Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death PDF
Preview Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death
HUMANE INSIGHT Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death COURTNEY R. BAKER Humane Insight The New Black STudieS SerieS Edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Dwight A. McBride A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book. Humane Insight Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death courTNey r. Baker UnIverSIty of ILLInoIS PreSS Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield An earlier version of chapter 3 was previously published as “Emmett Till, Justice, and the Task of Recognition,” Journal of American Culture 29, no. 2 (2006): 111–24. Reprinted by permission from Blackwell Publishing. © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America c 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid- free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Baker, Courtney. Humane insight : looking at images of African American suffering and death / Courtney R. Baker. pages cm. — (The new Black studies series) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-252-03948-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-252-09759-1 (e-book) 1. African Americans—Violence against—History—Pictorial works. 2. African Americans—Social conditions—Pictorial works. 3. Documentary photography—Social aspects—United States—History. 4. Photojournalism—Social aspects—United States—History. 5. Empathy—Social aspects—United States— History. 6. Racism—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. e185.61.b148 2015 305.896'0730222—dc23 2015003808 In Memory of Thomas Cary Saunders 1919–2008 and Dorothy Belle Ottley Saunders 1921–2013 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Slavery’s Suffering Brought to Light—New Orleans, 1834 18 2. Framed and Shamed: Looking at the Lynched Body 35 3. Emmett Till, Justice, and the Task of Recognition 69 4. Civil Rights and Battered Bodies 94 5. A Litany for New Orleans, 2005 109 Notes 119 Index 137 Acknowledgments In September 2001, I watched via television as a space that I had traversed and a place that I recognized became permanently disfigured. Since then, I have sought to understand what compelled me to watch those extraor- dinary images of people dying and, more, to appreciate what I learned from watching other human beings in despair and death. In terms of its sheer horror, 9/11 represented a scenario that has been repeated throughout time and throughout the world and one that will sadly but I fear inevitably be repeated in the future. No discussion of global capitalism, non-s tatist mili- tary syndicates, or mobilized rhetoric has enabled me to understand fully the extraordinary images of people of myriad races, ethnicities, and nationali- ties dying. I still struggle to understand the magnitude of 9/11 and of other events wherein humanity has been laid to waste. In the wake of that day, it was the image and the word—a specific image and particular words, actu- ally—through which I came to recognize the struggle for comprehension to be itself a worthy object of study. A few months after the destruction of the World Trade Center, I revisited the first words of Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City”: “Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center.”1 As it happened, I had seen the city from the point of view that Certeau described, but I now knew, as the text certainly did not or could not, that this point of view could never now be replicated. The tense of the verb seeing now signaled to me a remarkable lack of hubris. Did the destruction of the location invalidate the knowledge Certeau was imparting? To speak metaphorically, did the sermon die when the mount crumbled?
The list of books you might like
