Visualizing The Unimaginable: Art, Photography And American Racial Terror

From racial terror lynchings in Georgia through racial terror bombings in Alabama, this dissertation unveils a lineage of black and white artists grappling with the legacy of racial trauma. To be free from the chains of traumatic pasts, we must return or turn to imagery and supporting evidence of American atrocities. This dissertation takes visuals alongside written and oral accounts to form a more robust, engaging connection to that past. The artistic interventions offer evidence, testimony, and most importantly, they provide new avenues down which trauma might travel and transform itself. Art becomes a vehicle to depict and process racial trauma, from Meta Warrick Fuller and Kara Walker to Philip Guston and William Christenberry. Artists broach the unspeakable and move beyond it to create new spaces for processing and ultimately transforming traumatic pasts. Moreover, artists offer new material toward a culture of mourning that must exist for such histories to be properly buried. Censoring the conversations generated by visual representations of racial trauma prevents education and a path forward from past traumas. In this dissertation, I argue for an educational approach to the covered history in this project that situates visual narratives alongside historical sources while also privileging the recollections, when available, of survivors and eyewitnesses – too little space and import is ceded to them. I do not see a future devoid of or undefined by such traumas until they are dealt with sufficiently. To do so, we must discuss them and be willing to relive them in some cases, or really, live them through imagination aided by a new visual archive like the one I introduce in this project. This dissertation is a living dialogue, informed by the author’s conversations with Christenberry, Renee Stout and RaMell Ross. Toward collective healing, I invoke visual culture as a vehicle for depicting and processing racial trauma.