What is it about?

Angelina Weld Grimké’s play Rachel (1916) offers a prime example of how Black lesbian writers used coding and nuance to present queer content in lynching dramas. This reading of Grimké’s work reveals how the Black lynched body and the Black lesbian body both become culturally abject within the sexual economy of lynching. Taking a holistic view of Grimké’s oeuvre, I analyze Rachel alongside her erotic poetry and short stories, establishing multiple connections between the theme of lynching and lesbian longing. By listening closely for how lesbian desire appears, often through absence, critics can develop new perspectives on these often overwrought, sentimental writings from the earliest moments of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Why is it important?

In the early twentieth century, Grimké wrote with obsessive repetition on themes of lynching and anti-black violence and discrimination. However, she was also a closeted lesbian of color. As a Black lesbian, Grimké’s body existed beyond cultural comprehension, systematically “jettisoned” from the consciousness of both Black and white communities. Throughout her oeuvre, she gave literary form to this jettisoning, sometimes through absence. Despite its psychological futility, the phobic practice of “jettisoning” persists unabated today, as white, heteronormative society continues to cast out as unfit for citizenship and belonging Black and LGBTQ+ people living in the U.S. in 2022.

Perspectives

This article was published in the summer of 2021, in the midst of escalating white supremacist, homophobic, and transphobic violence in the United States. A contemporary comparison between lynching and police killings has been suggested, and in some cases directly articulated, in light of recent high-profile cases, as well as the murder of those not named in public discourse, but memorialized by the #SayHerName and #SayTheirNames projects. The latest legal challenges to social justice teachings seek to ensure the survival of the "white race" by shoring up fictive boundaries of race, sex, and gender. Like playwrights Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Mary Burrill, Grimké was also an educator and thus she would be appalled by this smothering of historical truths. These bills deny public funding to schools attempting to dismantle white supremacy and white privilege. Defiant educators can lose their jobs, depending on the local attitudes toward what some are referring to, in a shocking historical reversal, as the new “woke mob.” As in Grimké’s time, the state’s desire to purge discussions of racism from public discourse obfuscates the systemic mechanisms that all but guarantee lower life chances for BIPOC communities, if not outright extermination. If education is in part the solution to systemic racism, then the effects of these actions are immeasurable. Exposure to death for the marginalized, including Black trans women who have the lowest life chances among LGBTQ+ groups, meanwhile becomes secretly integrated into modern life, rendering such losses both shocking and ordinary.

K. Allison Hammer
Vanderbilt University

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This page is a summary of: “Blood at the Root”: Cultural Abjection and Thwarted Desire in the Lynching Plays and Poetry of Angelina Weld Grimké, Frontiers A Journal of Women Studies, January 2021, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2021.0005.
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