“PROVISIONAL BEINGS”: CROWDS, RACE, & THE BIOPOLITICS OF LYNCHING IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1890-1915

This dissertation is about two types of mass human aggregation that were materially and figurally significant for U.S. cultural discourse at the turn of the century: crowds and populations. Specifically, “Provisional Beings” argues that crowds and populations combined in this era to forge a mass racial imaginary—a symbolic system meant to construct and maintain racialized distinctions through the coordination of contrasting aggregate forms. While many Americans—and especially White Americans committed to racial segregation—felt that indicators of racial difference were slipping away at the level of individual bodies, the comprehensive capture performed by tabulating the population promised to (re)surface these otherwise submerged signs of identity. This mass racial imaginary found its quintessential expression in the act of lynching. As a horrifically widespread and public form of mass violence, lynching saw the era’s paradigmatically race-based crowd—the lynch mob—rally together in an attempt both to instantiate and protect the so-called purity of the White population by brutalizing a Black individual situated to stand in for and make tractable the putatively threatening Black population as a whole. Lynching thus operated as a crucial convergence zone—a deadly intersection through which crowds and populations were meant to cross over and into one another as reciprocally supporting concepts. It is due to this overdetermined significance that the lynch mob is the focus of my three chapters. Literary accounts of lynching register this desire to stabilize race on the basis of bridging an impossible gap between crowds and populations. And precisely because this gap is unbridgeable, these same literary accounts also reveal the myriad paradoxes and problems that arise to splinter apart the segregationist dream of the mass racial imaginary. Through my analysis of texts by Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Ida B. Wells, Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, Thomas Dixon, James Weldon Johnson, and George Schuyler, lynching is shown to produce not only counterintuitive but antithetical racial outcomes.