American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching by Guy Lancaster, has been reviewed in Arkansas Review by Brent M. S. Campney.
“In his recent American Atrocity, [Lancaster] links the history of anti-Black mob violence in Arkansas to an analysis of theoretical works on the meaning of violence drawn from academic fields like history, philosophy, literary theory, and cognitive science to wring new understands about, as he subtitles it, the types of violence that comprised the essentially subjective category of lynching. [T]his is a thoughtful and sometimes brilliant work that should enjoy a broad readership among specialists in Arkansas history, in lynching studies, and violence studies more generally.”
—Brent M. S. Campney, Arkansas Review, August 2022
Lynching is often viewed as a narrow form of violence: either the spontaneous act of an angry mob against accused individuals, or a demonstration of white supremacy against an entire population considered subhuman. However, in this new treatise, historian Guy Lancaster exposes the multiple forms of violence hidden beneath the singular label of lynching.
Lancaster, who has written extensively on racial violence, details several lynchings of Blacks by white posses in post-Reconstruction Arkansas. Drawing from the fields of history, philosophy, cognitive science, sociology, and literary theory, and quoting chilling contemporary accounts, he argues that the act of lynching encompasses five distinct but overlapping types of violence. This new framework reveals lynching to be even more of an atrocity than previously understood: that mobs did not disregard the humanity of their victims but rather reveled in it; that they were not simply enacting personal vengeance but manifesting an elite project of subjugation. Lancaster thus clarifies and connects the motives and goals of seemingly isolated lynch mobs, embedding the practice in the ongoing enforcement of white supremacy. By interrogating the substance of lynching, American Atrocity shines new light on both past anti-Black violence and the historical underpinnings of our present moment.
Guy Lancaster is the editor of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System, and the editor of the award-winning Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950.
Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies focuses on the seven states of the Mississippi River Delta, from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico. This area includes the southern half of Missouri; the southern third of Illinois; the western third of Kentucky; the western half of Tennessee; and all of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Interdisciplinary in scope and aimed at a general academic audience, the journal welcomes scholarly contributions from all the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, art history, cultural studies, folklore studies, history, literature, musicology, political science, and sociology.