Death and Blackness: the Aestheticization of Death from Lynching Photography to African American Literature to Memorials is located at the nexus of literary criticism, African American studies, visual culture theory, and continental philosophy. The project examines a host of media ranging from major African American literary texts to more marginalized paintings, photographs, graffiti art, and public memorials, and explores how these various aesthetic objects represent the function of death in African American culture over the last 100 years. I argue that the aestheticized cultural byproducts of death provide a hermeneutics to interpret the formation of modern African American culture, and perhaps more importantly construct African American male subjectivity. The ever-present threat of death is constitutive of a bio and necropolitics that works to oppress and discipline African American subjects. I lay the basis for this argument in the introduction by tracing the genealogy of a specifically American racialized necropolitics in the 19th century writings of William Wells Brown and the declaration "death is freedom" in Clotel not only from the vantage point of philosophy, but as a political pronouncement designed to show the limits of democracy. This line of analysis is further developed by reading Frederick Douglass's autobiographical writings as texts engaging the construction of black subjectivity through political oppression and subjection in a way that foreshadows theories of subjectivity developed by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, and in a away that allows Douglass to be read side-by-side the philosopher Hegel. Chapter one focuses on lynch photographs as mediums that allow for an understanding of the political subjection of African Americans on the American landscape through vigilante justice that takes place outside of formal law during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the 20th century. This chapter draws on the philosophy of Guy Debord and Jacques Ranciere and argues that lynch images disclose American culture's weltanschauung. Additionally, this chapter argues that lynch photographs demonstrate that the spectacle of punishment did not fade with the onset of modernity while also maintaining that lynch photographs are "tear-images" directed at the real. Chapter two proposes a new reading of Richard Wright's Native Son to show how the politics of death functions at the hands of the state and circumscribes Bigger Thomas's subjectivity while simultaneously arguing that Wright himself can be read as presenting a biopolitical theory concerning death vis-à-vis African Americans. Further, this chapter relies on the existential-phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon and argues that Bigger's subjectivity is constituted by the Other through "the look"; that is, through the gaze. In chapter three, I discuss Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a point of entry into the conditions of the mid-twentieth century that (re)produced symbolically or socially dead subjects. I read Invisible Man from the vantage point of Hegelian phenomenology and argue that the anonymous hero is struggling for recognition. In the conclusion, I analyze the graffiti and memorials associated with the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant by the Bay Area Rapid Transit police and argue that these aesthetic phenomena are explicit engagements with the contemporary form of necropolitics that governs black subjectivity. To that end, I draw on Walter Benjamin's theory of the police, arguing that police brutality functions as a form of law-preserving mythic violence.
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