ABSTRACT
This essay opens with a description of the moment the author found a photograph of a lynched man amongst her grandmother’s odds and ends. The immediate curriculum encounter is described as an aesthetic provocation that marked the moment the author learned she was white—an encounter which implicated her in the larger society. The author uses this encounter to forge a theorization of the curriculum of home things, a term that refers to relics exhibited or hidden in our homes, those things that inextricably link us to the larger social world and do so in a particular order. The second portion of the essay explores transmutations of lynching photographs as ethical curriculum in making: white supremacist souvenirs, detoured anti-lynching appeals, and consumables for U.S. history textbooks, through the lens of curricular intensities in the public sphere. The essay returns to the theory of home things with a contemplation on the tensions and ambiguities between private and public curricula.
