Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity

Ultimately, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity makes undeniable the life-and-death stakes of this work and the proximity of trauma for Black scholars, a reminder to the field that?s both painful and affirming. Morgan K. Johnson, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 2020, Vol. 50, No. 1

In addition to being profoundly instructive regarding the ways U.S. national identity forms around lynched Black bodies, which Ore argues function as ?a powerfully persuasive symbol of antiblack citizenship,? Lynching helps us understand that the lynch mob does its work, often quietly, in the hallways of our predominantly white institutions, on the pages of our books and journals, and in various other spaces where academic labor takes place. Bryan J. McCann, Louisiana State University, Quarterly Journal of Speech

Ore?s focus is rhetoric and the power of the lynching trope in American culture past and present. She is highly persuasive in her analysis of the functions and tragic persistence of this trope in American identity. The book is also well written and accessible for an academic monograph. A preface and postscript narrating her own experience with racialized police brutality add particular poignancy. This book will reward reading by all interested in the rhetoric of American lynching. Michael J. Pfeifer, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The Journal of African American History

To date, scholars of lynching studies have not examined the rhetorics through which lynching asserted citizenship identity and civic belonging. Understanding this aspect of lynching provides new insight both into lynching?s (rhetorical) functions and into the ways lynching reverberates in the present as a constitutive feature of white civic belonging. This aspect also underscores lynching?s performance as a form of state-sanctioned racial violence. I?ve not yet read a work that so carefully outlines the ways lynching and its rhetorics were/are interwoven both with the formation of America?s national identity and with the nation?s need to continually renew that identity. Scott Gage, assistant professor of English and director of first-year composition at Texas A&M University–San Antonio

Fecund, provocative, and contemporarily resonant, Lynching makes at least three significant contributions: One, in addition to its cultural studies, political science, black studies, and historical lens, it reads lynching through a rhetorical method/analysis. Two, this approach allows the author to revitalize and repurpose heretofore both well-known, previously quoted material as well as less cited archival material/content to different effect and affect. As a result, tethering the primal terrain of literal lynching to Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, and former President Barack Obama makes the lynching trope contemporarily relevant. Three, and maybe most significantly, Ore makes clear that lynching was not excessive or incidental to state power, but rather that lynching was/is ?organic to civil society? reflecting the racial order of things. Lynching is a provocative, trenchant, very relevant rhetorical analysis of the ongoing force of the lynching trope. Because it is both historically anchored and currently relevant, Lynching may evoke a sense of significance for an extended period of time. Vorris L. Nunley, associate professor of English and rhetorical studies, University of California, Riverside