(Download) "Preface" by The Faulkner Journal * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Preface
- Author : The Faulkner Journal
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 45 KB
Description
As callous as it is to say it, some lynchings are more horrible than others" (Arnold 267). With that sentence "Chip" Arnold begins his remarkable essay on the lynching of Sam Hose, perhaps the grisliest, most barbaric event in the sorrowful history of lynching in this country. Chip's research on lynching in America--of which this is an early assay--must have compelled him to reflect deeply on the mystery that such acts of utter savagery could be performed by a society that defended its right to commit ultimate violence against persons as, according to the Newnan Herald & Advertiser, a "civilization [that] is distinctively Southern" (qtd. in Arnold 274; emphasis mine). In Newnan, Georgia, Hose had been charged with murdering a white farmer, Alfred Cranford, and raping Cranford's wife. He fled, and, for the nearly two weeks during which he eluded expanding search parties and escalating rewards, his liberty struck terror into the white population of the surrounding countryside. As Chip does not fail to notice, though, this state of affairs terrorized the Negroes of the area as well; any one of them might be mistaken for the fugitive. Death lay a second away on some nervous trigger finger. When Hose was finally captured, he was escorted by vigilante guard back to Newnan to confront Cranford's widow, who pleaded for his immediate lynching. Hose's murder by a white mob on April 23, 1899, unleashed a ferocious outpouring of racial rage, sexual panic, and depthless anxiety. Hose was hanged, stabbed, and finally incinerated by bonfire, but not before his torturers, some of whom were children, managed to amputate his fingers, toes, and g******s. It was discovering a charred finger of Hose on display in an Atlanta store window that convinced W. E. B. Du Bois, as he recounts in a shaken passage of The Souls of Black Folk, that he could no longer live in the South. Du Bois recognized that the very survival of the Negro was the issue of modern America: the reason the color line mattered was that it sought to divide the living from the dead. Given a decline in the Negro family's economic and reproductive vitality under Jim Crow, the murderous assault on black men in the lynch-happy South, not to mention the burial of urban Negroes under northern prejudice, Du Bois concluded that the American state was at least passively contemplating the sacrifice of an entire race--held to be defective--to the rejuvenated national union. Black morbidity became a theme of Du Bois's joint intellectual investigations--sociological, historical, and imaginative. When Chip quotes Governor Allen Candler on the lynching of Hose, he points to the monstrous saturation of state power with racist ideology: in Chip's words, Candler "called on 'good negroes' to speak out against the sort of crimes that 'provoke' lynchings" (276; emphasis mine). Giorgio Agamben has explored the way that state power is consolidated around its blunt capacity to dispose of human or "bare life," that is, simple fleshly existence. For Agamben, the figure of "homo sacer," the sacred man, embodies the power of the state, beginning with its classical origins. Homo sacer is defined by two conditions: he is the individual who may be killed without punity, and he is the dead who may not be mourned. As such, his extinction by the state displays the arbitrary authority of the state over individual persons: a life that may be taken without cause; a life that must not be redeemed into any system of higher values or meaning, lest the sheer unreasoning power of the state be compromised. This is the moment at which the politicized body originates, according to Agamben, and it would be difficult not to see the intensification of modern state power that he charts as sharply illustrated by the coincidence in the US of a reunited modern national state--pivoting on the reconciliation of North and South in the exercise of military state power in the Spanish American War--and the exercise of subjugation ov
 "Preface" by The Faulkner Journal * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}