The Legacy of Lynching provides a critical social theory of the history of lynching as a pedagogy of social and political violence, power, and control (to identify-find-kill-display the body of the racial Other). The theory emphasizes the final stage of display as what truly constitutes a lynching and differentiates it from other forms of violence (race riots, recreational murder, racial hunting, bombings, and disappearances) and challenges other definitions of lynching (hanging, mob violence, extra-judicial, and racial terror). The book examines the socio-historical record of lynching in the United States, with additional attention to lynching activity and imagery of Australia, Britain, France, Germany, and India, to surface the nature of lynching as a public spectacle with important critical social and political dimensions that enact power in visible ways across racialized bodies, peoples, and spaces.
Lynching, in this book, is presented not just as a historical phenomenon or as a set of artifacts (picture postcards, shreds of clothing, pieces of rope, and other ephemeral), but also as a cultural production of State power and control that shapes social and political institutions, public spaces, and social memory. This socio-historical record of lynching, as such, reveals not only the mechanisms of previous instantiations of racialized power schemas (pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and genocide) but also the ongoing encoding of control and colonization of public life. Through a thorough re-reading and reworking of the history of lynching and its ongoing, contemporary afterlife, the book reconceptualizes the nature and ramifications of the phenomenon in various forms of media like film, television, social media platforms, gaming, graphic novels, fictional novellas, and even fashion. As such, it will be an important resource for podcasters, journalists, students, instructors, researchers, and readers in sociology, social theory, political sociology, historical sociology, American history and American studies, cultural studies, Race and ethnicity studies, and geography.
Rasul A. Mowatt is Professor and Researcher who studies State violence and the geographies of Race for the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, USA. Before joining NC State, Rasul served on Indiana University’s faculty in the Departments of American Studies and Geography for 17 years and previously taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence (2021), co-author of Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits (2024) and The City of Hip-Hop: New York, the Bronx, and a Peace Meeting (2025).
