ABSTRACT
This fi nal chapter investigates the question that threads throughout this book: how can we bear witness to violence against black men, without enacting the violence of the look? In answer to this question, I turn to Charles Chesnutt’s novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), to consider how the author confronts the visual terrain of lynching. Aware of both a white supremacist audience that would relish the imagery of wounded black bodies as well as an African-American audience that would be terrorized by the very same spectacle, Chesnutt set out to expose the visual practices that shaped lynching, without whetting the appetite for black fl esh. While it might seem that by choosing to address the problems of lynching through letters, Chesnutt could eliminate the problem of rehearsing spectacle violence, such imagery was not confi ned to visual representation. As I discuss in Chapter 1, these images glided seamlessly between literature and photography in a vigorous cross-fertilization. Sandra Gunning points out that “lynching became a familiar image in the American turn-of-the-century imagination through novels, photographs, and newspaper descriptions, all of which dramatically referenced a public spectacle.”1 As he attempted to illustrate the problem of lynching in The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt encountered this visual culture in which looking at the wounded black male body through a variety of media was central to white supremacist violence. His solution was to shift the lens from the horrors of the brutalized body itself to the cultural forces that informed racialized spectacle violence. As he negotiates the fi ne line between interrogating the brutal practices of lynching and reenacting them, Chesnutt omits the imagery of the wounded black male body to create a space in which to examine the practices of spectacle violence.
