ABSTRACT
As Noelie Vialles has documented, modern slaughter is predicated on the dispersal of human guilt, achieved through the dispersal of the death of the animal, which cannot be attributed to the single action of any one human being. John L. Hayes, in his Sheep Husbandry in the South, anticipates Vardaman's racism in a more "scientific" and "hopeful" approach to southern agriculture. Vardaman's incendiary rhetoric, although it relies on a discourse of racist animality, accurately revises these European tales and redefines wolves' prey as animal (sheep, specifically) and not human. The hunting of black "wolves" domesticated twice over in "protecting" white women and "taming" black men, whom white hunters hoped to turn back into "sheep dogs." The most basic generic conventions of spectacle lynching photographs are evident in this image in the highly visible, hanging body and the crowd of white men that gathers around it.
