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Gruesome Looking Objects Elijah Gaddis (Auburn University, Alabama)

Gruesome Looking Objects By Elijah Gaddis (Auburn University, Alabama)

Gruesome Looking Objects by Elijah Gaddis (Auburn University, Alabama)


Summary

This innovative study uses objects-made, collected, and imagined-to tell the story of the 1898 lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer in North Carolina. Utilizing material culture, memory, and landscapes, it brings important new insights to the understanding of racial violence in the American South and beyond.

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Gruesome Looking Objects Summary

Gruesome Looking Objects: A New History of Lynching and Everyday Things by Elijah Gaddis (Auburn University, Alabama)

The 1898 lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer is retold in this groundbreaking book. Unlike other histories of lynching that rely on conventional historical records, this study focuses on the objects associated with the lynching, including newspaper articles, fragments of the victims' clothing, photographs, and souvenirs such as sticks from the hanging tree. This material culture approach uncovers how people tried to integrate the meaning of the lynching into their everyday lives through objects. These seemingly ordinary items are repositories for the comprehension, interpretation, and commemoration of racial violence and white supremacy. Elijah Gaddis showcases an approach to objects as materials of history and memory, insisting that we live in a world suffused with the material traces of racial violence, past and present.

Gruesome Looking Objects Reviews

'Elijah Gaddis has written an incisive, probing history of the materiality of racial violence and its historical residue. In creatively reconstructing a double lynching in North Carolina, he has persuasively demonstrated how objects and things, if interrogated and contextualized thoroughly enough, can allow us to read more deeply into the freighted meanings of such tragedies.' Claude A. Clegg III, author of Troubled Ground: A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South
'There are hundreds of lynching stories yet to be told, and all deserve to be told with care and creativity. In a crowded scholarly field, Elijah Gaddis has offered a singular contribution through his examination of artifacts associated with a double lynching that occurred at the height of North Carolina's white supremacy campaign. Gaddis demonstrates, like none before him, how lynchers leave their mark on history, memory, and the everyday things left behind. A remarkable achievement.' Jason Morgan Ward, author of Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century
'Gruesome Looking Objects offers a rich analysis of the material culture surrounding racist violence. Through a case study of one lynching, Gaddis deftly demonstrates how the ordinary objects used in and generated from a lynching served to normalize atrocity and embed it in everyday life. This is an innovative and smart book.' Amy Louise Wood, author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940

About Elijah Gaddis (Auburn University, Alabama)

Elijah Gaddis is Assistant Professor of History at Auburn University, and the co-director of A Red Record, a comprehensive mapping of lynching victims in the American South.

Table of Contents

Preface; Introduction: Fragments; 1. The Article; 2. The Letter; 3. The Clothes; 4. The Tree; 5. The Hammer and Chisel; 6. The Song; Conclusion: Archival Remains.

Additional information

CIN1316514021A
9781316514023
1316514021
Gruesome Looking Objects: A New History of Lynching and Everyday Things by Elijah Gaddis (Auburn University, Alabama)
Used - Well Read
Hardback
Cambridge University Press
20221117
212
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book. We do our best to provide good quality books for you to read, but there is no escaping the fact that it has been owned and read by someone else previously. Therefore it will show signs of wear and may be an ex library book

Customer Reviews - Gruesome Looking Objects