Using literature to understand violence against blacks
The grim history of lynching in the United States may be over, but it has been preserved through photographs, memoirs, novels and poetry. To Sandy Alexandre, an associate professor of literature at MIT, those images and words help make clear, in retrospect, how closely lynching was related to the issue of property, in the form of bodies, possessions and land. This is not the first thing usually associated with lynching; as many scholars and commentators have detailed, lynch mobs were often triggered by the suspicion, whether true or not, of physical relations between black men and white women. Now Alexandre’s first book, “The Properties of Violence,” published by the University Press of Mississippi, explores the territorial aspects of lynching — including its capacity to uproot blacks and dispossess them of property, while also denying them access to particular places.“Racial violence is a way to demarcate space, and it’s a way...