“I am Not That”: The Logic of Lynching and the Performativity of Americanizable Alienness in American Identity Constructions

초록

This essay examines popular culture texts ranging from films like Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927) and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) to Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters (2007), Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor (2008), and Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013), to Walter Hill’s 2006 miniseries, Broken Trail, and songs or photographs, as well as recent legislation to show how the logic of lynching is based on a particular American construction of identity as a black-white binary of “I am not that” black body hanging in a tree, tortured, mutilated, and murdered. This logic of lynching polices who is allowed to belong and enjoy the full rights of citizenship and protection of the nation-state of the U.S.A., but where the line between “that” and “I am not that” lies continues to shift historically. This essay argues that it is through learning and deploying the logic and strategies of lynching that certain immigrant groups originally not regarded as white cross over from undesirable and unAmericanizable alienness to Americanizable alienness, and at times, even whiteness, or, in other words, transition from “that” to “not that” through the performativity of Americanizable alienness, to emerge as full citizens.

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