BUT THE CROWD WAS NOT SATISFIED: BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND LYNCHING AS FANDOMS OF THE REMEDIATED BLACK BODY by Evan Jeremy Johnson APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ Shilyh Warren, Co-Chair ___________________________________________ Kim Knight, Co-Chair ___________________________________________ Kimberly Hill ___________________________________________ Olivia Banner Copyright 2017 Evan Jeremy Johnson All Rights Reserved To the struggle. BUT THE CROWD WAS NOT SATISFIED: BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND LYNCHING AS FANDOMS OF THE REMEDIATED BLACK BODY by 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. v 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 vi 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 vii 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. viii 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 ix 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 x 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. 1 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.