Seeing like a Theorist, or, Lynching’s Visual Politics

• In Event: Aesthetics, Anti-racism, and Democracy

Abstract

By considering a key episode in the struggle over white supremacy in the U.S., my paper shows
the importance of visuality to politics and political theory.

Part one begins by examining how, despite some excellent recent scholarship, visuality remains
too marginal in contemporary political theory: debates over how to understand textual and
linguistic forms of political expression are elaborate, our frameworks for understanding non-
textual media less developed or discussed. I then theorize the visual as site of convergence and
conflict, order and change, elaborating a sustained account of how the optical field of
perceptibility and the political field of action and institutions shape each other.

Part two exemplifies that account by considering the emotionally challenging case of American
lynching photography. Typically shot from the mob’s perspective, lynching photographs were
deployed by white supremacists as both celebratory souvenirs and tools of racial terrorism. Yet,
the same photographs were also mobilized in Black-led anti-lynching campaigns. Some have
thus concluded that the photographs’ political meaning is wholly a matter of context and use. I
show, however, that anti-lynching activists proceeded not by ignoring or obscuring but by
thematizing the visual form and racist perspective of the photographs they deployed.
Understanding the visual politics of the photographs and their role in both the fight over lynching
and the making and remaking of race in a white supremacist society, I argue, requires us to
engage the centrality of aesthetics, too. I conclude by elaborating what that centrality suggests
for understanding politics and doing political theory.

Author

• Mark Reinhardt, Williams College