Gruesome Looking Objects
A New History of Lynching and Everyday Things

This original and provocative study uses objects—made, collected, and imagined—to examine lynching and racial terror.

Elijah Gaddis (Author)

9781316514023, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 November 2022

212 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

'Gruesome Looking Objects offers a rich analysis of the material culture surrounding racist violence. Through a case study of one lynching, Gaddis deftly demonstrates how the ordinary objects used in and generated from a lynching served to normalize atrocity and embed it in everyday life. This is an innovative and smart book.' Amy Louise Wood, author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940

The 1898 lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer is retold in this groundbreaking book. Unlike other histories of lynching that rely on conventional historical records, this study focuses on the objects associated with the lynching, including newspaper articles, fragments of the victims' clothing, photographs, and souvenirs such as sticks from the hanging tree. This material culture approach uncovers how people tried to integrate the meaning of the lynching into their everyday lives through objects. These seemingly ordinary items are repositories for the comprehension, interpretation, and commemoration of racial violence and white supremacy. Elijah Gaddis showcases an approach to objects as materials of history and memory, insisting that we live in a world suffused with the material traces of racial violence, past and present.

Preface
Introduction: Fragments
1. The Article
2. The Letter
3. The Clothes
4. The Tree
5. The Hammer and Chisel
6. The Song
Conclusion: Archival Remains.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]