Abstract
From the mid-1910s through the 1920s, several anti-lynching plays by African Americans were presented. The plays were in response to the violent tactics of mobs terrorizing African Americans not only throughout the South, but also in many northern states as well. The authorial efforts were by writers and social critics who, firm in their conviction, believed drama capable of evoking social change.3 Angelina Weld Grimké’s play Rachel (1916) represented one of these attempts and it is this drama that shall be the focus of this chapter.4
That is their rite of colored male passage: having to drag all those lynchings around with them, around their necks: those are their ancestors. Too bad when violent deaths define who you are.
— Hilton Als (2000)1
To read the details of lynching is to be reminded of the torture of the Middle Aged.
—Thomas F. Gossett (1963)2
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Notes
Hilton Als, “GWTW,” Without Sanctuary, ed. James Allen et al. (New York: Twin Palms, 2000), 41.
Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963, 1977), 270.
See Sandra L. Richards, “Foreword,” in Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, ed. Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), x.
Patricia R. Schroeder, The Feminist Possibilities of Dramatic Realism (Madison: Fair-leigh Dickson University Press, 1996), 112.
Judith L Stephens, “Anti-Lynching Plays by African American Women: Race, Gender, and Social Protest in American Drama,” African American Review 26.2 (Summer 1992), 332.
Will Harris, “Early Black Women Playwrights and the Dual Liberation Motif,” African American Review 28.2 (Summer 1994), 205.
Judith L. Stephens, “Lynching, American Theatre, and the Preservation of a Tradition,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 9.1 (Winter, 1997), 65.
Angelina Weld Grimké, “‘Rachel’: The Play of the Month: The Reason and Synopsis by the Author,” Competitor 1.1 (January 1920), 52.
Lyrics to “Strange Fruit,” by Abe Meeropol, 1937; originally an anti-lynching poem published in the New York Teacher and later made famous by the singer Billie Holliday. See David Margolick, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song (New York: Ecco Press, 2001).
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, tr. John Osborne (1925; reprint, London: Verso, 1977), 119.
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I & II, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schwep-penhäuser (Frankfurt/am: Suhrkamp, 1977), II, 137.
Nellie McKay, ‘“What Were They Saying?’: Black Women Playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance,” in Harlem Renaissance Re-examined, ed. Victor A. Kramer and Robert A. Russ (Troy, NY: Whitston Publishers, 1997), 154.
Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Rev-olution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1–2.
See, for instance, Rainer Nägele, Theatre, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991), 113–14
Ferenc Feher, “Lukács and Benjamin: Parallels and Contrasts,” New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985), 126.
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 687.
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 68.
Jacqueline Goldsby, “The High and Low Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and the Death of Emmett Till,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9.2 (1996), 274.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donna G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 80.
For discussions on the devaluation of allegory, see Paul de Man, Blindness and In-sight: Essays on the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., “Transhistorical Intentions and the Persistence of Allegory,” New Literary History 25.3 (Summer 1994), 549–67.
Albrecht Schöne, Emblematik and Drama im Zeltalter des Barock (München: C. H. Beck, 1964), 30–34.
For an interesting study of lynching as a ritualize act, see Kirk W Fuoss, “Lynching Performances, Theatres of Violence,” Text and Performance Quarterly 19.1 (January 1999), 1–37.
Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981), 116.
Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Plays of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 34.
Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin (London: Verso, 1981), 23.
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© 2002 David Krasner
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Krasner, D. (2002). Walter Benjamin and the Lynching Play: Mourning and Allegory in Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel. In: A Beautiful Pageant. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06625-1_5
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