Koritha Mitchell

In From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture, Koritha Mitchell builds on the work of her previous monograph, Living with Lynching, to examine the cultural construct of African American citizenship in a society determined to violently deny African American identity and existence. Dr. Mitchell argues, “Homemade citizenship is a deep sense of success and belonging that does not depend on civic inclusion or mainstream recognition… When African Americans seem to be investing against the odds, they are not responding to the forces that oppose them so much as they are continuing community traditions of affirming themselves while acknowledging that the resulting success will attract hostility” (pg. 3). Performance theory underpins Dr. Mitchell’s analyses as she argues, “As a cultural project that African Americans engage in, the tendency to pursue success while acknowledging hostility is an endeavor of articulation and performance that does not assume stable identity so much as discussion and debate, as well as both harmony and discord in action” (pg. 4). She focuses on women and concepts of domesticity due to the cultural weight cis-hetero white culture places on the heteronormative family in the United States and how African American women developed their definition of full citizenship against this background and in the face of white discursive and physical violence determined to deny their citizenship (pg. 14).

Dr. Mitchell examines literary sources beginning with the mid-nineteenth century and tracing the pattern of black women claiming full citizenship through the domestic sphere only to face white violence up to the 2016 election. She argues, “White people forced the enslaved to perform the difference that the discursive violence of claiming they were another order of being was said to simply describe. It is time for scholars to recognize how thoroughly black people understood the forces arrayed against them as they nevertheless claimed victories. It is time to notice the many ways African Americans defined and redefined gradations of achievement” (pg. 62). She identifies how whites used know-your-place aggression to counter black success as soon as formerly-enslaved African Americans began pursuing new opportunities during Reconstruction, setting a pattern that continues through the present day. Dr. Mitchell also complicates the narrative of the New Negro movement, showing how African American women faced a double standard both from white violence and patriarchal ideals of propriety within some black communities (pg. 105). Discussing the postwar years, she argues, “Mainstream declarations about the nation’s preferred domestic configuration amounted to discursive violence that encouraged physical violence” (pg. 126). Though she writes this in describing the 1950s and 1960s, it could easily describe the violence of mainstream political discourse in 2020. Linking her analyses to the current day, Dr. Mitchell writes, “Quite routinely, white Americans destroyed black families and households and swore they never existed. It is in this context that one must view black cultural production that spotlights successful black families and their households, and Mrs. Obama’s public persona is one such cultural production” (pg. 195).

Dr. Mitchell’s use of performance theory to examine African American women’s success in claiming their citizenship and white know-your-place violence in reaction to that success offers a new way of understanding black citizenship and the process by which white society sought to limit it. In identifying white violence as a discursive tool to deny black citizenship, Dr. Mitchell refocuses the long history of resistance to African American civil rights to foreground the work of women and show how their efforts to create and portray their homes in life and literature were radical acts. This is a must-read for historians, literary scholars, and anyone seeking to better understand the violent resistance to African American citizenship that continues to this day.… (mere)

In Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930, professor of English and cultural historian Koritha Mitchell argues, "African Americans recognized lynching as a theatrical production, and when they engaged the mob's destructive power, black dramatists preferred the less corporeal evidence of testimony to the physical evidence with which they were surrounded, Black-authored lynching scripts direct the gaze away from the brutalized body, finding its representational capacity to be insufficient" (p. 194). Mitchell describes the lynching act as master/piece theatre as it served to establish white mastery over black subjects, reduced to "pieces." The lynching plays, on the other hand, focused on the effect lynching had on black families long after the initial act of violence. To counter the assertions of lynch mobs, the dramatists focused on characters that ran contrary to the stereotypes of African Americans found elsewhere in theatre. Mitchell argues, "Whether spotlighting the black soldier, lawyer, or pimp, lynching dramatists maximized the alternative public spaces fostered by periodical culture" (p. 177). Though most of the plays never appeared in mainstream theatres, they served a vital purposed in black communities, in which communal literacy (the reading and sharing of materials in a group setting, either in the home or a social center) allowed the stories and their ideas to spread and foster discussion. Mitchell links the plays back to other black activists' writings and shows the plays reflect and transcend terrorist attacks that traumatized the black community at the time of writing. In writing this monograph, Mitchell has dynamically shifted the dialogue around lynching from one based on photographs of the act taken by white participants to a discussion of how this affected black families.… (mere)