Buxton Books is honored to host an in-store book launch with Mari N. Crabtree and Gary Jackson to celebrate the launch of Dr. Crabtree’s new book My Soul Is A Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching. This is a FREE event; RSVPs are strongly recommended (please email rsvp@buxtonbooks.com to reserve your spot)!
About Mari N. Crabtree:
Mari N. Crabtree is an associate professor of African American Studies and previously was a visiting research scholar with Princeton University's Department of African American Studies. She specializes in African American culture and history, in particular how the African American cultural tradition has shaped African American struggles for freedom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book, My Soul is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, will be published in 2022 by Yale University Press as part of the New Directions in Narrative History series. This monograph unearths how African Americans lived through and beyond traumatic memories of lynching in the mid-twentieth century US South. Drawing upon a wide range of narrative responses to lynching, this book develops a theory of African American trauma that uses the sensibility of the blues as its central metaphor. She also has written essays for Raritan, Rethinking History, Contemporaries, and an edited volume, Reconstruction at 150. Currently, she is working on a new book project that examines the pleasures and political utility of guile, deception, and humor in the African American cultural tradition titled Shuffling Like Uncle Tom, Thinking Like Nat Turner: Humor, Deception, and Irony in the African American Cultural Tradition.
Professor Crabtree teaches courses on African American music, mass incarceration, collective memories of racial violence, the life and writings of James Baldwin, and Afro-Asian cultural and political connections.
About My Soul Is A Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching:
An intimate look at the afterlife of lynching through the personal stories of Black victims and survivors who lived through and beyond its trauma.
Mari N. Crabtree traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. She unearths how African American victims and survivors found ways to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching, offering a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility—a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain.
Black southerners often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past. They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob’s fury. They infused a blues element into their lynching narratives to confront traumatic memories and keep the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or submission that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that amid the utter devastation of lynching were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.
About Gary Jackson:
Gary Jackson is the author of Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010), which was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He teaches in the MFA program at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. He’s also co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry