Lynching Terrorism In Frederick Douglass Imperio

The 1870s American South witnessed the emergence of a horrific pattern of racial violence that was still on the rise by the 1890s—and, tragically, would continue until the mid-twentieth century. Writing near the end his life in 1892, and unsuspecting of the extent of this lynching longue durée, Frederick Douglass prophesied that there were two routes available for confronting the rise and nadir of racial terror, one optimistic and the other pessimistic. For Douglass, either the nineteenth-century’s residual moral force which had brought about Emancipation would regain its footing and marshal the end of lynching, or, more pessimistically, African Americans would eventually return its violence with revolutionary force. Seven years after Douglass’

Griggs’ 1899 novel, Imperium in Imperio, is a select—even if often underappreciated —contribution to what historian Kidada Williams has called the development of black counterpublic sphere that emerged in the 1890s and early twentieth-century as a discourse in opposition to the racial regime increasingly consolidated in forms of legal disenfranchisement, extractive economic practices, and lynching terrorism.
The purpose of this paper is to bring into focus (1) the concept of lynch law, specifically, to foreground its theoretical significance. Along the way, I use Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic violence, misrecognition, and habitus to interpret lynch law and dramatize the difficulties of resistance to it. For Bourdieu, symbolic violence has to do with the way in which violence against dominated populations is

Wells by arguing that “above all, lynching is about the law,” which is clarified to mean: “legal discourse and disciplinary practice [that] subtends the symbolic arena, marking out a topos of bodies and identities that gives order to generation, defines and circumscribes social and political behavior, and punishes transgression.” However, an objection to Wiegman’s attention to the connection between lynching and law is that it proceeds as if the power relations that make lynching possible were formally reflected and affirmed by legal discourse and policy. The problem with this rendering, so the objection goes, is that normative criminal law is then reductively understood to be an idiom of power, which represents law as purely instrumental to mob violence and the racial regime at the turn of the twentieth-century. Seeking analytic relief, the opposing position clarifies lynch law instead as a way of naming the suspension of normative criminal law by which vigilante justice transgresses or violates state arrangements for justice. Lynching results primarily from of an unequal enforcement of law because of the power of the mob to displace the power of law enforcement. Lynch law, understood along these lines, describes the extralegal capacities of mob violence that takes place independent of and in opposition to normative law, which is made possible by fissures of juridical