Violence from Slavery to #BlackLivesMatter

Andrew Dix is Lecturer in American Literature and Film in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University, UK.Peter Templeton is Honorary Fellow at Loughborough University, UK, teaching both in the School of the Arts, English and Drama and the School of Social Sciences and Humanities.

• Introduction: African American History, Violence and Problems of RepresentationAndrew Dix PART I: THE VIOLENCES OF SLAVERY "The Zest of Sport": Representing Slave Hunting as Sport in the Antebellum and Jim Crow Eras Catherine Armstrong2 "My massa whip me, cause I love you": Violence towards Slaves in Antebellum Southern Literature Peter Templeton 3 "Monstrous Perversions and Lying Inventions": Moses Roper’s Performative Resistance to the Transatlantic Imagination of American Slavery Hannah-Rose Murray4 "The Lynching Had to Be the Best It Could Be Done": Slavery, Suffering and Spectacle in Recent American Cinema Lydia J. PlathPART II: FROM CIVIL WAR TO CIVIL RIGHTS 5 Making Lynching Male: A Canon-Shaping Tendency Koritha Mitchell6 Lynching Photography and African American Melancholia Cassandra Jackson 7 A Necessary Undoing: The Implications of Violence in Richard Wright’s Native Son and The Outsider Maggie McKinleyPART III: FROM BLAXPLOITATION TO #BLACK LIVES MATTER 8 "The baddest One-Chick Hit-Squad": Pam Grier, Angela Davis and the Politics of Female Violence in Blaxploitation Cinema Andrew Dix9 The Topos of Lyrical Gunplay: Hip-Hop and the Process of Civilization Stephan Kuhl10 Towards a Black Prophetic Critique of Neoliberal State Violence: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and the Death of Eric Garner Luvena Kopp11 Formal Violence: The Black Lives Matter Movement and Contemporary Elegy Gavan Lennon

"This remarkable collection of essays offers a series of timely interventions in the study of violence and its representation in African American history. It breaks new ground in all kinds of ways, helping us to understand how the bitter and often traumatic experiences of African Americans, from the establishment of the American republic right up to the present day, have shaped a whole range of cultural forms and profoundly influenced the way African Americans identify themselves. The African American activist, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, famously claimed in 1967, ‘Violence is as American as cherry pie.’ This book offers support for that claim in terms that are at once passionately committed and rigorously critical." -- Richard Gray, Fellow of the British Academy