Sovereign Violences of Racial Terror : Spectacles of Lynching

Argues that contemporary forms of anti-Black sovereignty rests on the reproduction of the sense of the aesthetics of lynching.

Alfred Frankowski critically examines how the spatiality of lynching violence continues as a politics and functions as an expression of political sovereignty. He argues that terror spectacle lynching and the politics of racial terror are expressions of political sovereignty not only in that this violence was beyond the jurisdiction of law, but also in that it makes sense of the contemporary politics of the racial violence embedded in our sense of space and place. Frankowski concludes that by focusing on lynching, the spatiality of racial terror makes legible forms of global violence, largely through the dispossession of space, mass incarceration, and the degrading of environments, that operate as forms of slow genocide, on the one hand, and the centralizing of political power through the reproduction of spatially terrorized communities, generationally, on the other.