The origins of lynching in the U.S. date back to before the American Revolution and belie an insistence that the practice is inherently associated with racial violence and oppression. Lynching involves any individual whose access to due process is pre-empted and replaced by an assumption of guilt, followed by summary judgment, and rapid execution, often by two or more persons who conspire to carry out the judgment even if there is resistance from law enforcement officials. In this week-long seminar, our task is to develop a deeper understanding of the rhetorical and representational practices associated with the lynching of African American citizens, starting in the years following the Reconstruction period up through the 1990s (and arguably, into the 21st Century). We will begin with the earliest attempts either to justify or condemn lynching to understand the rhetorical strategies writers employed to influence public opinion. We will then turn to a variety of media to understand how acts of representation (in the form of literature, cinema, photography, and painting) work to mediate public understanding of lynching and its costs. Throughout the week, our emphasis will be on the role of memory as it pertains to representations of cultural trauma, but also on how discussions of lynching might serve to facilitate a more honest form of cross-racial dialogue and national healing.


Herman Beavers
Associate Professor of English
School of Arts and Sciences


Herman Beavers is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1989. He received his B.A. in Government, Sociology, and Creative Writing from Oberlin College (1981). He went on to the Graduate Writing Program at Brown, where he received the M.A. in Creative Writing (1983). In 1985, he received an M.A. from the Afro-American Studies Program at Yale University and in 1990, completed his doctorate in American Studies, also at Yale. Since arriving at Penn, he has authored the book Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson (U of Penn Press, 1995), as well as over 25 articles and book chapters. He has guest edited issues of both African American Review and Narrative and he has either served or is serving on the editorial boards of American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Literary Studies, and African American Review. His creative works include the chapbook, A Neighborhood of Feeling as well as poems that have appeared in Black American Literature Forum (now African American Review), Dark Phrases, The Cincinnati Poetry Review, Cross Connect. Peregrine, and most recently, Callaloo and the anthology, Gathering Voices. He has been a Fellow in the Cave Canem Poetry Workshop as well as the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. He is co-editing (with Professor Honoree Fanonne Jeffers) the two-volume collection of essays, Changing Chords: African American Poets on Poetry and Poetics, which is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press next year and completing work on a scholarly monograph on the cultural politics of Afro-modernist expressive culture.