These books both illuminatingly explore the rhetoric, images, and cultural representations of American lynching. Despite their rather divergent approaches, both Ashraf H. A. Rushdy and Sandy Alexandre reveal the destructive influence and persistent legacy of the ubiquitous racial mob violence of the American South during what Rushdy calls “the long twentieth century” (xi).

Ashraf H. A. Rushdy's mellifluously argued, thoughtful book focusses on the shifting rhetoric and argumentation surrounding American lynching from the late nineteenth century through current times. Rushdy identifies successive understandings of racial mob violence employed by advocates and opponents of lynching, beginning with a “lynching-for-rape discourse” (12) that would be defended and countered by several “complicity models” (15) and eventually succeeded in the mid-twentieth century by an “end-of-lynching discourse” (15) that continues to profoundly influence discussion of racial violence in the US. Rushdy briefly and effectively synthesizes decades of US cultural and legal history as he traces the rise and fall of these notions. Perhaps the book's most effective portions are its third and fourth chapters, which carefully analyze the racist collective murder of James Byrd, an African American, by avowed white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, in June 1998. Local law enforcement and regional and national media labeled the killing of Byrd a “hate crime,” not a lynching, asserting that the era of lynching had ended and that the murder of Byrd differed in essential ways from early twentieth-century mob violence because it was, for example, perpetrated by only three persons and did not enjoy the support of the larger community. Compellingly pressing for “continuity” rather than “discontinuity” in understanding American racial violence (138–39), Rushdy argues that the killing of Byrd is actually best understood as a lynching, as it displayed ideological, geographical, and even ritualistic qualities consistent with a prolific and lengthy history of racially motivated mob violence in east Texas and in the Deep South. Rushdy's larger point is that a powerful, insidious “end-of-lynching discourse” bequeathed by American culture's response to shifts in patterns of mob violence in the twentieth century tends to obscure the persistence of racially motivated lethal group violence in the contemporary United States.

While much of Rushdy's discussion of American lynching history is derivative of other scholars whom he duly acknowledges, he nonetheless offers intriguing insights, particularly in tracing and critiquing the ideological origins of current discussion of racial violence. He most certainly oversimplifies in asserting that most “historians and other students of lynching emphasize the discontinuities” in the history of mob violence; this misrepresents the work of numerous scholars who have offered complex analyses of the evolution of lynching violence over time, many of whom he draws upon in constructing his account of the development of ideas of American lynching. Rushdy's assertion here is also ironic and hypocritical, as on page 94 he offers his own narrative of the transformation and decline of mob violence in the Deep South in the 1930s, a description that differs in few particulars from accounts offered by a number of other scholars. Here Rushdy asserts, in a discontinuous vein, that “the spectacle lynchings of the Progressive Era, the operas of white civilization, had lost their motive, their production value, and become essentially a defunct form” (94). Similarly questionable is Rushdy's decision to exclude from his analysis the racially motivated lynchings of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and Native Americans – hundreds of whom were murdered by mobs of white Americans – in favor of a “focus on whites’ lynching of black Americans” (xi). While Rushdy's choice replicates the traditional focus of the scholarship, it seems facile in an era when scholars are beginning to recover the full dimensions of white Americans’ history of racial violence. One suspects that a more diverse and inclusive analysis of American lynching would have only underscored Rushdy's crucial points about tendencies toward denial, complicity, and the convenient oversimplification of the lengthy practice of racial violence in the United States. Despite these quibbles, Rushdy's book is a valuable intervention in the scholarship on American mob violence, and it will be especially useful to those interested in the historical context of contemporary debates over racial violence in American society.

Taking as her focus African American literature and lynching photographs, Sandy Alexandre's book perceptively analyzes “claims to ownership” in cultural representations of racially motivated mob violence. Closely reading photographs of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spectacle lynchings and the mob murder of the African American youth Emmett Till in 1955, as well as the fictions of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Angelina Weld Grimké, and other black authors, Alexandre is strongly concerned with the relationship between race, space, and notions of possession, dispossession, belonging, and alienation in artistic representations of racist violence. In highly evocative chapters on photographs of fin de siècle lynching and images of the racist collective murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, Alexandre persuasively argues that “lynching anxiety is yoked to matters of groundlessness and space throughout black vernacular culture as well as its literary culture” (25). Acutely interpreting the signification of trees – the means by which many African Americans were lynched – in African American poetry and prose, Alexandre asserts that black writers have often inverted the pastoral ideal to represent rural Southern spaces as oppressive and dominated by white violence rather than as edenic and sanctuary-providing, or evocative of deep-rooted ties to the land. While much of the book addresses the alienation and uneasiness in African American representations of the natural landscape occasioned by the history of slavery and lynching violence in the rural American South, Alexandre draws richly on eco-criticism to compellingly suggest in her afterword that “the land on which black people were formerly lynched is being reclaimed and occupied by black people themselves” (193).

Overall Alexandre brilliantly accomplishes her goal to situate “African American art within the ambivalent, romanticized, slaved-over, beloved, and traumatizing earthly context, which has informed it” (194). Yet certain points in the book could be stronger. Although she characterizes the recent historical scholarship on lynching as “blindly fixated on positivist thinking” (18), she might nonetheless have benefitted more fully from the insights of that literature. Only the popular historian Philip Dray's 2002 study of American mob violence is consistently cited here and Alexandre errantly claims that Toni Morrison's Beloved “takes place between 1860 and 1873, a time during which the frequency of lynching was nowhere near the level it reached during the 1880s and 1890s” (142). Historian George C. Wright found in a landmark 1989 study that the frequency of racist mob violence in Kentucky in the era of emancipation and Reconstruction outstripped that in the late nineteenth century; it is quite likely that racial lynching across the South in the 1860s and 1870s similarly matched or exceeded even that which occurred in the lynching frenzy of the succeeding decades. Moreover, at times Alexandre descends into a fog of dense, cloying jargon that obfuscates rather than conveys meaning. For instance, in one of a number of egregious examples, she writes on page 170 that “the transformation of Emmett Till's body, from ‘handsome’ to ‘hideous’ during his short visit to the South, is certainly integral to the ways in which we may begin to understand what has often been described as the impenetrable ontology of Mississippi-ness.” Fortunately the majority of the book is composed in clearer and simpler prose that eloquently expresses rather than hinders meaning. Finally, the book's afterword lacks the laser-sharp focus and intellectual coherence that characterizes much of the book, although the final pages pull together the book's insights in a highly meaningful and persuasive fashion. Yet all told these are minor issues in a book that should be read by all interested in the relationship between American racial violence and cultural representation.

In sum, these books both make quite useful contributions to our emerging understanding of the significant legacies of American lynching and they merit a wide readership.