American Brutalities: Lynching and Spectatorship in Nineteenth Century American Literature

Vincent Basso extends our conversation to the experiences of men of color in Western climates. His scholarship confronts the iconic legacy of lynching through several historical events and texts published in the later half of... [ view full abstract ]

Vincent Basso extends our conversation to the experiences of men of color in Western climates. His scholarship confronts the iconic legacy of lynching through several historical events and texts published in the later half of the nineteenth century and argues for lynching’s role in the developing anxieties of American masculinity, exposing the unequal opportunities for freedom and justice for men of color in the American West. Gore also challenges conceptions of American West for men of color by looking to the plagiarized legacy of Indigenous literary production. She asserts that the many unauthorized reprints of Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) attempt to dismember Ridge from his intellectual and literary labor, reflecting the disarticulation of a majority of American citizens in a society purportedly founded on ideals of equality. Through a corpus of marginalized voices, our scholarship provides corrections to the continually romanticized American West and interjects more complex readings of Western climates.