Sound and Silence: The Politics of Reading Early Twentieth-Century Lynching Poetry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reading five late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century lynching poems chronologically, this article argues that pre-1920 lynching poetry focuses on the white audience, and after 1920, it focuses on the black body. (A curious concomitance, the 1920s was the first decade in which the number of African Americans executed exceeded the number lynched.) In Paul Laurence Dunbar's “The Haunted Oak,” Leslie Pinckney Hill's “So Quietly,” and Claude McKay's “The Lynching,” the victim is silent, and instead critique of the lynch mob is privileged. Using Hortense Spillers's distinction between body and flesh, this article argues that these poems objectify black bodies to represent violent white racism. None unleash the terrors of miscegenation on the Southern psyche or discuss the sexual humiliation of the lynched to preserve virginal whiteness. After the historical shift from lynching to execution, Jean Toomer's “Portrait in Georgia” and Langston Hughes's “Three Songs about Lynching” create corporeal tension between sound and silence. Instead of wordless black bodies, the bodies of these poems either speak or choose silence, becoming flesh. Symbiotic race relations lead to problematic definitions of self when the power and relative position of whiteness determines the autonomy of the lynched corpse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".