“Object Lesson(s)”

Abstract

This article reconstructs up an impromptu dance performed by Lavinia Baker, a survivor of mob violence and star of an anti-lynching performance revue, and reads it as the occasion for rethinking the performative dimensions of a seemingly familiar spectacle: lynching. As opposed to the familiar scene of the black corpse captured and circulated in photographs, the author argues that Lavinia's 1899 dance and the liveness of her performance – that is, its excess, disruptions, and improvisation – is instantiation of racial violence that strains against the putative framing of mob violence as a finite event that is amenable to documentation, capture, or narrativization. By pivoting a discussion of lynching on Lavinia Baker’s protean performance, this essay not only challenges the shape and structure of nineteenth-century anti-black terror, but also demands that we (re) turn to a deceptively simple question that animates Scenes of Subjection: what does racial violence look like?