that while some of the more prominent lynchings in American history occured after

Birth of a Nation’s premiere, such as Jesse Washington’s murder in Waco, Texas, lynchings continued to decline overall. In some way, perhaps contradictory to Griffith’s motives, Birth of a

Nation’s imagistic lynching may have helped to satisfy the desire for actual lynchings. As

Jackson points out, the period that saw the fall of the Hollywood system corresponds with the decline in lynchings.336 However, the use of lynching as a means to control black populations also overlaps with the upswing in popularity of other forms of mediated entertainment.

In the twentieth century’s first decade, when lynching first began to decline sharply, electronic visual media began its slow ascent as the primary mode for cohering American identity. It was, after all, this time period that saw experiments of the moving image, such as

Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope and the Lumière Brothers’ Cinematographe, evolve into an amalgamation of technological devices and narrative practices that constitute film as we currently understand it. Short one-reel films were exhibited in fairs and in viewing parlors, hotel lobbies, and other places that became collective sites for visual entertainment. And while Wood

335 Cedric J. Robinson, “D.W. Griffith and the Whitening of America,” in The Black Studies Reader, eds. Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, Claudine Michel (New York: Routledge, 2004), Kindle Edition. 336 Jackson, Scripting the Black Masculine, 105.

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is correct when she states that the South had comparably limited access to these technologies compared with the North, southerners were not wholly denied the opportunity to take part in the visual cohering of cinematic white American identity.337 For example, in 1896, William Rock and Walter Wainwright opened the first ever “storefront theater” made exclusively for the showing of moving images in New Orleans.338 Still, the fact that lynching functioned as a form of entertainment in a region of America lacking the technological infrastructure that allowed for the proliferation of mass media culture has gone unnoticed. One possible reason that spectacle lynching became so popularized in the South, whereas it was relatively unheard of in the North, might be that the North had other avenues for amusement that did not involve the literal destruction of black people. While there are numerous reasons why lynching activity was curtailed in the early twentieth century, increased access to American mass culture cannot be ignored.

By the time George Méliès in 1902 with “A Trip to the Moon” and Edwin Porter in 1903 with “The Great Train Robbery” had successfully fused the capabilities of moving-image technology with the narrative and spatial cohesion of theater, lynching was already on the decline in America. That was thanks largely to the sustained activism of Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Wells-Barnett wrote numerous articles against lynching that uncovered two inconvenient truths about the systematic destruction of black bodies. The first was that black people were often lynched for no particular reason whatsoever and not because they had committed some

337 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 118.

338 Tim Dirks, “The History of Film: The Pre-1920s: Early Cinematic Origins and the Infancy of Film, Part 2,” Filmsite, accessed February 13, 2017, http://www.filmsite.org/pre20sintro2.html.

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horrendous crime, most notably rape. The second was that many of the so-called rapes that black people were accused of were really consensual relationships between black men and white women.339 Wells-Barnett’s articles and monographs, as well as her pointed and performative journey to the United Kingdom, according to Gail Bederman, convinced the British to shame the

South into curtailing lynching, at least to some degree.340 The work of Wells-Barnett cannot be understated, but I contend that since lynching as both practice and fandom exists not merely as a means to instill white supremacy inside the hearts and minds of both white and black people, but as the hyper-logical conclusion to the white supremacist dominant culture’s consumption of black existence, the campaign of lynching could not have been defeated, even by someone as gifted and industrious as Wells-Barnett. For even though physical lynching did decline in the twentieth century’s first decade, it had already infiltrated the American imagination during the height of its practice because it became woven into professional and amateur visual practices and ideology.

In the late nineteenth century, when film technologies were being created by the likes of

Thomas Edison, who produced one of the early lynching films, Charles Francis Jenkins, and others, lynchings occurred far more often than they did when D.W. Griffith’s fandomized piece of lynching propaganda, Birth of a Nation, premiered. And yet, while lynchings were more common in the nineteenth century, some of the most ostentatious and horrifying lynchings, with the largest and bawdiest crowds, happened after film’s ascendancy and after many white southerners would have seen photographs and filmic depictions of lynchings. There are, of

339 Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases (Public Domain Book, 1892), Kindle Edition. 340 Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 60.

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course, exceptions to this. For instance, the lynching of Sam Holt (or Hose) in 1899 was an anomaly for the time period in that he was mutilated, castrated, set on fire, and had his body parts sold to the 2000 thousand or so spectators as memorabilia. As a writer for the Springfield

Weekly Republican in Massachusetts put it, “Those unable to obtain the ghastly relics direct paid their more fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them. Small pieces of bones went for 25 cents, and a bit of the liver crisply cooked sold for 10 cents.”341 Additionally, Holt’s body parts, or some replica thereof, were still being bartered, traded, and sold seven decades later.342 Like many spectacle lynchings, the public torture and murder of Sam Holt gained national attention.

Editorials were written that called on the Georgia government to prosecute his murderers and for the country to examine its own responsibilities to these crimes. The Governor of Georgia, where

Holt was lynched, responded to the “controversy” surrounding Holt’s death by arguing that the black community had been “blinded by race prejudices” because they were devastated about

Holt’s murder, but he had nothing to say about the crime he had allegedly committed.343 Some things do not change.

Like Henry Smith before him, the lynching of Sam Holt is not the exception to the rule, but the exception that proves the rule. Returning to Wood, if Will Porter’s lynchers had seen lynching films and photographs, so too did many of the other twentieth-century lynchers. And

341“Negro Burned Alive in Florida; Second Negro Then Hanged,” Springfield (Massachusetts) Weekly Republican, April 28, 1899, quoted in 100 Years of Lynching, edited by Ralph Ginzburg (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988), Kindle Edition.

342 Edwin T. Arnold, “What Virtue There is in Fire”: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 2.

343 “Negro Burned Alive in Florida,” quoted in Ginzburg 100 Years of Lynching.

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yet, according to noted black film historian Donald Bogle, after the Birth of a Nation premiered, the virulent racism and lynching ideology evident in the film seemed to turn Hollywood films away from the notion of lynching films and the depictions of black men who were sexually obsessed with white women that would, at least to the vast majority of white Americans, necessitate a lynching.344 In fact, in 1930, Hollywood, in an attempt to elude the clutches of the federal government, self-adopted the Production Code which, among other things, forbade the representation of relationships between black and white characters.345

This does not mean that relationships between black people and white people were not explored and that black bodies were not lynched because of them. It simply means that to address this issue, filmmakers used visual metaphors to get around the Code. Most notably,

Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong tells the story of a giant gorilla who is kidnapped from his jungle homeland, a place that time literally forgot, in order to be turned into a circus attraction. Once arriving in New York City, Kong breaks free from his chains because of his uncontrollable desire for a white woman, Ann Darrow (Faye Wray). Upon escaping into the city, Kong kidnaps Ann and is eventually hunted down and killed in order to protect her, and really all of civilization, from his wrath. And yet, at its conclusion, the film places Kong not as a villain, but as a sympathetic victim of his own inability to control his urges. The famous line, “It was beauty killed the beast,” uttered in the film by Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), allows for a reading of

King Kong as an allegory for autonomous black masculinity. The film suggests that Kong would

344 Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 21st Century Edition (New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 12.

345 Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, Revised and Updated Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), Kindle Edition.

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have been better off kept away from America and, most importantly, away from white women.

The white masculine obsession with protecting the virtue of white women from fiendish black masculine sexuality was used as a justification for lynching and the oppression of black people and appears in the textual justifications for both slavery and the abolitionist literature of the nineteenth century.

The anxiety toward the uncontrollable black body and its existence in America was, almost a century earlier, fundamental to abolition movements that wanted to end slavery and also send black people back to Africa.346 It is the same sort of racism evident in Harriet Beecher

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. According to Ibram X.

Kendi, Stowe’s popular novel became an exemplar for racist people, both black and white, attempting to prove that black people were intellectually inferior to white people. If black people were left to their own devices, their powerful emotions in combination with weak minds would cause a violent, at times sexual, response. This idea mirrors the lynching justifications that littered the fandom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black men were lynched in order to protect white women, and black people were lynched because emancipation had failed them. Regarding the popular white racial thought about black people following the Civil War and their propensity to treat black acts of autonomy with violence, Edwin T. Arnold writes, “The

‘heroic measures’ of the whites were demanded to regain control of blacks, who were not yet ready for freedom and responsibility.”347 As Rhona J. Bernstein argues, King Kong and the

346 Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016, 194. 347 Arnold, What Virtue There is in Fire, 28.

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jungle film sub-genre the film belongs to, “depict blacks as monstrous.”348 Just as black people were not ready for “freedom and responsibility,” so too do we see a Kong who, freed, rampages throughout downtown New York City in search of his forbidden love, Ann Darrow, proving that he is not ready for autonomy. The supposed complexity and nuance of this relationship and the sympathies directed toward Kong negate the imagistic lynching that the film centers itself on.

Lynching fandom may arise in the contours of the negotiation between blackface minstrelsy and black existence, but its true source rests in the very idea of blackness inhabiting spaces where it does not belong.

Imagistic Lynching in Contemporary Cinema

In the years following Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and the metaphorical construction of black lynching in King Kong, assaults on the black body within popular culture did not wane.

Indeed they fulfilled Bogle’s premise: they were slipped in through an ostensibly comedic package. For instance, in “Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat,” a Universal Pictures cartoon directed by Walter Lantz in 1941, there is not a particular moment when black bodies are disciplined through racialized violence. Instead, the cartoon itself functions as an attempt to discipline blackness through images that render black bodies as lazy, indolent, savage, and over- sexualized. The cartoon begins with images depicting black men sleeping during the day when they should be working. Of course, the construction of the black men and black women is in line with the racist caricatures first created within the blackface minstrel milieu. With one notable exception, the all-black cast have big lips, wide noses, exaggerated black hairstyles, and missing

348 Rhona J. Bernstein, “White Heroines and Hearts of Darkness: Race, Gender and Disguise in 1930s Jungle Films,” Film History, Vol. 6, (1994): 315.

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teeth. The exception is an overtly sexualized mixed-race woman who also functions as the cartoon’s inciting incident when she enters “Lazy Town” and tells the black people within the town that they require rhythm to work. What follows is a boogie-woogie inspired music video in which the black town gets over its laziness through the direction of the mixed-race woman. The violence that ensues does not come in the form of a visually-depicted physical assault on the black people, but an assault on blackness itself. From the lazy black men, to the mammy figure, to the mixed-race woman who saunters around the town in outfit that shows off her animated body, blackness is both the setup and punchline to the cartoon’s joke: the men cannot be aroused by anything but a provocatively dressed almost-white woman and upbeat music. Also, the two opposing constructions of black women illustrate how blackface minstrelsy tropes and iconography have become tools used to assault the bodies and identities of black people. The mammy figure is heavy-set, with dark skin, big lips; she is dressed in a maid’s outfit with her hair wrapped up in a rag. While, initially, she is the only one working, she is nevertheless unable to get the other black people, all men or children, to work. Through the plot and the way she is drawn, she is rendered as simultaneously hardworking, incompetent, and undesirable. The mixed-race black woman is obviously lighter, but slightly tinted to signify that she is not white.

The cartoon thus contrasts the mammy and the mulatto characters to assault blackness. The

“real” black woman is depicted as both unattractive and ineffectual because her blackness deprives her of efficacy in either area. In contrast, the lighter-skinned black woman is shown as sexy and capable in getting the men and children to work. The black men in the cartoon have much greater visual diversity. The cartoon depicts black men who are tall, short, skinny, fat, and everything in-between. However, regardless of their physical stature, the cartoon depicts all of

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the black men in the same paradigm as the blackface minstrel coon. This is not to say that “Scrub

Me Mama with a Boogie Beat” treats its black woman objects better than black men. In allowing for a sexualized mediated form of black female identity, the cartoon traffics in the ever-present capacity for black women to become turned into beings of pure sexual gratification under the white gaze.

“Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat” exists within a dominant cultural logic that presumes blackface minstrel fan articulations as normative utterances of black ontology. It situates blackness as harmful, undesirable, and worthy only of being mocked for the purposes of entertainment and humor. Just as King Kong and “Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat” were being made into racist assaults on blackness, so too were the first self-identified participatory fandoms forming. While I have somewhat subtextually been arguing that fandom has been an active part of American media consumption and engagement since at least the seventeenth century, the first collection of self-identified fans who intentionally gathered together underneath the idea that they shared series of passions and ideological positions began taking shape in the

1930s.

The fandomization of the black body and fan activity intertwine in the fandom of another cartoon that used the core fan ideology of blackface minstrelsy to visually lynch “inappropriate” black performance: the fandom of Disney’s infamous Song of the South (Jackson and Foster,

1946). A live-action film with interspersed animated scenes, Song of the South continues the racist legacy of cinema and the construction of a singularly appropriate formation of black performance. In the film, a young white boy named Johnny runs away from the plantation where he and his parents are vacationing because he feels abandoned by his father. Eventually, he

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encounters a group of black children and an elderly black man, Uncle Remus, on the edge of the plantation. For the rest of the film, Uncle Remus tells Johnny stories that help him sort out the various conflicts he encounters. Although the film takes place during Reconstruction, Song of the

South romanticizes the plantation milieu through Uncle Remus, a tom character who spins tales about the trickster Br’Er Rabbit and sings songs such as “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” in which he waxes poetic about his former life of bondage and his current existence on the same plantation where one imagines, he was once enslaved.

In 1986, Disney decided to take the film off the shelves because of its racist content.349

Since then, fans of the film have become strident in their belief that Disney ought to re-release the film, ostensibly because they feel that history should not be deleted even if it is ugly.

However, I suspect it is mostly because they value their own enjoyment of the film over any racist content the film might contain. Fandoms often behave as if they are being persecuted, a fact that fan studies has not just failed to acknowledged, but encouraged. As one commenter on the film’s Facebook fan page stated in a post dated November 13, 2015: “it got banned, Racist film. I loved it.”350 The fact that fans of Song of the South cannot see that a film that employs blackface minstrel tropes to reinforce the subordination of black bodies to whiteness is a consequence of a white supremacist media environment founded on lynching images that turn black people into white entertainment in life and in death.

349 Hollis Henry, “Song of a Never-Was South: Will Disney re-release a twisted film?” The Black Commentator, 2002, accessed February 13, 2017, http://www.blackcommentator.com/139/139_south.html.

350 Stephen Jago, comment, November 13, 2015 (4:58am) on “Song of the South turns 69 years old today!” Facebook, November 12, 2015, Accessed February 13, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/songofthesouth/.

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One such example is Planet of the Apes, one of the most popular science fiction films of the late 1960s. The original film was so successful that it inspired four sequels throughout the

1970s, two different television series, one remake in 2001, and a reboot in 2011, which spawned two more sequels of its own. The original Planet of the Apes tells the story of an astronaut,

Captain George Taylor (Charlton Heston), who arrives on a mysterious planet where apes rather than humans evolved into the dominant intelligent species. The film depicts the planet of the apes in the midst of a dark age where the apes have yet to invent more advanced technology.

Even prior to the film's surprise ending where the viewer discovers that the planet Taylor has been trying to escape has been his home planet Earth all along, the movie traffics on a racial nightmare. In the film, the simians have a speciesist hierarchical structure where the physically powerful, yet stupid, gorillas sit at the top, followed by the intelligent but fallen orangutans, then the inquisitive and childish chimpanzees, and finally the humans, who are slaves. Worse yet, as

Gary Gerani argues, the true horror of the film comes from Taylor who "emerges as a man stripped of heritage and importance, naked in the face of an unsympathetic environment."351 In other words, the planet of the apes is the visual embodiment of the Western world's worst fear: a place where whiteness has no value and the metaphorical black people (the gorillas) are in control. The Earth in the diegesis of Planet of the Apes simultaneously encodes two warnings.

The first is a rather classic trope in science fiction from the time period: nuclear disarmament, or else. The second builds on the first because it was ultimately nuclear war that ended humanity's

(white people) reign as rulers of the planet; the result is a world where white people are the

351 Gary Gerani, “Knowing Your Place on the Planet of the Apes,” in Planet of the Apes, comic, Marvel Comics Group, June 7, 1975, no.33, 21.

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slaves. The gorillas embody the same fear of black power and autonomy that have guided the use of lynching imagery for decades. Visual media objects that construct examples of black characters, or characters who read as black, to embody that fear do some of the same work as lynching photographs and other images that depict overt racial violence. These pieces of media trade on a contrived concern over the autonomous black body as an ever-present threat to the nation and world. Further, they illustrate how the formal conventions of blackface minstrelsy have become intertwined with the hostility of spectators who demand that the images of black people that they consume not just entertain, but function as visual correctives for black people or perhaps, more accurately, white people. The symbolic destruction of the black body in Planet of the Apes simultaneously evoked the fear of increased black political power for white people (let us not forget that the film premiered in the midst of the Civil Rights Era) and further illustrated the ability of white supremacist images to create and alter the black body in any way it so desired.

The continued fascination with media objects that discipline black bodies for being imagined threats to white supremacy functions as an act of willful unseeing. Because fans of

Planet of the Apes want media objects that reinforce notions of white supremacy and black inferiority, or at the very least they value their own entertainment over racist imagery,

Hollywood continues to produce new iterations of these racist objects. For instance, decades after the original King Kong premiered, vaunted director, Peter Jackson decided to remake the film as a love letter to his own childhood fandom. In various interviews, Jackson revealed that

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he has wanted to remake King Kong since he first saw the film when he was eight years old.352

More interesting than his lifelong fandom with the film is his statement, “I am not a filmmaker with a message to impart onto the world. I simply want to entertain people.”353 On the surface it would seem that Jackson’s anti-philosophy suggests messages exist separately, or perhaps additionally, to the entertainment of spectators. This seems contradictory to the idea that one would want to remake a film with such a clear message at its core, unless that message is either invisible to Jackson, or irrelevant. Jackson’s fandom also serves as a reminder that the fandoms of the black body, blackface minstrelsy, and lynching are so hidden within textual, filmic, televisual, and other mediated forms that the racism of a text disappears without a historical categorization to properly contextualize its significance. And yet, King Kong’s obvious racist allegory has been discussed time and time again. It is so prominent within the annals of film history that it functions as a joke in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009).354 What is important is how King Kong works as a symbol and then proliferates throughout American cultural thought. Had King Kong simply been a bad science fiction film made over eighty years ago, it would not be worth discussing except as a historical marker.

352 Peter Jackson interview by Stephen Applebaum, “Peter Jackson King Kong,” BBC, September 24, 2014, accessed February 13, 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2005/12/09/peter_jackson_king_kong_2005_interview.shtml.

353 Applebaum, “Peter Jackson King Kong.”

354 For more scholarly investigations on King Kong’s racism see: James Sneed, “Spectatorship and Capture in King Kong: The Guilty Look,” in Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997) and Cynthia Erb, Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture, 2nd Edition (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009).

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Since King Kong has had multiple sequels and remakes, most recently Peter Jackson’s

2005 rendition, it appears as if the ideas of the film still linger within our mediated consciousness. What is most interesting about Jackson’s version of the film is that, unlike the

1980s remake which attempted to remediate the racial concerns of the original by reframing the situation entirely, Jackson attempts to re-tell King Kong as an even more tragic love story than the original. Added to the more contemporary version are scenes in which Kong must save Ann from the other monsters of the island, and where she must perform for him in order to entertain him. In this sense, one imagines, we are supposed to look at Kong as a more sympathetic figure, and his relationship with Darrow (Naomi Watts) as more complex. However, the film does not, could not, remove the racist taint maintained by a giant gorilla’s obsession with a white woman, which leads to state-sponsored murder. Instead, King Kong remains a film about a gorilla who stands for a black man who is lynched because his lust for a white woman makes him lose control and threaten society. With this in mind, it would be easy to assert that everyone who has ever made a work that fandomizes lynching was an overt racist who received satisfaction and delight from the death of black bodies, but the reality is somewhat worse. Because many texts that traffic in the imagistic lynching of black bodies erase black people from the screen, those who read these texts become vulnerable to lynching ideology without realizing it.

Race and Digital Culture

In the latter decades of the twentieth century, academics began to see the potential for technology to converge previously distinct identitarian categories. Beginning with Donna

Haraway’s seminal “A Cyborg Manifesto,” (1984), and then later continuing with Sherry

Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995) and Allucquére Rosanne

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Stone’s War of Desire (1996), many of the academics initially interested in the cultures developing within the Internet age saw online environments as potentially emancipatory spaces where the bindings and barriers of marginalized identities can be overcome in favor a disembodied or newly bodied identity not beholden to histories of racial, gendered, and colonial oppression. These optimistic appraisals of the future of identity politics would then be countered by scholars, many of them people of color, who investigated the digital iterations of white supremacy and misogyny. Lisa Nakamura’s Cybertypes, published in 2002, Jessie Daniel’s

Cyber Racism in 2009, and Laur M. Jackson’s “Memes in Blackness,” in 2016, are just a few examples. Evident in both positions is a tension over the proper place of identity and its politics in ostensibly leftist-minded academic and artistic spaces. For Haraway and those who followed her, emerging technologies were an opportunity to overthrow the histories and boundaries of identity.

To this point, Haraway announces the cyborg as “a creature in a post-gender world, it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.

In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story…”355 Haraway’s theory of the cyborg is rooted in a rejection of terminological boundaries. In this sense, Haraway attempts to build a coalition of individuals made up from differently makeshift bodies. For her, the cyborg disrupts the seemingly inherent binaries of human/animal, human/technology, and the physical/non-

355 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London, New York: Routledge, 1999), 272.

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physical.356 She suggests that instead of thinking of these identities as wholly distinct, we are all already cyborgs—embodied composites of differing material origin points, beings for whom our lack of identity is our identity. A skeptical reading of Haraway would find her own investment in revising the terms of identity to one in which the historical suffering of marginalized, particularly non-white, people becomes erased to be white supremacy lite. However, unlike many of her successors, Haraway takes the time to include the work of women of color and to theorize how the differing philosophical realities of those women can create frameworks that avoid oppressive reifications. Still, some of those who followed Haraway devoted considerably less time to elucidating the differing histories of women of color, including Allucquére Stone, whom

Haraway mentored,

In this metaphorical amalgamation of carbon and metal, silicon becomes useful as a de- material extension of a body into other cyborg bodies. Stone sees bodies as the (somewhat) static material housing for our more ephemeral and fluid selves.357 Seemingly then, the self and the body exist under differing sets of circumstances and rules. Whereas the self, or one’s selves, can be transferred into online environments and occupy a multiplicity of personas simultaneously, the body can only ever exist on a moment-to-moment basis. One’s body can change, but its materiality will always be rooted in time and space, thus making it appear to be a manifestation of a singular persona. On the other hand, the cyborg persona, guided by Internet technology, allows for a splintering of the relationship between the body and a person’s multiple selves that

356 Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 272-274. 357 Allucquére Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) 2.

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still remain tethered by technology.358 Since people can inhabit different personas with potentially different histories, their relationship to their bodies becomes somewhat abstract.

Stone sees cyberspace as a hive, or base, for the cyborg. For her, if the cyborg is a being without a history, then the Internet is its fractal and fractured homeland.359

Even though Sherry Turkle has no interest in upholding the cyborg metaphor, she nonetheless agrees with Haraway and Stone in that she perceives of the encounter between the individual and “the screen” as a fundamentally postmodern act of deconstruction.360 For her, online identities are little different from characters or avatars that a person can alter at a moment’s notice. While this is no doubt true in a certain sense, what is missing from Turkle and

Stone’s accounts is that for some, particularly people of color, racial and ethnic identities matter precisely because the dominant culture has been so heavily invested in physically and ideologically erasing those identities, along with the historic and systemic oppressions that so often come with them. Which is to say, they seemed to not consider race and ethnicity at all when they wrote about the potentiality of the cyborg. Turkle, for her part, seems to have considered the issue, but only at the most perfunctory of levels. More pragmatically, due to those economic, geographic, gendered, and religious oppressions, many people could not escape their identities even if they wanted to. Still, Stone, Turkle, and others have influenced many other thinkers who would be more intentional in their examination of race in digital spaces.

358 Stone, The War of Desire and Technology, 2.

359 Stone, The War of Desire and Technology, 39.

360 Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

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Within the confines of digital spaces and the cultures therein, which have only become more participatory since the advent of Web 2.0 applications, race does not and has never been used as a tool for dismantling the oppressive hierarchies that seem to be always active in the physical realm. And yet, as Jessie Daniels states in her book Cyber Racism, a thorough and thoughtful investigation on the permanency and mutability of white supremacist rhetoric in digital spaces, “The participatory quality of Web. 2.0, where everyone creates online content, opens up white supremacist rhetoric in ways that were simply not possible in the print-only- era… The Internet, and specifically the participatory form of the Internet referred to as Web 2.0, changes that so the resistive read of the prevailing white supremacist ideology gets built into the medium.”361 That is, the material conditions resulting from the centuries-long creation of blackness as an ontologically non-existent slave identity is only heightened when introduced into digitized environments. Digital tools such as Photoshop and other meme-creating applications have revealed what has always been true: remediated black bodies are always vulnerable to the occupation of white supremacist ideology. This ideology has been merged with the fandom compunction to recreate texts in ways that adhere to a pre-existent conceptualization of appropriate political engagement. In short, the combination of digital culture and fandom methodologies illustrate that all bodies can be fandomized, but when those bodies are black the textual objects that emerge from this process are also encoded with the inherently white supremacist logic found in the DNA of American culture.

361 Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (Landham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 84.

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This should not be a surprise. Just as lynching photographs were textual objects spread surreptitiously in order to cohere a white supremacist understanding of black inferiority, avowed white nationalist and white supremacist websites have existed on the Internet since its early stages.362 As Daniels states regarding the efficacy of white supremacist websites in avoiding detection, “The emergence of cloaked websites illustrates a central feature of propaganda and cyber racism in the digital era: the use of difficult-to-detect authorship and hidden agendas intended to accomplish political goals, including white supremacy.”363 In the years since

Daniels’ book was published in 2009, an increasingly political environment throughout digital spaces fostered primarily by women of color interested in fomenting much needed social justice has also led to increased activity from avowed racists who desire to maintain America’s standing as a white supremacist culture.

While these white supremacists, who engage in the most aggressive form of the lynching fandom seen since the end of the physical lynching era, use memes such as “Obama Rope” in order to ontologically suture blackness to lynching, they are also appropriating a form of black political resistance. As Laur M. Jackson argues, the Internet meme itself, in both content and movement, mirrors the internal logic of black vernacular and black culture.364 She suggests that both memes and black cultural products demonstrate an almost infinite mutability and hybridity in that they can exist in a plethora of environments. In drawing this comparison, Jackson

362 Daniels, Cyber Racism, 3.

363 Daniels, Cyber Racism, 3-4.

364 Laur M. Jackson, “The Blackness of Meme Movement,” Model View Culture, Issue 35, March 28, 2016, accessed on February 14, 2017, https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-blackness-of-meme-movement.

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subtextually authors a history of American popular culture, both material and digital, built on the backs of black American existence. Even so, contemporary lynching fandom occupies blackness in that it remediates the black body in order to dismantle it, just as blackface minstrelsy did, and simultaneously appropriates forms of black culture. The ability and desire to use blackness against black people is a fundamental aspect of the lynching fandom. Since lynching became intertwined with the policing of black bodies, the behavior of black people deemed as deviant from the perspective of white supremacy has been weaponized as a justification for black death.

The most common form of assault for these white supremacists has been to harass and assault people of color, in particular black women, who have been the intellectual and emotional leaders of digitally based social movements such as Black Lives Matter, as well as the curators and creators of digital rhetoric itself. Since Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, thanks to the passionate and concerted effort of the NAACP, visual representations that celebrate the lynching of black people have all but disappeared from mass media objects. As I have already argued, elements of the lynching fandom have bled into professionally produced visual media and not just in the case of films such as King Kong, which display what Toni Morrison would call the “Africanist presence.”365 According to Morrison, the white supremacist dominant culture’s wholly fictional conceptualization of blackness permeates the history of American literature from the eighteenth century to the present. It is the literary embodiment of Du Bois’ color-line which not only dominates American letters, but is its defining characteristic.366 To which Morrison writes:

365 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

366 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 6.

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Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. Through significant and underscored omissions, starting contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writes peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence—one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness. And it shows.367 Embedded within the shadows of Poe, the dark men of Hawthorne, and the moral decay of

Melville is a barely tangible fear of the unknown that the black body conjures. In visual media, perhaps because the referent has no image to hide behind, the cultural logic of remediated blackness seems to the conscious reader as less subtle, but remains to many plausibly deniable.

In digital culture and the lynching fandom that permeates and signifies much of its internal operations, this plea toward ignorance has risen to pathology. After the election of

Donald Trump, Dr. Michelle Herren, who held positions as a pediatric doctor and faculty member at the University of Colorado, Denver, responded to a Facebook post about Michelle

Obama’s oratory skills: “Doesn’t seem to be speaking too eloquent here, thank god we can’t hear her! Monkey face and poor ebonic English!!! There! I feel better and am still not racist!!! Just calling it like it is!”368 From Herren’s perspective, she is not racist because she claims to be not racist. Her words do not somehow reveal any element of her character because she claims to be uttering some form of incontrovertible truth. This connects to a common refrain of racists.

367 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 6.

368 Nina Golgowski, “Doctor Calls Michelle Obama ‘Monkey Face,’” The Huffington Post, December 5, 2016, accessed February 14, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/doctor-michelle-obama-monkey- face_us_584069a7e4b017f37fe35241.

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“Facts” and “honesty” somehow trump the linguistic embodiment of institutional tyranny. These so-called truths are rarely, if ever, based on anything but a fictional understanding of the world, often filtered through the lens of white supremacy. But in digital culture these statements find ballast given a large trend toward a radical postmodernist perspective in which facts are secondary to the affective position of the subject. If the postmodern condition is, as Jean-

Francois Lyotard suggests, an implementation of subjective localized narratives over objective grand narratives, then the radical postmodern condition of digital culture, of the so-called alt- right, imbues the situational logic of the local narrative with the authority of the grand narrative.369 While this might seem like a new phenomenon, it is the very same logic that can be found in the lynching fandom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Imagistic Lynching: From Film to Digital

With the advent of computer generated imagery (CGI) and other motion-capture software that created more capacity for wholly digitally created objects to appear on-screen in the 1990s, metaphorical and racist renderings of blackness could become even more obscured. And yet, there are times when the digitization of alien bodies obviously correlates with blackness. For instance, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (Lucas 1999) introduces the character of Jar Jar

Binks into the Star Wars universe. According to Adilifu Nama, who borrows from Donald

Bogle’s taxonomy of black minstrelsy tropes inherent within Hollywood reconstructions of blackness, Jar Jar is a “sci-fi version of a Coon.”370 Jar Jar, played by black actor, Ahmed Best,

369 Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

370 Adilifu Nama, Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 160.

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embodies Bogle’s definition of a coon in his highly racialized speech pattern that brings to mind an intensely exaggerated Jamaican accent as well as blackface minstrel devaluations of black performative utterances, and his bumbling antics create a racialized specter of blackness around a digitally constructed alien body. Just as with King Kong, blackness becomes an obvious metaphor meant to ground the understanding of an alien within an extant visible grammar. So naturally this kind of racist character would cause Star Wars fans to rise in anger over an archaic depiction of black people, right? Not exactly. While it is true that Jar Jar Binks was almost immediately reviled amongst Star Wars fans, what is less true is that it has anything to do with the character’s representing racist tropes and more with the character’s becoming a symbol for everything wrong with the Star Wars prequels. In a Salon article written around the time of The

Phantom Menace premiere, David Cassel captured the anger surrounding the character while also posing this significant question: “Why does this jive-talking, subservient character whip up such fury?”371 While Cassel does not spend much time answering his rhetorical inquiry, suggesting only that some find Jar Jar annoying, noting that “Jar Jar’s idiot-clowning comes across to many as racist,” it remains an important question for understanding the logic of fan anger. The answer can perhaps be found in the fan responses to Jar Jar since the film opened.

The legacy of Jar Jar Binks has become directly tied into a desire of seeing the character meet a violent end. For instance, the critic and fan of science fiction films Daniel M. Kimmel titled his collection of essays Jar Jar Binks Must Die… And Other Observations about Science

Fiction Movies. There was a once semi-popular song within the Jar Jar Binks hate fandom also

371 David Castle, “’Star Wars’ lovers call for Jar Jar’s Head,” Slate Magazine, May 28, 1999, accessed February 14, 2017, http://www.salon.com/1999/05/28/jar_jar/.

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called “Jar Jar Binks Must Die” and a now defunct website with the same name. In the participatory, intertextual digital environment of contemporary Internet culture, fictional characters like Jar Jar Binks are used to discipline real life figures and, not coincidentally, to highlight white masculine fan power. In an article published on The Huffington Post titled “10

Times Jar Jar Binks Opened His Mouth and Ruined Star Wars: Episode I,” the “listicle,” which was published fifteen years after Star Wars: Episode I premiered, begins with an image of a white fist punching Jar Jar’s face.372 While it also depicts what, in the fandom sense, would be an act of racial violence, the very fact that someone took the time and energy to create such an image reveals how anger and hate are as pleasurable a fan activity as images created out of joy.

In the same article, other images of Jar Jar Binks are paired with variations on the character’s oft- mocked speech pattern. White people mocking black vernacular has a long and persistent history within mediated entertainment. This tradition only gets somewhat obfuscated when Internet memes attempt to discipline blackness via the mocking of an alien character meant to be read as black. To visually and rhetorically perform such acts of violence against Jar Jar Binks is to digitally suture all forms of misbehaving black bodies to the history of racist and violent representations perpetrated against black people.

The fan texts that depict racial violence toward Jar Jar Binks are reminiscent of the professionally produced representations of violence against a character like King Kong, but there is an important distinction between the two. Since slavery, the movement and autonomy of black bodies has been understood and treated as a threat to white supremacy. Blackface minstrelsy

372 Ryan Kristobak, “10 Times Jar Jar Binks Opened His Mouth and Ruined Star Wars Episode I,” The Huffington Post, May 20, 2014, accessed February 14, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/19/jar-jar- binks-quotes_n_5352708.html.

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created a mediated prism for representations of black bodies that doubled as a model for actual black people to sublimate themselves to if they incorrectly thought that doing so would allow them to escape racism’s grasp. The loyal ‘Tom,’ who loves white people more than he loves his own life, is, minus the warped African American Vernacular English, nothing if not the mediated embodiment of what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham famously calls “politics of respectability.”373

For Higginbotham, the politics of respectability amount to the various strategies black people employ to endear themselves to white people. They include the ways a black person dresses, speaks, her willingness to critique other black people, particularly for white audiences, and her politics.374 Tracing this influential concept backwards through time, we see that black people have used this strategy since slavery, with varying degrees of success. No matter how respectable to white eyes a black person appears, she can still be lynched. What has become interesting since

Higginbotham coined the term is that the respectable black person has overtaken the more minstrelesque depictions as the preferred model of black cultural performance, both actual and fictionalized—so much so that the imagistic violence directed at black people in contemporary digital culture borrows from blackface minstrelsy. At least on some level, the fandoms of blackface minstrelsy and lynching have merged.

And yet, nothing has really changed. Blackface minstrelsy was created and popularized during slavery. Lynching came as blackface minstrelsy was losing popularity, but the ideologies

373 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 6. 374 I should clarify, not all conservative black people engage in respectability politics, and not all black people who engage in respectability politics are conservative. At its core, respectability politics correlate to a black person’s desire to perform in ways that make white people feel comfortable.

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inherent in both worked together within filmic representations of black bodies. Digital culture was supposed to carry the potential for identity, and thus white supremacy, to be cast aside for a more collective and harmonious space where we can focus on what makes us similar. As the pages that follow will illustrate, not only is the opposite true, but the metaphors used in film to hide attacks on blackness have been weaponized. The strategies used to imagistically lynch black people may have changed, but the goals and rationale of these assaults remain the same.

Imagistic Lynching in Digital Culture

Since the rise of digital culture, we have seen that social media engagement on sites like

Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook do not differentiate when people are discussing presidential elections, natural disasters, wars, or the Super Bowl. For instance, the once ubiquitous “Crying

Jordan” meme was used liberally following the United Kingdom’s decision to remove itself from the European Union. The meme, which shows Michael Jordan’s tear-filled face taken during his

Hall of Fame speech, was initially used to mock and poke fun at an athlete or sports team when they lost or something else bad occurred. This fandom act then began to spread beyond basketball and beyond sports as a way to both humorously, but mostly harmlessly, make fun of some sort of failure. In just one of the many memes made regarding “Brexit,” the “Crying

Jordan” was placed on top of the Queen’s image on the ten pound mark. In another meme, the

“Crying Jordan” was woven into a chart displaying the value of the pound after “Brexit.” In both of these images, the “Crying Jordan” no longer merely fandomized the failures of others, but used an element of fandom to offer meaning to a failure that is, ostensibly, shared by everyone in the Western world. However, while the “Crying Jordan” meme is a mostly harmless jab at some once dominant entity, other memes carry with them a history of violence and oppression and

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reveal the reality of the racism still encoded in both American institutions and the hearts and minds of people that reify them.

To this day, the fandomization of blackness in the American imaginary—which is to say the remediation of black existence into textual bodies that reinforce the notion of the inherent inferiority of black people, which in turn activates the subjunctive consecration of the structural superiority of whiteness or whiteness-adjacent people—allows for systemic and personalized racism to function largely undeterred. The permanency and mutability of lynching culture as a preferred method of discipline for misbehaving black bodies, evidenced in both the professional works of fandom, such as Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and their amateur brethren, like the memes associated with Jar Jar Binks, shows that even normative fan strategies participate in violence directed toward black bodies. The historical antecedents for these acts of violence litter

American mass cultural industries and were enacted by the white people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who clearly employed lynching as a means of creating and maintaining a white supremacist national identity. It is the white supremacist rendering of images depicting black death that inspired the sharing of lynching photography and postcards and continues to inspire the proliferation of videos that show police officers killing black people. It is why Afro-Pessimists see blackness as an ontologically slave identity. The lynching fandom is more than just the desire to spectate on the destruction of black bodies; it is what Jason Sperb, when speaking about Henry Jenkins’ notion of ‘convergence culture,’ calls “‘epistemophilia’—a love for seeking out knowledge and connecting information that motivates fans, bloggers, and

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other.”375 The anxiety and passions that surround the black body have always constituted something of a convergence culture in that they represent a fracturing of a semiotic system that is volatile in its various reconstructions through the image, but stable in its ontological goal. Black bodies are after all black bodies. It does not matter if the person who is turned into a body is

President Obama, who has had a slew of racist memes created out of his image, the “Rope” meme simply being the most clearly identifiable as a lynching, or Trayvon Martin, whose death instigated a meme series called, “Trayvoning,” where mostly white people dressed in hoodies and lay on the ground as if dead, with a bag of Skittles and an Arizona Iced-Tea can in front of them. In remediating Trayvon’s death, these fans convey the general lack of empathy of the

United States toward the loss of black of life. It is after all an America where Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, can sell the gun used to kill Trayvon for $250,000.376 Just as spectators used to buy the body parts of lynching victims, people can now buy weapons used to kill black people. Form thus matches content as the black body has been exhibited for a variety of stated purposes within the mainstream American imaginary, but very few utterances act to destabilize the paradigm of the visual articulations that destroy that black body as an act of participatory entertainment. Perhaps that is because it not possible to do so.

If it were possible, or at least attempted, then the videos that depict the death of black men would not be as ubiquitous as they have become since the beginning of the new millennia.

Images that depict violence directed toward black people have circulated throughout America

375 Jason Sperb, “Reassuring Convergence: Online Fandom, Race, and Disney’s Notorious Song of the South,” Cinema Journal, Vol.49, No.4, Summer (2010): 26.

376 Christopher Brennan, “George Zimmerman’s Gun Sold for $250,000,” CBS News, May 21, 2016, accessed February 14, 2017, http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/george-zimmermans-gun-sold-for-250000/.

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since before the advent of photography. However, as is the case with fandom writ large, these images did not find their most efficacious meme carrier until recently with the rise of the memetically encoded, participatory digital culture. Since a bystander recorded a Bart police officer shooting and killing Oscar Grant on New Years Eve in 2008 in Oakland, California, denizens of digital culture have been witnesses to nearly a dozen videos of police officers killing unarmed black men. Jordan Crawford III was shot and killed while buying a toy gun; a series of surveillance cameras caught his death from multiple angles; the most popular of these videos, published by Green County Dailies, has had, at the time of this writing, 1.9 million views. Police officers were videotaped choking and killing Eric Garner for selling loose cigarettes in front of a convenient store; the most watched video of Garner being killed was published by The Advise

Show TV and has been seen at least 3.1 million times. Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old boy, was shot and killed while playing with a toy gun in a park; Cleveland.com published a video that has been watched 1.3 million times. The New York Times video of Walter Scott being shot in the back has 1.5 million views. Although millions of Americans had access to these videos thanks to social media and online video hubs, not one of the police officers who assaulted or killed an unarmed black person was convicted of a crime. In only one instance, when Michael T. Slager was recorded shooting Walter Scott in the back while he was running away, did any of these videos even lead to an indictment. Not only were the officers responsible for the deaths of Jordan

Crawford III, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Walter Scott not prosecuted, but the last three were blamed for their own deaths after the fact. Timothy J. McGinty, the attorney assigned to prosecute the case against Timothy Loehmann, Rice’s killer, suggested that it was Rice’s size for his age—meaning his potential for violence—that contributed to young boy’s death. As Timothy

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Williams and Mitch Smith of the New York Times write, “Prosecutors also said that Tamir looked large for his age, and that the neighborhood has a history of violence, and that other officers have been killed nearby.”377 In order to call the termination of a boy’s life justifiable based on his size is to establish the value of Rice’s life as directly related to the level of anxiety his bodily existence caused someone else—that Rice’s size was even an issue in his death illustrates an active desire by Cleveland’s prosecutor and police department to counter the flood of images on social media that depicted a young Tamir Rice as a sweet little kid. To do so, they established a fantasy of Rice as a great black brute whose sheer physicality made him appear to be an ever-present threat. Rice, of course, did not just have his size working against him. He had the actions of other presumably black people. According to McInty and the Cleveland police, a neighborhood which has seen violence before surely indoctrinates everyone who lives in that neighborhood with that compunction for violence. Such potential for violence justifies any act of violence the state engages in to protect itself. By this same logic, if the actions of people who look like you justify violence against you, then it would be justifiable for any Native American to shoot a white person on sight. It would also be self-defense for any woman to assault any man who speaks to her for any reason.

But that, of course, is not the true logic evident in McInty’s decision not to prosecute

Rice’s killer. That logic finds its home in a never-ending moment in America’s history in which the murder of a certain number of black people is simply charged to the game. For centuries, this morally bankrupt transaction required little more than any white person stating that any black

377 Timothy Williams and Mitch Smith, “Cleveland Officer Will Not Face Charges in Tamir Rice Shooting,” The New York Times, December 28, 2015, accessed February 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/us/tamir-rice-police-shootiing-cleveland.html?_r=0.

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person was deserving of violence. Today, not much has changed. During Michael J. Slager’s trial for the murder of Walter Scott, the prosecutor argued that it was ultimately Scott who was responsible for his own death, even if Slager had gone too far. During her closing arguments, the lawyer in charge of prosecuting the case, Scarlett Wilson, stated, “If Walter Scott had stayed in that car, he wouldn’t have been shot… He paid the ultimate consequence for his conduct. He lost his life for his foolishness.”378 What the videos of police officers killing black people reveal is that images surrounding lynchings that proliferated throughout nineteenth and twentieth centuries have re-emerged in the twenty-first century thanks to cellphone videos.

The videos mentioned above are just the most watched chronicles of death; all are on

YouTube. Even there, each killing has dozens of different versions, published by a mixture of professional organizations and amateurs for a variety of political reasons. While it is certainly true that some individuals choose to consume the images of black people being killed in order to play watchdog to both news media outlets and police departments, many of the people who watch these videos not only gain intense pleasure from watching them, but then take even more pleasure from harassing black people through social media. The contemporary lynching fandom functions no differently from the original fandom of the late nineteenth century. The only difference being that individuals who are interested in consuming dead black bodies are now forced to live vicariously through police officers rather than being free to commit acts of violence against black people themselves.

378 Alan Blinder, “Mistrial for South Carolina Officer Who Shot Walter Scott,” The New York Times, December 5, 2016, accessed February 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/walter-scott-michael- slager-north-charleston.html.

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As I discussed in Chapter 2, within visual media the police often act as a cipher for white masculine power. In digital culture, this has taken on a new life not only through the quasi- movement Blue Lives Matter, but also from those within digital media who attempt to police black existence in ways similar to the vigilante behavior of the lynchings of yesteryear. Dara

Byrne’s research investigates this drive toward “digilante justice” in anti-419 websites.379

According to Byrne, 419 is the Nigerian criminal code for cons and scams. The infamous

“Nigerian email scam” generally involves a potential victim receiving an email which requests that she send the emailer either her account information or a small fee in order to be given more money at a later date.380 Due at least in part to the difficulty of prosecuting these cases, the participants of these anti-419 websites seek out alternative forms of digital justice. Byrne describes the chosen methodology of the 419 eaters (an identification that stems from one of those most popular anti-419 websites, 419eater.com):

Members pose as unwitting targets in an attempt to frustrate scammers, waste their time, publish their addresses or emails, and, in a handful of cases, pass their information on to law enforcement agencies. However, the real prize in scam-baiting is when the scammer fulfills the baiter's request by sending “good faith gifts” such as African arts and crafts, a small money order, or, in the best-case scenario, an image of the scammer or people in the scammer's community engaged in humiliating activities.381

379 Dara N. Byrne, “419 Digilantes and the Frontier of Radical Justice Online,” Radical History Review, Issue 117, Fall (2013).

380 Byrne,”419 Digilantes,” 70.

381 Byrne, “419 Digilantes,” 76.

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Justice, in this context, also includes to the 419 eaters collecting and distributing imagistic

“trophies” which place an alleged scammer, almost always a black man, in humiliating and dehumanizing positions. Many of these images depict the scammers in various stages of undress, often with their genitalia bound by rope or cord, and with written signs that state that the scammer is owned by or slave to the 419 eater. Although, as Byrne notes, the moderators for these online communities state that racism will not be tolerated, the act of celebrating in the visual destruction and containment of the black body visually and ideologically resembles lynching photography.

It is a comparison that Byrne in no way shies away from. Byrne connects this formation of anti-black digilantism to the much longer history of American anti-black vigilantism. In regard to the capacity of the above-mentioned images to create a collective identity (that is, to function as a fandom), Byrne argues, “Like lynching memorabilia, the rhetorical power of these trophies is their socializing function since they are critical in establishing the code of ethics and the reward system for the community.”382 Of course, Byrne does not explicitly state that these digilantes engage in a fannish act when they post, consume, and discuss trophies that systematize and celebrate violence against black bodies. However, in their passionate engagement with material whose very existence hinges on a cultural understanding of black inferiority, which also seeks to revel in images that discipline black bodies, the correlation seems clear.

In digital culture, the revelry existent within online communities that avidly attempt to punish unruly black bodies does not stop at inflicting imagistic violence on unknown black

382 Byrne, “419 Digilantes,” 77.

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bodies from Africa, but also extends to visible black people who inhabit spaces imagined as being for white people only. Comedian and actor Leslie Jones unknowingly stumbled into one of these Jim Crowesque spaces when she was simply cast in the 2016 all-women reboot to the

Ghostbusters (Feig, 2016) film franchise. Initially the film, at least from pockets of the Internet intelligentsia somewhat interested in diversity, garnered praise in that it re-gendered the mostly male original Ghostbusters (Reitman, 1984) into a film that centered women in a big budget, science fiction, fan-friendly franchise. In the most recent incarnation of the 1980s film series, which on its own terms does not rise above or fall below standard Hollywood blockbuster fare,

Jones plays Patty Tolan, a New York Metropolitan Transit Authority worker who joins a team of scientists in order to stop the city’s escalating paranormal threat. Upon viewing the trailer prior to the film’s release, many black critics dismissed the film, along with Jones’ role in it, as racially problematic in that the black character inhabits a low-skilled, less-educated position, while her white companions are scientists from prestigious universities.

Bustle’s Kadeen Griffiths argues that whatever credit the new Ghostbusters film achieved in re-ordering its gendered priorities, it self-dismantles by maintaining the racialized hierarchy that plagued the original.383 The 1984 Ghostbusters also had one black character,

Winston Zeddmore (Ernie Hudson) who, like Patty, was also portrayed as being an everyman next to his more prominent and capable scientist teammates. In that film, Winston only joins the team after the original Ghostbusters take out an ad in the paper in search of extra help. In the reboot, Patty does not join the team’s ranks after they take out an ad, but instead inserts herself

383 Kadeen Griffiths, “Leslie Jones Appears to be the Only Non-Scientist in the Ghostbusters Trailer & that’s Problematic,” Bustle, March 3, 2016, accessed February 15, 2017, https://www.bustle.com/articles/145702- leslie-jones-appears-to-be-the-only-non-scientist-in-the-2016-ghostbusters-trailer-thats-problematic.

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into the group and is only truly accepted, at least at first, because she has access to a vehicle. The critics of Jones’ Patty believe that the refusal to characterize a black woman as scientist reifies a historicized racist belief system that suggests black people are incapable of intellectual pursuits.

As Kimberle Crenshaw might argue, when race and gender intersect, particularly for women of color, the forms in which oppression manifests alter completely. Unfortunately for Leslie Jones, this now apparent fact manifested in the fandom response to her mere presence in Ghostbusters.

Following the release of the film, Jones was almost immediately digitally assailed by a gang of misogynoirists. These attackers were not interested in merely critiquing the film, nor her performance in the film. Instead, they combined the ideological purpose behind racist assaults against black people, especially black women, with the methodologies found only within participatory digital culture. In these spaces, access and visibility can masquerade as positive fixtures; in this instance, however, Jones’ hyper-visible blackness became a beacon for racists to engage in a campaign of imagistic lynching against her. Articles written about the assault in The

New York Times, USA Today, Buzzfeed, Slate Magazine, and other journals state that these

“trolls” visually remediated images in order to compare Jones to a gorilla, created fake Twitter accounts that attempted to imitate black vernacular English to make it seem that Jones desired that all gay people be put to death, and hurled racist slurs at her through the anonymity of Twitter usernames created for just such an occasion.

While some news outlets, such as The New York Times, suggested at the time that the reason why Jones bore the brunt of the attack was because she has a more substantial digital presence than her white co-stars, Kristen V. Brown, a writer for Fusion, rightly points out that the digital lynching party did not amass until a review of Ghostbusters written by Milo

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Yiannopoulos, a technology editor for Breitbart, was published on July 18, 2016. Yiannopoulos’ review, which is less a critique of the film and more of a screed against feminism and anti- racism, singles out Jones when he writes: “Patty is the worst of the lot. The actress is spectacularly unappealing, even relative to the rest of the odious cast. But it’s her flat-as-a- pancake black stylings that ought to have irritated the SJWs. I don’t get offended by such things, but they should.”384 On the surface, Yiannopoulos’ problem with the Patty character seems to align closely with the issues many of the black critics had regarding the film’s trailer. The obvious and significant distinction is that while Yiannopoulos focuses on Jones’ performance, the black critics of the film took issue with the filmmakers. However, there is a lot more to it than that. In pinpointing his critique on Jones’ “black stylings,” Yiannopoulos blows a dog whistle in a tune that only those who are accustomed to rejecting the inclusion of a particular unacceptable form of black cultural performance can hear. Yiannopoulos makes this very point himself when he nostalgically waxes poetic on the single black character in the original film, writing, “Remember, the original film not only represented women well, but also had Winston

Zeddmore, the character with his feet most firmly on the ground.”385 In the final version of the original film’s script, Winston had only about thirty lines of dialogue, few with any narrative significance, and was not introduced until halfway through the film.

Years later, Hudson himself continues to lament on the decision to take a role that was sold to him as a career changer but ended up as a factoid. In an essay for Entertainment Weekly,

384 Milo Yiannopoulos, “Teenage Boys with Tits: Here’s My Problem with Ghostbusters,” Breitbart, July 18, 2016, accessed February 15, 2017, http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/18/milo-reviews-ghostbusters/.

385 Yiannopoulos, “Teenage Boys.”

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Hudson writes that in the first versions of the script, Winston was not a man of the street who stumbles upon a team of paranormal investigators, but an Air Force Captain with the team from the onset of their collective journey.386 Being largely cut out of the narrative for the film also meant that Hudson’s Winston was not a part of most of the film’s promotional material. He was, in his mind, and to many viewers upset that Leslie Jones might be receiving similar treatment in the film’s reboot, an afterthought. So when Yiannopoulos negatively compares Patty to Winston, he creates for his audience a role model for the type of black involvement that he and they would find appropriate: mostly silent and barely present. For the lynching fandom, a black presence that challenges the limited constraints found initially within blackface minstrelsy is one deserving of assault. And assault they did.

For much of July 18, 2016, Leslie Jones was subjected to an endless wave of hate from

Yiannopoulos’ followers. And even if he did not explicitly direct their ire and hatred of blackness toward Jones, Yiannopoulos was more than happy to take up arms with them. After doing his own bit of harassment, Yiannopoulos went so far as to retweet one of the fake Leslie

Jones Twitter accounts which called for gay people and Jewish people to be killed. If the goal of this prolonged assault was to make Jones’ life a living hell and drive her away from social media, the campaign worked, at least temporarily. At around midnight on July 19, Leslie Jones announced that she was leaving Twitter. In response, Twitter did something that anti-online harassment activists had been pushing the platform to do for months. It did something about the toxic users who had been driving away users: it permanently banned Milo Yiannopoulos.

386 Ernie Hudson, “The Painful What-If that Haunts Ghostbusters,” Entertainment Weekly, November 5, 2014, accessed February 15, 2017, http://ew.com/article/2014/11/05/ghostbusters-ernie-hudson/.

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Yiannopoulos’ official title is technical editor of the ultra-conservative website Breitbart; however, a more accurate description of his duties would be the pied piper of the fandom wing of the neo-white supremacist movement sometimes mistakenly called the alt-right. He was seemingly unfazed.

In an interview with ABC News, Yiannopoulos positioned himself as a “virtuous troll” doing “God’s work.”387 By using the term “troll,” Yiannopoulos and many of the people who discuss him, even in negative terms, entertain the idea that what is behind these attacks is mischief, not an overriding hate and fear toward a displacement of white masculinity as the accepted center of the universe. It is this very anxiety that created the lynching era in the first place. White men, and many white women, perceived the removal of black people from bondage, which also meant that they were no longer able to consider themselves, even potentially, as masters, as an affront to white supremacy itself. During slavery, those mostly white men created a physical and ideological cultural system that imbued America’s burgeoning aesthetic culture with a distorted and racist textualization of blackness called blackface minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy has simply been the most resonant articulation of that textualization. After slavery, the white American culture of the time could no longer maintain black people in bondage, Thirteenth

Amendment aside, and eventually no longer found pleasure in the spectacle of white men in blackface singing and dancing about the joys and sorrows of being on the plantation. Perhaps the mythical verisimilitude of these performances could no longer be upheld once the truth was out,

387 Terry Moran, Emily Taguchi, and Clair Pedersen, “Leslie Jones’ Twitter Troll Has No Regrets Over Attacking the ‘Ghostbusters’ Actress, ABC News, September 1, 2016, accessed February 15, 2017, http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/leslie-jones-twitter-troll-regrets-attacking-ghostbusters- actress/story?id=41808886.

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or maybe to gaze upon this material conjured up too much in the way of recently abetted nostalgia. Either way, the blackface minstrel performance may have ended, but the tradition seeped into the soil of the country; it lives on.

Conclusion

If the white supremacist culture could no longer force black people into shackles, nor find joy in black people finding joy in those shackles, they could forcibly turn black people into objects of entertainment under the already percolating dictate that a free black person was a criminal black person. The lynching fandom came about as a white reckoning of emancipation coupled with an increased desire for modes of participatory consumption. Even then, prior to any technological means to make it happen, Americans, both white and black, felt a desire to attach their identities through mediated objects which would then find ballast amongst other like- minded people who saw the world in similar ways. The photographs, paintings, and films that make up the lynching fandom signified a coherence toward white identity at the turn of the twentieth century, while also stigmatizing and delegitimizing black autonomy and equality. As such, by the time physical lynchings began to decline, the symbolism associated with lynching had already been encoded within blackness from the scopophilic perspective of the American imaginary. Films that both iconically and metaphorically reproduce lynchings are sprinkled throughout the early media of the twentieth century, including Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our

Gates. The iconographic remediation of lynching ideology that merged into a subtextual dialogue of white supremacist containment of black bodies has emerged, in the twenty-first century’s digital culture, as a lens through which to view America’s political and cultural future.

It is no mere coincidence that the website that employed Milo Yiannopoulos is the same one that

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previously employed Stephen Bannon, one of Donald Trump’s leading political advisors. Or that

Chuck Johnson, one of the men behind #BoyCottStarWarsVii, was hired by the Trump

Administration during the transitional period. The rise of Trump is, at its core, the rage of the white fan who feels that his favorite television show, or film franchise, or country, has been taken away from him by women, minorities, and immigrants. It is and has been his anxieties and concerns that have continuously allowed for the American government to ignore and neglect the needs of many people in the United States. “But the Crowd was not Satisfied” has been about how we got here, and what we do next is anyone’s guess.

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APPENDIX A

Fig. A1. Sheet music from Virginia Serenaders’ “Plantation Melodies,” 1847

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Fig. A2. Sheet music from Old Dan Emmett’s “Original Banjo Melodies,” 1843

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Fig A3. The lynching of Jesse Washington, Waco, Texas, 1916

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Fig. A4. Drawing of the lynching of Sam Hose, 1899

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Fig. A5. Drawing of Sam Hose’s alleged crime, 1899

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Fig A6. The lynching of Laura Nelson and son, Okemah, Oklahoma, 1911

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Fig. A7. The Obama “Rope” Meme, 2008

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Poe Johnson is a PhD Candidate in Aesthetic Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas. His research synthesizes critical race theories, Afro-Pessimism, film studies, and new media theory to bring to the fore the connections between race, participatory fan cultures, and popular culture artifacts. He has been published in The Phoenix Papers, The Routledge Companion to Biology and Architecture, and Films for the Feminist Classroom.

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CURRICULUM VITAE Poe Johnson

Research Interests The History of Race and Gender in Film; Digital Participatory Culture; Fandom; New Media History.

Education University of Texas at Dallas  PhD – Aesthetic Studies ABD, Expected Spring 2017 Dissertation: But the Crowd Wasn’t Satisfied: Blackface Minstrelsy and Lynching as Fandoms of the Remediated Black Body Committee: Dr. Kimberly Knight, Dr. Shilyh Warren, Dr. Kimberly Hill, Dr. Olivia Banner Rosemont College  Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing: Graduated with Distinction, May 2010 Thesis: “Creative Non-Fictionesque” Advisor: Dan Driscoll Philadelphia University of the Arts  Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing for Film/Television: Graduated With Honors: May 2006.

Publications “Fandom as Praxis in Black Visual Media.” Films for the Feminist Classroom. http://ffc.twu.edu/issue_7-1/feat_Johnson_7-1.html “Racial Technologies in the Time of Black Cyborgnetic Consciousness.” Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Technology. Routledge. September, 2016. “Cultural Memory as Fandom Ideology in a Remediated World.” The Phoenix Papers. Vol. 1, No. 2. July, 2013. http://fansconf.a-kon.com/dRuZ33A/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/Cultural-Memory-as-Fandom-Ideology-in-a-Remediated-World-by- Poe-Johnson.pdf “Mass Buildabearia.” Unlikely 2.0. June, 2009. http://www.unlikelystories.org/09/pjohnson0609.shtml “First Communion.” Writer’s Bloc. Writer’s Block Magazine. March, 2010.

Forthcoming Publications Co-written with Roger Malina. “Investigating Missing Satellites: Narratives in Dark Culture.” Nodes Cosmos. “The Self-Fandomization of the Black Body: Internet Memes and the Afrofuturist Present.” Afrofuturism in Time and Space.

Book Reviews “Comics as Language: Reimagining Critical Discourses on the Form.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21504857.2015.1060618 “Spring Series #3: Memory Bytes” HASTAC.com. Humanities, Art, Science, Technology, Alliance, Collaboratory. March, 2014. https://www.hastac.org/blogs/poe- johnson/2014/05/10/spring-series-revew-3-memory-bytes

Invited Talks “The Great Chain of Being Black: Racial Violence and the Fandom of the Remediated Black Body.” Public Lecture, February 2017, University of Pennsylvania. “The Rise and Fall of Blaxploitation in Context.” Undergraduate seminar, Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Film, October 2016, UT Dallas. “Narratives in Dark Culture: Investigating Missing Satellites.” Public Lecture, Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, September 2016, UT Dallas. “Regarding Racecraft.”PhD Seminar, Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Film, August 2016, UT Dallas. “The Participatory Black Body as Mediated Fandom.” Feminist Research Collective, September 2015. “What is Black Twitter and Why it Matters.” Elective undergraduate course, African American Literature, Literary Studies, School of Arts & Humanities, October 2014, UT Dallas. “Memes in Theory and in Practice.” Graduate seminar, Seeing with your Skin, Aesthetic Studies, February 2014, UT Dallas.

Selected Conference Presentations “The Great Chain of Being Black: Lynching as Participatory Fandom.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. New Orleans. April, 2015. “The Mystical Negro Sage: The Fans and Film Content of Will Smith.” Southwestern Modern Language Association. Austin. October, 2014. Co-presenter. “Time and Space as Meaning Makers in Persepolis” San Diego Comic Con. San Diego. July, 2014. “Digitized Skin: Race in the Fandom Era” Theorizing the Web 2014. Brooklyn. April, 2014. “Digitized Skin: Race in the Era of Participatory Culture” Southwest Popular Culture Association. Albuquerque. February, 2014. “Cultural Memory as Fandom Ideology in a Remediated World.” FANS Conference. Dallas. July, 2013. “Women in Tights: The Absent Power of the Subjugated.” New York Comic Conference. New York. October, 2012. “Slut Walk” Research. Art. Writing. Graduate Symposium. Richardson. March, 2012.

Awards Year of Media Grant: University of Pennsylvania – 2017 Edith O’Donnell Graduate Fellowship: Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History – 2016-2017 HASTAC Scholar – 2013-2014

Robert Nelsen Scholarship in Creative Writing: University of Texas at Dallas – 2011 Thesis with Distinction: Rosemont College – 2010 Graduate Excellence Award: Rosemont College – 2010 Novelli Liberal Arts Award: University of the Arts – 2006 Promising Artist Award: University of the Arts – 2002 – 2006

Teaching Experience University of Texas at Dallas  Introduction to Creative Writing (Instructor of Record) (Fall 2015 – Spring 2016)  Rhetoric Instructor (Instructor of Record) (Fall 2013 – Summer 2016)  Teaching Assistant for Understanding Film (Spring 2013)  Teaching Assistant for Exploring the Humanities (Fall 2012)

Service Research Fellow at UTD ArtSci Lab Pioneer’s Project (Fall 2014 – Present)  Editor for Leonardo Observatory for the Arts and the Techno-Sciences (OLATS)  Editor for Leonardo Online  Coordinator of content for the Pioneers and Pathbreakers Project  Host and Podcast Producer for Creative Disturbance  Guest Editor for “Narratives in Dark Culture” Podcast and Memoir Series University of Texas at Dallas Arts & Humanities Graduate Student Association  Member at-Large (Fall 2013-Spring 2014)  Vice President (Fall 2014-Spring 2015)  President (Fall-2015-Spring 2016) Research. Art. Writing. Graduate Student Symposium  Organizing Chair (2014-2016)

Languages English Spanish

Professional Organizations Modern Language Association Popular Culture/American Culture Association HASTAC Scholar

References Dr. Kimberly Knight Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Technology 818-370-6337 [email protected] Dr. Shilyh Warren Assistant Professor of Film Studies 919-491-3712 [email protected] Professor. Roger Malina Arts and Technology Distinguished Chair 510-853-2007 [email protected]