JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 24, Number 2, 2004 Page: 416
261-512 p. : ill. (some col.), ports. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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416
specifically address the ways in which African American writers have
experienced America's lynching history, we might also pose these same
questions to audiences of and participants in lynchings (then), and
audiences of attempts to remember lynchings today. Without Sanctuary
brings to the surface the ways in which our racial memories predispose
our viewing of lynching photographs. Intentions aside, whether we (can)
confront or exorcise these memories determines the argument that the
photographs now make.
In attempting to adopt a postmemory of lynching, we reinforce the
division-the impossibility-in that identification. As Burke argues,
identification is never "pure":
In pure identification there would be no strife. Likewise, there would be
no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can join battle only
through a mediatory ground that makes their communication possible,
thus providing the first condition necessary for their interchange of blows.
But put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you
cannot know for certainjust where one ends and the other begins, and you
have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric. (25)
The shared memory that Without Sanctuary constructs between the
viewer and the "oppressed or persecuted other" simultaneously creates
and obliterates identification; even as the photographs provide a visual
means of accessing the experiences of the lynching victims, the attempt
to access these experiences makes the line between passive empathy and
an active account of the history of racial violence indistinguishable.
When we enter into conversation with these photographs, "who is to say,
once and for all,just where 'cooperation' ends and [...] 'exploitation' of
the other begins?" (Burke 25).
Traces of all of the possibilities that Harris considers above emerge
in our identifications with the lynching photographs, in any act of
identification; our conversation with the photographs is both "voluntary
and determined." "Being historically informed about his or her heritage
in blood and violence makes each black writer a member of a club from
whose membership he or she cannot be severed" (Harris 185). The
postmemory of lynching that Without Sanctuary creates is an identifica-
tion with this "club"; African American experiences of violence, so
graphic and yet so suppressed in the original photographs, begin to
surface in their republication. Yet, white positions of looking at and of
enacting violence are also resurrected. These postmemories and memoryjac
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 24, Number 2, 2004, periodical, 2004; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28644/m1/162/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .