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W. Jason Miller. Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2011.160 pp. $19.95.
W. Jason Miller's Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture is an important contribution to recent scholarship attempting to understand lynching within a broad American context. Most analysis of lynching and literary responses to it focuses on the period between 1880 and 1920, when the number of lynchings in the United States was highest. Unlike other scholars, Miller's analysis starts around 1920 with Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." By focusing on Hughes and his commentary on American lynching culture, Miller demonstrates how such a culture has had and continues to have an enduring legacy. Hughes's marginalization within discussions of literary contributions to American lynching culture has persisted even within the recent scholarship. In addition to historical period, such persistence can be explained through relatively narrow definitions of "lynching." Miller expands on received definitions, and explains that "American lynching culture" suggests "that lynching is a uniquely American practice that was enacted, sustained, and tolerated by a complex interplay of socioeconomic, psychological, racial, sexual, and political motives" (4). Miller offers his most provocative analysis in his latter chapters, when he incorporates visual culture into his analysis and argues for understanding domestic terrorism as part of American lynching culture. Tbe other three pipes of lynching framed in Miller's analysis are spectacle lynching, legal lynching, and mob lynching. He highlights the following works: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Scottsboro Limited, "Christ in Alabama," "The Bitter River," "Not for Publication," "Dream Deferred," "The Negro," and "Mississippi."
In chapter one, through Hughes's 1919 poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Miller argues that Hughes reclaims an African American pastoral tradition through riverscapes. For African Americans, rivers were sites of terror because black bodies were usually hung and left as warnings under bridges. Once acknowledging this his- torical reality, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" reinterprets rivers to provide assurance to Hughes and other African Americans as they travel. Hughes had to pass through Texas in the summer of 1919 to spend time with his father in Mexico. As Miller reminds us, in Hughes's youth, black teenage boys were regularly lynched, and Texas led the nation in lynchings. One of the state's most infamous "spectacle lynchings" took...