Über den Autor
Koritha Mitchell is a professor of English at The Ohio State University and the author of Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930.
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Dr. Mitchell examines literary sources beginning with the mid-nineteenth century and tracing the pattern of black women claiming full citizenship through the domestic sphere only to face white violence up to the 2016 election. She argues, “White people forced the enslaved to perform the difference that the discursive violence of claiming they were another order of being was said to simply describe. It is time for scholars to recognize how thoroughly black people understood the forces arrayed against them as they nevertheless claimed victories. It is time to notice the many ways African Americans defined and redefined gradations of achievement” (pg. 62). She identifies how whites used know-your-place aggression to counter black success as soon as formerly-enslaved African Americans began pursuing new opportunities during Reconstruction, setting a pattern that continues through the present day. Dr. Mitchell also complicates the narrative of the New Negro movement, showing how African American women faced a double standard both from white violence and patriarchal ideals of propriety within some black communities (pg. 105). Discussing the postwar years, she argues, “Mainstream declarations about the nation’s preferred domestic configuration amounted to discursive violence that encouraged physical violence” (pg. 126). Though she writes this in describing the 1950s and 1960s, it could easily describe the violence of mainstream political discourse in 2020. Linking her analyses to the current day, Dr. Mitchell writes, “Quite routinely, white Americans destroyed black families and households and swore they never existed. It is in this context that one must view black cultural production that spotlights successful black families and their households, and Mrs. Obama’s public persona is one such cultural production” (pg. 195).
Dr. Mitchell’s use of performance theory to examine African American women’s success in claiming their citizenship and white know-your-place violence in reaction to that success offers a new way of understanding black citizenship and the process by which white society sought to limit it. In identifying white violence as a discursive tool to deny black citizenship, Dr. Mitchell refocuses the long history of resistance to African American civil rights to foreground the work of women and show how their efforts to create and portray their homes in life and literature were radical acts. This is a must-read for historians, literary scholars, and anyone seeking to better understand the violent resistance to African American citizenship that continues to this day.… (mehr)