Browsing by Subject "Black studies"

Despite the significant contributions made by African American women since the Black Church's founding, titles like pastor, bishop, and reverend for centuries have been freely awarded to men while being restricted to women. The leadership of black clergywomen in these roles traditionally held by men helps to challenge the stereotypes of what it means to be a leader. Black clergywomen's contributions to religious institutions like the Black Church are frequently only remembered through the prism of deconstruction. In an effort to not only deconstruct but also reconstruct the church into a more equitable organization, this study explores how the ministries of black clergywomen from the early 19th to the late 20th century undermine male domination and patriarchal normativity within Christianity. Using memoirs, interviews, sermons, and lectures, assumes that black clergywomen's transformative leadership is disruptive epistemologically, politically, and anthropologically. This study will demonstrate how different leadership avenues were altered or established as a result of the experiences of these African American preaching women by evaluating their lives and ministerial work. This essay intends to demonstrate how black clergywomen's ministries challenge orthodox beliefs, rituals, and theologies, opening up new avenues of leadership for themselves and others.

This thesis research presents a choreographic enquiry into ways Black Americans, specifically Black femme inhabit their bodies and their entanglements to the surrounding environment. It asks the question of how Black girls in the south navigate their social circumstances, and what inheritances—metaphysical, emotional, cultural—affect their encounters with themselves and each other. To do this the author contemplates concepts of the “undistinguished mass,” Black flesh, and inheritances as offered by Hortense Spillers. The author introduces her embodied practice of Groove as a bourgeoning theoretical framework for exploring self in the context of its larger positioning within society and the land. Groove is propositioned as a way of expanding awareness of self through movement, by paying attention to the sensatory information observed and communicated within our bodies. For this purpose a working group of Black femme was formed to trace their own geographies, histories, and sense of care, through conversations and physical movement strategies, to explore aspects that mold their own Grooves. This research project presents an urgent attempt to reimagine creative and embodied strategies for Black femme as a practice of freedom, tenderness, and connection. Through multimedia experimentations with the practice of Groove, it is proposed, that Black femme move to initiate a collective imagining, and access otherwise ways of being.

"Black Sacred Breath: Historicity, Performance and the Aesthetics of BlackPentecostalism" considers are the aesthetic practices found in BlackPentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that began in Los Angeles, California in 1906 to argue that the aesthetic practices are the condition of possibility for a performative assessment and antiphonal criticism of normative theology and philosophy. Indeed, the history of these performances is an atheological-aphilosophical project, produced against the grain of liberal logics of subjectivity. By showing that theology and philosophy were abstractions of thought that produced the conceptual body as the target of racialization, the atheological-aphilosophical couplet indexes modes of intellectual practice that engulf and exceed such reductivism. BlackPentecostalism is a social, musical, intellectual form of new life, predicated upon the necessity of ongoing new beginnings. The religious practices I analyze produce a range of common sensual experiences: of "shouting" as dance; "testimony" and "tarry service" as song and praise noise; "whooping" (ecstatic, eclipsed breath) that occurs in praying and preaching; as well as, finally, "speaking in tongues." I ultimately argue that these aesthetic practices and sensual experiences are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture.

During the antebellum era, both clergy and scholars alike levied incessant injunctions against loud singing and frenzied dancing in religion and popular culture. Calling for the relinquishment of these sensual spiritual experiences, I argue that these framing injunctions led to a condition where BlackPentecostal aesthetics, even in the much later institutional Black Studies, were and are thought as excessive performances. "Black Sacred Breath" investigates how discourses that emerged within the cauldron of spatiotemporal triangular trades in coffee, tea, sugar and human flesh of Transatlantic slavery necessitated a theology and philosophy of race, and consequently, the racializing of aesthetic practices. Over and against this discursive theology-philosophy were the performance practices of BlackPentecostalism, an atheology-aphilosophy. These sensual experiences were not merely performed through duress but were the instantiation and sign of love, of life. As love and life, these performative dances, songs, noises and tongues illustrate how enjoyment, desire and joy are important for the historicity - the theory of history found in these practices - that antiphonally speaks back against aversion, embarrassment and abandonment, against the debasement and denigration of blackness. Fundamentally, "Black Sacred Breath" is about the possibility for Black Study (as opposed to and differentiated from university institutional Black Studies), about the capacity for aesthetic practices typically deemed excessive can be constitutive, can provide new models for collective intellectual practice.

Because identity is a continuously evolving process, it is important to question whether and how immigrant groups contend with U.S.-based ideas about race. This is especially the case for Afro-Latinxs, who sit at the intersection of two identities, Blackness and Latinidad, that are constructed as mutually exclusive. This dissertation uses Dominicans in the U.S. as an empirical case for understanding how Afro-Latinx groups think about their racial identity and create racial meaning around labels like “Latinx” and “Black.” I also theorize the concept of ethnoracial authenticity and explore how this group navigates normative constructions of Blackness and Latinidad that situate them outside of these identities. Finally, I discuss how Dominicans engage with transnational racial justice movements that create space for Dominicans both in the Dominican Republic and in the diaspora to challenge Dominican xenophobia and anti-Blackness. This work contributes to a broader conversation about the future of Black and Latinx politics and intergroup coalition building and offers insight into how Black Latinxs perceive the benefits of social and political alignment with these larger groups. Understanding the intersections of ethnicity and racial identity and the ways in which these groups overlap is ultimately important for considering what Black, Latinx, and Black Latinx coalition-building will look like in the future and could help us better understand and appreciate the role that these communities could play in global efforts for racial justice.

Bodily Trespass situates the fantastic as a discourse of spatial production in twentieth-century black American literature. Eruptions of the fantastic in realist and surrealist narratives index and ameliorate the spatial constriction that informs black American subjectivity from the Middle Passage up through to the contemporary carceral state. The black fantastic is a narrative response to a spatial crisis that is corporeal and ontological. As a literary mode, in the Todorovian sense, the fantastic identifies the real as a production of the "unreal" and calls attention to ideological and institutional apparatuses that sustain the dominant order. Taking Pauline Hopkins' turn of the twentieth-century serial Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self as a point of departure, this project examines the fantastic as a discourse of Pan-Africanism during a period Farah Griffin describes as the "nadir" of post-emancipation black life. Hopkins reaches outside of U.S. borders suturing Ethiopia to America in order to fashion a new and "rival" black geography that challenges the eradication of black legal, civic, and social space.

In the postwar years, the production of imaginative space extends to the task of recording and refuting the racial discourse that articulates urbanity. Chester Himes' The Real Cool Killers, Ann Petry's The Street, and Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha depict racially encoded urban geographies as corporeally informed psychosocial "interfaces." These novels identify cartographic locution as a strategy for spatial occupation and psychic rehabilitation. James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" and Ralph Ellison's "The King of the Bingo Game locate in the sonic a blueprint for refashioning the space of the modern metropolis according to a logic of interiority. Baldwin and Ellison identify the fantastic as a discourse of aurality that alters the texture of space by channeling what I call "scalar consciousness," a heightened awareness of the ways in which one might manipulate scale in the service of spatial production. Meditations on belonging, displays of corporeal violence, discourses of Africanity, and the identification of the aural as a pathway for liberation illustrate, in all these works, the black fantastic's rootedness in spatial production, subject formation, and resistance to a dehumanizing social order.

This dissertation investigates the relation between the formation of "Blackness" and the Western tradition of sovereignty through the works of late twentieth century Black Radical theorists. I most specifically examine the work of Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka, Frantz Fanon, and Huey P. Newton in order to delineate a shift within Black Radicalism which, due to an intense de-linking of Black nationalism from the concept of territorial sovereignty throughout the 1960s and early 1970s led to the formation of a new subjectivity ("Blackness") oriented against and beyond the Western tradition of political sovereignty as a whole.

This dissertation begins by outlining the parameters of the concept of sovereignty as well as its relation to conquest, coloniality, and racialization more generally. I then examine the formation of Black Power as an expression of anti-colonial sentiments present within the United States and uncover there the influence of W.E.B. DuBois' concept of double-consciousness. I then further examine the concept of Black Power through the work of Amiri Baraka and his notion of "Blackness" as the proximity to "home." Each of these expositions of Black Power are undertaken in order to better understand the era of Black Power and its relation to both Black nationalism and the Western tradition of sovereignty.

Next, I turn to the work of Frantz Fanon, whom I claim prepares the way for the idea of "Blackness" as an ontological resistance beyond, not only the territorial imperative, but also the logic of sovereignty more generally. This notion of "Blackness" as an antidote to sovereign logic present within the work of Fanon allows me to turn to the work of Huey P. Newton in order to demonstrate his conceptualization of "Blackness" as an antagonistic subjectivity within a fully globalized society whose onset he had theorized and which he termed "empire." I conclude by drawing on each of the above theorists as well as the work of Angela Davis in order to build a retrospective summary of this alternative lineage of the Black Radical Tradition and its importance for the conceptualization of resistances to and life beyond our contemporary society.

“Even Christ the Redeemer has turned his back to us” a young, Black female resident of the Baixada Fluminense told me. The 13 municipalities that make up this suburban periphery of Rio de Janeiro have suffered for decades from stigmatizing media narratives that cast the region as pathologically violent and culturally devoid due to its Blacker, poorer inhabitants. This has helped perpetuate government neglect, exacerbated by Rio’s hosting of the 2016 Olympic Games, through clientelist politics that thrive off the lack of jobs and basic public services in the region. My dissertation is an auto-ethnographic analysis of my three years of participatory action research with Black and brown youth in Rio de Janeiro’s stigmatized Baixada Fluminense. I argue that the music, films, social media driven journalism, and scholarly production of these youth contest the ways in which race, class, and place of origin often overlap through segregationist practices that attempt to maintain racial, socio-geographic hierarchies by relegating Black, brown, and poor bodies to the social and geographic periphery of a country than once proclaimed itself a “racial democracy.” Through transnational partnerships, these youth employ diasporic cultural forms and digital media to re-configure the Baixada and its 13 municipalities as a “Black place” that is inherently intersectional in its claims to collective access to urban and social mobility within this urban periphery.

ABSTRACTThis thesis examines Black preaching themes appearing to yield influence on Black Millennial-Xennial males. The prospective connection of this demographic giving ear and response to certain preaching motifs, is approached in this study from multiple perspectives. The thesis’ research methodology is designed to summarize scholarship of traditional and contemporary Black homileticians and place those assumptions in conversation with traditional and contemporary developmental psychology and sociology on the internal and external motivations of Black Millennial-Xennial males. This study assesses the following: Black preaching scholarship assertions regarding effective Black preaching; Developmental description of Black Millennial-Xennial males, Sociodynamics this demographic must negotiate to survive and thrive; Black preaching themes of contemporary Black preaching appearing to reach this demographic; and to conclude, comparison and contrast between Black academic and preaching homileticians. My research examines a corpus of leading traditional and contemporary Black homileticians. The Black homileticians’ assertions on effective Black preaching establish a foundation upon which Black preaching themes can be built. This thesis engages from a developmental perspective, social science to discuss the Millennial brain. Cerebral characteristics of Black Millennial-Xennial males address behaviors and assist in explaining Black Millennial-Xennial males’ indifferences and motivations. The study then pivots to consider key social factors that affect Black Millennial-Xennial males. This research project explores the dynamics of technology, social media platforms, “life markers,” incarceration and social inequities in relation to Black Millennial-Xennial males. These sociodynamics are placed in conversation with assertions from leading Black homileticians, academicians, and theoreticians. The study next moves to a case study featuring a leading church appearing to reach Black Millennial-Xennial males. Fifteen sermons from one pastor are examined to identify recurring Black preaching themes—themes compelling my study’s demographic. My central argument of existing Black preaching themes that are compelling Black Millennial-Xennial males concludes with comparative and contrasting examination of academic, homiletical theory versus preaching praxis. For example, the study’s analysis seeks to answer the question of whether the assertions of traditional and contemporary homileticians regarding tenets of effective Black preaching translate to the sermons examined that seem to be producing compelling Black preaching themes for Black Millennial-Xennial males. The study will evaluate whether and to what degree the theory of effective Black preaching concepts appears in the sermons of preaching practitioners. Conclusions drawn in this study aim to inform sermonic approaches to engage Black Millennial-Xennial males.

In this dissertation, I analyze the critical, creative, and personal work of Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Alice Walker in order to suggest that spirituality can be a useful component of Black feminist self-repair. Within the scope of Black women’s literary history, I argue that Morrison, Spillers, and Walker each functioned as three figures from Afrodiasporic spiritual traditions: the griot, the conjurer, and the medium, respectively. This project contends that there is significant overlap between spirituality and magic, the latter of which is defined as the use of ritual activities or observances which are intended to influence the course of events or to manipulate the natural world. In the context of this project, I interpret “magic” as a collection of stylistic choices, inherited traditions, and behaviors that enable Black Americans to repair the psychic, physical, and emotional damage that has been internalized in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade and Jim Crow segregation. This practice of self-repair through magic draws on ritual activities and observances that exist within both Afrodiasporic spiritual traditions as well as a body of Black feminist literary knowledge that has been passed down through generations of Black women writers. I contend that Black Americans’ ability to perform self-repair through spirituality is a practice of world-making that is rooted in Black feminist thought.

This project rereads the political thought of Augustine of Hippo in the Black Lives Matter era. In the last two decades, scholars of religion and politics made a striking return to the constructive resources of the Augustinian tradition to theorize citizenship, virtue, and the place of religion in public life. However, these scholars have not sufficiently attended to Augustine’s embrace of the position of the Christian slaveholder in light of the fact that the contemporary situation to which they apply his thought is itself the afterlife of slavery. The ghosts of slaves and masters live on, haunting the ongoing social meanings of blackness and whiteness in American life. To confront a racialized world, the Augustinian tradition must reckon with its own entanglements with the afterlife of the white Christian master. This reckoning demands a constructive encounter, at once timely and long overdue, between Augustine’s politics and the resources of modern Black thought. Drawing from these two intellectual traditions, this constructive religious ethics dissertation develops a critical account of the problem of the Christian master, even as it presses toward an alternative construal of key concepts of ethical life—agency, virtues, temporality—against and beyond the framework of mastery.

This dissertation examines photographic representations of Ethiopian identity. It focuses on Emperor Haile Selassie I as a recuperative figure in Pan-African contexts, images by court photographer and later London studio portraitist Shemelis Desta, and contemporary works created by Ethiopian artists in the diaspora one generation after the Derg’s collapse. Exploring visual processes that concern, inform, and confront the practices of photographers working at the intersection of ethnic identity and nationalism, this dissertation scrutinizes Ethiopian artists’ views of the importance of their work to their country and to the African diaspora in conjunction with opposing historical narratives adopted by Black nationalists, and alternatively, white imperialists in the early twentieth century.

This dissertation disputes the notion of a decline in human agency, which is taken as a theoretical article of faith in many threads of post- and anti-human literatures concerned with the effects of technical networking and computation on society. Its central contention is that the notion of “the death of authorship” is based on a false construction of political authority and individual subjecthood, and that the concept of decision developed during the Western Enlightenment continues to exert an outsized discursive influence on our conceptions of human being (via liberal subjectivity) and state power (sovereignty). Because such discourses share an understanding of decision as something concentrated in an individual, issues that transcend the scope of localized human perception are often considered outside the purview of human agency, ultimately resulting in an abdication of collective human responsibility. Despite never having truly articulated interpersonal and political relations, the figure of the sovereign subject is reified by twenty-first century discourses that claim to have transcended it. The work accomplishes this critique through a combination of arts-based research and theoretical argumentation, developing notions of ‘collectivity’ and ‘improvisation’ as central to human decision and agency, while casting the sovereign subject as the lingering particularity of a specific time in the history of Western political thought. It concludes, first, that understandings of human subjectivity as always already interrelated—intersubjectivity—allows theory to better model and understand political phenomena in the age of networked, generative aesthetics and, secondly, that such understandings may provide avenues toward a notion of collective responsibility for novel approaches to problems considered outside the limited purview of individual subjecthood.

This project examines how African diasporic writers and filmmakers from Zimbabwe, Martinique, Britain, and the United States inscribe into their works a sense of anticipation of release from subjection, as if to experience in advance the feeling of unequivocal bodily relief. Charting its appearance in both descriptive content as well as aesthetic form—such as metaphor, narrative structure, and aspects of cinematic editing—“Fugitive Time” shows how this recurring form of utopian time-consciousness distinct to African diasporic cultural expression evolves from the 18th century slave narrative to the contemporary novel, and how it mutates across disparate global geographies. In epic poetry, autobiography, experimental film, and historical novels, the project isolates this fugitive anticipation of the outside of black subjection and the persistent memory of violence that engenders it. In these works, utopia, however elusive, lies in that moment when the body at last finds release.

This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between nineteenth and twentieth century artists and the paranormal. Historically, the term “paranormal” has denoted an array of otherworldly phenomena that has captivated artists and the public alike. Indeed, this period, host to William Blake’s spiritual visions and William Butler Yeats’s ghostly dictations, showcases the indelible influence the paranormal has had on art. Unsurprisingly, this influence has long attracted critical attention. The prevailing narrative of critics such as Leon Surette and Helen Sword argues that the period’s artists expressed their paranormal interests by aestheticizing the practices of spiritualist movements, which professed the existence of a “spirit world” that could be contacted by humans via séances or psychic mediums. But there has been little consideration of how artists identified these interests with the very mechanics of artistic creation, believing art could engage otherworldly phenomena in ways that spiritualist techniques could not.

In Guided by Voices, I argue that a diverse strand of nineteenth and twentieth century artists conceived of poetry as an access point to a transgressive, generative kind of paranormality. Some, for instance, understood the poetical text and its creator as haunted entities, while others believed their poetry-making could conjure spirits. Regardless, these poets all turned to the paranormal to achieve liberation. In their quest to expand the imaginative possibilities of their craft, they invoked the paranormal to revolutionize our perceptions of language, humanity, and politics. When read as such, their work comprises a distinct historical arc, a tradition of liberated poetics that unifies artists across disparate times and spaces. Hence, Guided by Voices not only reassess artistic engagements with the paranormal but also illuminates conceptual-historical links between artists that scholarship has not yet recognized.

Over three chapters and an epilogue, I demonstrate how parapoiesis, the unique enmeshment of poetry and the paranormal, enables a series of liberations: liberation from embodiment; liberation from poetic form; liberation from individuality; and liberation from sociohistorical reality. Close readings of primary sources direct my assertions, as do some wide-ranging theoretical reference points. I harness Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to help articulate my definition of the paranormal, for example, and I incorporate Georges Bataille’s ideas about the mythic to flesh out my examination of poetical mythmaking. The project does, however, draw as much from a popular imaginary as it does academic discourses; folk spirituality’s characterizations of ghosts, magic, and the occult also help anchor my claims.

Ultimately, I argue that parapoiesis’ significance lies in its capacity to transform, often in a material sense, our world. Parapoiesis illustrates how and why poets perceive their works’ relationship with paranormality as intrinsic, procreative, and alchemical. I contend that these poets reveal a broader facet of nineteenth and twentieth century artistic production which maintains a contemporary resonance and usefulness: art’s paranormal entanglements deconstruct prevailing ideological narratives and histories, imagine alternative, liberatory ones, and, in doing so, alter the very material conditions within which culture itself germinates.

This dissertation undertakes a black ecocritical study of the trope of water in African Diasporic Literature. Over the course of three chapters treating fiction, drama, and photography, in a study both multi-generic and interdisciplinary in scope, I illuminate the ways in which black literature recursively figures the problem of being black in terms of a recurring crisis of having no ground that originates with and is haunted by the waters of Middle Passage. However, beyond its traumatic associations with the slave trade, I also argue, following the aesthetic philosophy of Gaston Bachelard, that water provides the feature element of what I call the "material imagination of blackness." That is, a poetic and ethical imagination informed by the physiopoetic properties of water that inspires both black literary creation and enactments of black social life.

God created . . . and it was good. People of faith are a part of God’s work of creation that from the beginning of time has created and innovated without fail. A mantra of the ecumenical Black Church is that we serve a God who “keeps making a way out of no way!” Out of conditions of scarcity, malice, and hardship, enslaved Africans living in America created possibilities and opportunities for themselves. Fast forward to 2022, and that spirit of innovation still exists within the stories and lived experiences of African Americans across time.

In this work I will suggest that innovation must continue to be an intentional practice of the black church. Given the monumental changes brought about by the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, I am compelling leaders to move towards the work of innovation and to illuminate opportunities of innovation within church environments. I would argue that the ecumenical Black Church has led many movements of social impact and connectivity yet our language for describing that kind of work has been too limited. I’m interested in narrating and interpreting the work of the ecumenical Black Church through the lens and discipline of social innovation, traditioned innovation, design thinking, and strategy.

We are at an intersection and inflection point in 2022. Virtual sanctuaries have replaced physical ones. The average parishioner has not walked into a sanctuary in the past two years. How does that change our concept of innovation, outreach and strategy? As a former publicist, current brand strategist, and church planter, I am very interested in the way the ecumenical Black Church is being received in society right now. I’m interested in threading who the ecumenical Black Church has been and who it can be. This is a renaissance moment. Let’s join together and see what we can create. Let’s dream together.

This dissertation documents African-American girls' musical practices at a Boys and Girls Club in Durham, NC. Hip-hop is the cornerstone of social exchanges at John Avery, and is integrated into virtually all club activities. Detractors point to the misogyny, sexual exploitation and violence predominant in hip-hop's most popular incarnations, suggesting that the music is a corrupting influence on America's youth. Girls are familiar with these arguments, and they appreciate that hip-hop is a contested and sometimes illicit terrain. Yet they also recognize that knowledge about and participation in hip-hop-related activities is crucial to their interactions at the club, at school, and at home. As girls hone their listening skills, they reconcile the contradictions between behavior glorified by hip-hop and the model presented to them by their mentors. This project examines how African-American girls ages 5-13 use their listening practices to claim a space within hip-hop's landscape while still operating within the unambiguous moral framework they have learned from their parents, mentors and peers. Through ethnography and close analysis of vocal utterances, dance moves and social interaction, I consider how individual interactions with mass-mediated music teach girls a black musical aesthetic that allows them to relate to their peers and mentors, and how these interactions highlight the creativity with which they begin to negotiate sexual and racial politics on the margins of society.

This dissertation, Lumpen: Vagrancies of a Concept from Marx to Fanon (and on), tracks the concept of the lumpenproletariat from its coinage by Karl Marx through its reworking by Franz Fanon, the Black Panthers and others in the context of the colonial liberation and Black Power movements, and onwards into contemporary debates about populism, identity, politics, and the end of work. From its origins an unstable concept, the lumpenproletariat raises a series of interrelated questions about the relation of class to interest, interest to identity, and identity to politics. Succinctly, the dissertation asks: what happens to the Marxian project when the future of productive labor seems in doubt, both as a source of capital valorization and as a foundation for political action?

Contemporary engagement with the category of the lumpenproletariat has typically focused on the latter as a symbol of the irreducible autonomy of the political, ignoring the concept’s empirical referent. Separately, a growing body of literature has grappled with the increase of economically redundant surplus populations produced, in part, by technological automation, a phenomenon obliquely reflected in recent philosophical fascination with, for instance, bare life, necropolitics and the abject. Such work has however rarely considered the political ramifications of such transformations. What we would need, then, is a theoretical framework capable of grasping both aspects of this twofold problematic—the determinacy of dispossession, the indeterminacy of its political expression.

The beginnings of such a framework can be found, I argue, in the writings on the lumpenproletariat in the work of Frantz Fanon, James Boggs, and the Black Panthers. Developing their scattered insights, I argue that the lumpenproletariat names both the tendential production of an economically redundant surplus population and the lack of any automatic correlation between this (or any) social condition and political subjectivation. This gap between economic and political, structure and subject, becomes then the space for the creative articulation of a collective subject as a properly political project. This is precisely the task of a socialist politics today.

Whether in terms of its objective position at the point of production or its subjective consciousness of the need for revolution, the decline of the industrial proletariat has often been figured as synonymous with that of socialist politics. In contrast, my dissertation suggestions that a recuperation of the rich and half-forgotten legacy of the lumpenproletariat emerging out of the Black radical tradition can help provide a model for constructing a powerful socialist movement in the present.

This dissertation investigates the social, emotional, and ethical implications of looking at the suffering and death of African Americans. Drawing on film theory, visual studies, literary criticism, and semiotics, the study addresses events and images from 1834 to 2000 in which the humanity of the black body was called into question. The events discussed include: a nineteenth-century riot over the abuse of slaves; the mass media depiction of Hurricane Katrina survivors; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's 1935 antilynching art exhibition; James Allen's 2000 exhibition of lynching photography; the Emmett Till case; and the Spike Lee-directed film Bamboozled (2000). The project ultimately argues for a nuanced appreciation of looking relations that takes into account the ethics of the look, especially when that look is directed toward bodies that cannot speak for and in defense of themselves.